Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Market research has and always will be a hot topic. How it is used though is a slightly contentious issue. Many feel that it offers insights into consumers’ minds and allows companies to develop new products or services. However, quite often opportunities are overlooked because organisations do not drill down and examine how customers are using their offerings. That’s what makes ethnographic research so interesting.

On the other hand there has been a lot of hype recently about how companies should engage with bloggers et al to drive innovation. However as a few people have pointed out, consumers often lack the insight to do this because they cannot grasp what is possible. Final Burp offers some interesting commentary on the subject. Here’s a snippet of what Stefano had to say:

Truth is, consumers don’t know better. They can give you hints, suggestions, provide insight, even come up with interesting ideas, but they lack:

1. Universality: they state what matters to each of them, but they can’t provide a synthesis that goes beyond individual needs and wishes (and shouldn’t be asked to)
2. Awareness of implications of whatever issue they’re confronted with
3. A deeper understanding of how certain mechanisms work (they can realize that a certain packaging shape makes them feel comfortable, but be unable to isolate exactly why. Let alone replicate it)
4. In general, talent. Revolutionary talent. Involve consumers, and you’ll get marginal improvements. Ask one or more talents, and you’ll get breakthrough innovations.

I recently read ‘Ethnography for Marketers - A guide to consumer immersion‘ by Hy Mariampolski, which offers similar thoughts:

There is a common misunderstanding that pervades some corporate managers that consumers are eager to tell marketers all about their dissatisfactions with current offerings and needs for new products…Consumers do not spend a great deal of time conciously thinking about how to improve on products or what new products might help them. It is hard for them to think beyond what is already available at the store. Most shoppers lack the insight and ingenuity to imagine practical new product opportunities, and the innovations they imagine, when solicited, often have a hackneyed or unachievable quality. For example, their expressed needs may not proceed beyond lower prices and less disposable packaging.

Despite this, Mariampolski goes on to state that companies can still glean a lot from their customers in order to roll out new products or services. This is due to the fact that “consumers leave numerous clues and hints to new opportunities, which marketers need to watch for and interpret carefully.” Here are a number of examples of consumer behaviour that Mariampolski uses to illustrate his point:

Combining products and home remedies - If nothing satisfactory exists or if a current product faqils to meet all of the needs consumers bring to a task, they may combine products from different categories; or they may concoct home remedies. In an ethnographic study of home cleaning, for example, we saw consumers mixing liquid dish soap and laundry bleach to create a cleaner for light linoleum floors probing revealed that the benefits they sought included stain removal, thorough cleansing, and sanitizing…Observing these combinations helped the client company to improve on its existing lines of cleaning agents.

Work-arounds - If consumers are frustrated in achieving a goal, they often improvise and work around a barrier. If they are not aware of or do not understand all of the operations required to complete a task in a database program, for example, they may patch together unique ways of solving problems or, alternatively, perform some task based on their own limited knowledge of the program’s functionality.

Indifference - Putting up with merely adequate results - When products preform poorly, many consumers just accept mediocore results…For example, we observed users of bathroom cleaners accepting mediocore cleaning results; it just wasn’t important for them to get the tiles completely white, they argued, as long as a decent effort was made to get thing ‘mostly’ clean. Further observation and analysis revealed that consumers were reluctant to follow directions that they experienced as confusing. Instructions recommended that users give the product at least 15 minutes to penetrate the surface, but few had the patience to follow that procedure…These observations led to the development of effort-free bathroom cleaning products, which were structured to deliver enhanced results with minimal effort.

Errors - Products may fail dismally, but consumers will blame themselves for the problem.

Avoidance - If the right product is not available, consumers may just avoid certain tasks or relegate them to the end of the agenda.In studying home cleaning practices, for example, we found that the backs of electrical appliances and computer equipment attract dense, sticky dust on account of static electricity…Although they did not express an explicit demand for such a product, the clear implication of the avoidance was the need for an agent that reduced static and cleaned the backs of home electronics with minimal effort.

Imaging perfection - When products do not perform as expected, consumers simply assume that the capabilities to meet those needs do not exist…An understanding of consumers’ ideas of perfection was able to drive the manufacturer into a number of alternative product-development directions.

A really simple example of how a company could observe customer behaviour and improve their offering is Subway’s footlong sandwiches. Maybe it’s different in other parts of the world, but everytime I buy a footlong in one of their stores I curse myself when I open the packaging later to see that the deli assistant hasn’t cut my sandwich in half. For those familiar with Subway’s footlongs, they’re a messy experience at the best of times, but ten times worse when you’re trying to juggle an entire sandwich. My mind boggles though as I cannot understand how their staff haven’t picked up on this and simply ask the customer whether they would like their sandwich cut in half when they’ve finished preparing it.

My Subway example might seem rather simplistic but it just goes to show while many companies are trying to think outside the box or engage in consumer generated marketing, quite often innovation is staring them in the face.

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