THE PANEL:
David Strickland, SVP marketing, Zellers, Brampton, Ont.
Scott Simmons, VP marketing, The Beer Store, Mississauga, Ont.
Stephen Plunkett, VP marketing, Boston Pizza, Vancouver
Noel O’Dea, president, Target Marketing & Communications, St. John’s, Nfld.
Alison Simpson, president, Enterprise Creative Selling, Toronto
Lara Palmer, associate CD, Palmer Jarvis DDB, Vancouver
David Crichton, partner-creative, Grip, Toronto
Some believe that research suppresses great ideas and therefore destroys breakthrough creative. Are research methodologies inflexible and irrelevant?
Crichton: Research can’t duplicate the way people receive advertising in the real world. As well, people tend to judge advertising (in research groups) based on what they are familiar with. When they see something they’ve never encountered before, their initial reaction tends to be negative. It’s unfortunate because these same people seem much more accepting of change in their real life.
We’re trying to research breakthrough, innovative and fresh ideas, more often than not, with tired, old methodologies. Radio needs to be produced, not described. The consumer doesn’t see a TV spot on a foam core board. Billboards aren’t viewed pinned to a boardroom corkboard. If the work is breakthrough, why then, can we not develop breakthrough research methodologies?
Simmons: Research itself does not suppress great ideas. However, if one is too dependent on the results of research to dictate a course of action, then it could clearly lead to indecision and conservative output. It will always have to be interpreted to some extent and this occasionally requires taking a risk or a leap of faith.
Plunkett: If the questions are focused on creative strategy –
(Is spokesperson X relevant to the brand’s target user?) – then research can be effective in pointing both the creative team and client in the right direction. If research is being used to choose between creative executions, the outcome may not produce anything useful.
A useful litmus test may be this: if you are a client and are taking a creative execution that you don’t feel comfortable with into research, then you may be wasting your time. Tell the creative team when you don’t think an idea is right and have the debate amongst the group that is most informed about the brand.
Palmer: I think research has killed a fair amount of breakthrough creative that would have done beautifully in the marketplace.
Now I’m not against testing creative to find out if somebody gets the idea – comprehension is important. In terms of whether it’s a good idea, is that really for a person who is there for the 50 bucks and the free cookies to decide?
Breakthrough creative only happens when agency/client relations are based on mutual respect and trust. Give them a chance. If it doesn’t work out, change agencies.
Strickland: Many ads never do the communication job they were intended to. I don’t believe that you can test definitely how much your customers will like or dislike a spot, but there are several methodologies that do a good job of testing core message delivery.
Research also sometimes helps a client eliminate meaningless parts of the message and help convince stakeholders internally that these messages should be simplified. In other cases it may confirm where a creative idea is overpowering and not reinforcing the core message. The challenge many of us face is that the broader leadership of many companies does not have complete faith that the agencies understand their customers, or that they care about the company getting results.
O’Dea: An increasing number of clients seem to be using research like a drunkard uses a lamp post: more for support than for illumination. Is it a lack of experience? A lack of confidence? High anxiety in evaluating creative? Distrust of the agency partner? Or a desire to avoid a career-limiting decision?
It’s a shame that clients suspend their belief in the collective brainpower, talent, and experience of themselves and their agency team – and put their faith in the hands of 10 or 30 participants who frequently come just for the food and cash.
Qualitative research can inspire great ideas and breakthrough creative. ‘Got Milk’ and the Polaroid campaigns from Goodby Silverstein & Partners [in San Francisco] are great campaigns born from research at the front end, digging deep into the consumer psyche, attitudes, values, lifestyles, motivations, and behaviours.
Ad-testing research is often used like a chainsaw, disemboweling the TV spot into two-second intervals…every syllable placed under a microscope, in an artificial context, light years removed from the consumer’s natural environment.
The result? Wallpaper. ‘Briefs,’ masquerading as ads, straining to reach the lowest common denominator. Mediocrity in the name of risk-reduction, unintentionally resulting in the greatest risk of all: not being noticed, liked or remembered.
The solution? Do the insight mining research upfront, before the brief is written (qualitative, observation, and ethnographic research); use the insights to set the strategic compass and to inspire the creative team with perspectives on consumer beliefs, hopes, and aspirations, as well as the nuances of language and associations. If you’re seeking peace of mind, run disaster check research on the concepts. Do not seek or accept creative and art direction counsel from the participants. After the campaign is in market, use quantitative research to track its impact and effectiveness. Measure the net takeaway – like you would with a movie – not the minutia, and monitor changes in brand awareness and predisposition, as well as ad awareness and liking.
Solution #2: Convince your client that they cannot bore a customer into buying their product. Spend some quality time together, reviewing creative campaigns, the Cannes show, competitors’ ads from different continents. Help your client better understand how advertising works in this overcommunicated world, the power of advertising in differentiating brands and how to recognize great concepts.
Researchers and creative people often don’t see eye to eye. How can that be changed?
Palmer: If researchers bought into the statement: ‘People buy products, not advertising.’ People will never admit to buying a product based on advertising alone even if they have. Let’s face it, focus group testing creative is like asking, ‘Is it gonna work on ya?’ Smart researchers don’t pretend otherwise. They use their skills to gather information that could be useful in many ways: product innovation, company restructuring or possibly advertising. Research has a role in helping mould the creative idea but has no role in critiquing it.
Crichton: [The statement] isn’t true. Certainly not in all cases. Creatives hate when research kills an idea. That’s all. Even asking this question sets one against the other. Both need to work together toward a common goal – producing great ads.
Too often research focuses on things consumers take for granted – all in the name of increasing branding or trial, etc. It becomes a case of focusing on executional details as opposed to concepts.
Simpson: Some of the most talented creatives I’ve had the pleasure of working with embrace both research and researchers…provided it is a collaborative process engaged in by intelligent and insightful individuals. When done properly and creatively, research can lead to some incredible learning that can only serve to enhance the calibre of the creative.
O’Dea: When there’s a conflict, it’s often because the client hires the agency and the research house separately – and then forces them together. An adversarial and suspicious relationship results, with each party competing for a larger share of the client’s mind (and, in the case of the research house, wallet).
The solution isn’t rocket science. It just requires a confident and trusting client. Our Market Insights research group is a very involved and valuable member of the brand team – conducting consumer research up-front (for strategic direction and creative insights) through to creative testing at the concept stage (for a disaster check and for creative inspiration).
Titles are parked at the door: our focus is on the shared client objectives of building the brand, creating great campaigns and making the cash register ring. Conflict, you say? I say it’s time to get over this ridiculous lack of trust and collaboration. First, the client will benefit exponentially from all the focused brainpower (and collaboration vs. conflict). Hey, none of us is as smart as all of us.
Second, ads will no longer be created with the goal of ‘scoring’ above the norm in an (expensive) artificial test at a research house. Third, agencies have always been fully accountable. Unlike management consultants (or research houses, for that matter), agencies are responsible for not only identifying the problem, but also for creating a powerful solution and executing it. No ‘good-bye, see you later.’ We’re always there to accept responsibility for the results, two months or two years down the road.
Strickland: The first step in getting clients and creative people to see more eye-to-eye is there needs to be mutual respect and trust. The research issue is a symptom, not the problem.
I sense that a lot of creatives that don’t trust researchers don’t trust their clients or understand them. Creativity needs to be part of the entire marketing process, not just in advertising.
What we really need is a way to bring creatives closer to the clients’ business to get more strategic creative solutions more often, and to encourage creativity in a broader scope.
It would seem that team-building exercises involving the creative teams and the account teams and the clients would help – the challenge is of course that teams rarely stay together for a long time. As soon as you get a great creative team on your business that you trust, they seem to leave for another agency. I’m sure the creatives and account people have the same experience with [their] clients.
Focus groups are often viewed as flawed, because they are too easily skewed by dominant members or leading questions.
What should be the role of focus groups?
Crichton: The trouble is, many clients (and researchers) see this as interfering or trying to skew the research in favour of the work. It is human nature for people to be negative in focus groups. If you walked into a room of strangers and simply said, ‘Look at my clothes. Notice anything?’ nine times out of 10, you will get back a negative response. People automatically think there is something to find, to solve, etc. It’s the way we are conditioned, and it’s the way the question is presented.
Conversely, if you said, ‘I have something exciting to show you. Take a look.’ Sure, you may consider that a leading statement, but a hell of a lot less leading and negative than, ‘Would this ad cause you to buy or WANT to buy the product?’ – the universally used research question.
As for the role of focus groups, they should be used before doing the creative work. If you DO use research to test creative, we should focus on the first two minutes after presenting the idea (hopefully in a form that does the idea justice). A) Did they laugh, cry, seem surprised, enlightened, etc? B) Did they understand what the main message was? C) Did they remember who it was for?
Strickland: If focus groups were the only contact with consumers, you would definitely be leaving yourself open to risks. Focus groups are one tool. The key is to understand your customers and use several different methodologies to build your understanding.
In addition to quantitative perception tracking, we utilize customer panels through correspondence to get to a broader scope of consumers. We have moms [in the Greater Toronto Area] but we also include places like Truro, N.S. and Grand Prairie, Alta. to get insights from consumers that we would otherwise never hear from. (Focus groups are often too Toronto/urban centric.)
We also like having a touchpoint more closely linked to their families and homes – enthnographic [methodologies] to get at unbiased opinions [that are] more linked to the hard and soft (emotional) benefits they are seeking.
Having said that, we also use focus groups. To minimize the risk of being led astray, we look for validation from multiple sources or past sources. We send in questions from behind the glass to test our hypothesis. We also keep our supplier list tight so the moderators know what responses we have had from consumers in the past, so they naturally probe for deeper understanding when a response seems out of place. We talk about what we are hearing and why we think we are hearing it in the back room, and then discuss it again after with the moderator. Ultimately, you really need a moderator who knows you, your business and your customers very well. And you need to recognize that some insights will just never surface unless the customer is actually in or closer to the situation or environment.
Simmons: Focus groups give the researcher a chance to see and hear how consumers feel about the product or service. It adds an emotional dimension, which is something that can’t be gleaned from a telephone survey.
Great insights can be generated from interpreting not only the content of the consumer feedback, but also from the expressions and delivery of the feedback. The challenge of any marketer is to determine if they are interpreting genuine reaction of the individual or a dynamic created by the makeup of the group and its varied personalities.
Plunkett: What the moderator can’t do is manage the spontaneous change that occurs when one participant’s comments influence what another person is going to say. This doesn’t happen when a viewer/listener experiences a product or message in the real world. So focus groups are limited in what they can tell a client or agency.
So what? They provide a temperature test on an idea and the result should be accepted in that spirit. Doing 12 individual intercepts may often be as useful as conducting one group of the same size. Not to mention less expensive and easier to manage.
O’Dea: Focus groups are only as strong as their weakest component. Dishonest respondents are a weak link; ‘pros’ cheat and conspire to beat the screening criteria. (One Torontonian reportedly adopted more than 30 aliases in order to maximize his participation rate and revenue.)
Unethical recruiters and research companies are another weak link; some actually coach prospective participants to lie about their demos, attitudes and product usage. Equally flawed is the widespread use of databases containing pre-selected willing focus group participants. And did you ever wonder how convenience samples got their moniker? If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right: we need a return to random sampling in recruiting.
Finally, inexperienced and ill-prepared moderators can be a fatal flaw: on the one hand, some are unable to unobtrusively stimulate and engage participants – and have little more than a shallow understanding of the product, the brand or the advertising; on the other extreme, they play drill sergeant and dominate the group and the discussion.
Many moderators do not understand advertising or how it works, some do not understand the nuances of communications, and I know some moderators who, deep down, just do not believe in advertising. These flaws flow not from the research methodology but from the execution. The solutions are simple: integrity, teamwork, courage, and informed clients.
In regard to ROI, how do you calculate how much to spend on research?
How does the mercurial nature of consumer attitudes and spending habits affect the process?
O’Dea: Spending too little – such as relying on two ‘cost-efficient’ focus groups in Mississauga to test a concept to run in British Columbia or Atlantic Canada – can cause a lot of marketing and advertising dollars to be wasted. Spending too much on research drains valuable dollars from creative and production and below-the-line support programs. Many packaged-goods clients spend more on the research than on producing the TV spot! Isn’t this looking through the wrong end of the telescope?
Most of our clients agree: we invest significant research dollars up front and for tracking results. Occasionally, there’s a need to do a disaster check for very risky concepts (at the concept stage) or for a new brand name (think zip and Tango for Air Canada).
Strickland: Research spending is driven by business issues in which consumer input is deemed critical on determining the right course of action. We focus more on what the right thing to do is than what is in the budget. As retailers we are constantly reacting to the current situation in the market – we get a report card every day.
We plan spending in two primary parts: the base level research like tracking and our Mom Panel etc., that we continue to refine to provide us measures on the overall franchise health and competitive perceptions; and the project-based work that is left more flexible to respond to issues in businesses that come up during the year.
At a high level many of the issues are known and planned, [like] the launch of a new brand or product line, etc., but many come up as part of in-depth analysis of specific businesses throughout the year.
In the past year, we have begun to realize the benefits of our HBC database as an incredible research resource. Cross shopping behaviour between HBC banners and product categories with consumers are now facts that we know and track, so our research planning is now more balanced between the internal customer data and external data.
We have to ask ourselves how they complement each other – our HBC database clarifies our opportunities, so that external research can be focused more on how the opportunity identified in the data can be realized with the consumer. External research is focused more now on the why and how and less on the what.
Simpson: There are no hard-and-fast rules for what you should spend on research, any more than there are hard-and-fast rules for what you should spend on advertising. Each situation is different and must be evaluated on its own merits. Consumer attitudes are one of many variables to consider in determining how much to spend on research. The marketing objectives, life cycle of the brand, category and competitive environment are just a few examples of other equally important considerations.
Plunkett: We calculate research spending by starting with what we want to test and how often it will be done. Tracking consumer attitudes and awareness of our brand/concept is a fact of doing business. Not knowing will end up being a lot more expensive later. Then it’s a matter of fitting it into all the competing opportunities. Because we focus primarily on tracking and usage, research timing tends to be predictable. And there is always something set aside for project work.
Simmons: When it comes to the crunch at budget time, research is usually one of those items that are deemed expendable. We conduct the same tracking studies year to year so we know how much to set aside, and it is important that you invest enough to ensure that your results are reliable and statistically valid. The mercurial habits of consumers are a non-issue if you have consistent methodology and application of your research. If done well, the changes in consumer behaviour will be reflected in the results and necessary actions determined.
Palmer: I think the downfall of many companies today is the constant pressure to perform in the short term. There is an overall lack of vision these days because all companies care about is how they did in the last quarter and not enough on how they will fare in the long term. The perception that companies ‘have to react’ to the consumer’s every move is a potentially dangerous one, a classic case of watching the ants as the elephants walk by. Smart people with vision need to lead business into the next century with research being used as an effective tool to facilitate that vision.
Simpson: I agree with [Palmer] that one of the greatest mistakes companies (including agencies) make today is to adopt a reactionary instead of leadership approach to how they run their business. I also don’t believe that consumers’ attitudes or spending are mercurial in nature. It only feels this way for marketers who have become complacent and downplayed the importance of staying close to who their consumers are and how those consumers are changing and feeling. When marketers truly understand their consumers, they are rarely surprised by them.
