Piaras Kelly PR – Public Relations in Ireland

I saw the RTE version of Dragon’s Den for the first time last week. Obviously it’s entertainment, but I was taken aback by some of the reactions of the Dragons when Colm Stundon and Pat O’Shaughnessy came on the show to pitch their Cosy Curtain idea. I found it highly disrespectful that one of the panel would immediately start laughing, despite not having heard the pitch or done a Q&A.

The blurb behind the product is as follows:

Cosy Curtain is a product that is fitted in 5 minutes to the wall beside the window on top of the window board. It is not visible when not in use and simply folds vertical and is hidden behind the curtain. A magnet holds it in this position. When in use it is simply folded down and the curtain is folded and placed up on top of it. The heat from the radiator below the window is then transferred to the room and not out through the window.

While it sounds clever enough, the actual physical product is a little awkward. However, my interest in it perked when Colm explained to the Dragons that he is a building energy rater and regularly comes across households with mould growing on curtains and windowsills due to condensation. To solve the problem, he devised the cosy curtain.

Now that set off a bell in my mind because he has spotted a potential market and devised a cheap solution. At 20 euro, despite looking silly it is obvious consumers will use it, as he has must have already put the product in place in a few homes he has assessed as part of his day job.

So what has ethnographic research got to do with any of this? Well it’s simple, a lot of business people put a lot of emphasis on market research when it comes to new products or services. What is the potential market value? How many consumers for the product or service exist? What are the market trends? Who are the competitors? All valuable information, but none of it really answers the question whether people will actually buy the product or service.

On the other hand, ethnographic research helps marketers identify the clues consumers leave behind as part of their consumption habits and hints at new opportunities, which marketers can exploit by developing new products or services. A great book to read on ethnographic research is Hy Mariampolski’s ‘Ethnography for Marketers – A guide to consumer immersion‘. Here’s a short blurb from the book which sets out simply how observing consumers in their natural habit can create opportunities for people like Colm Stundon:

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.

Here are several examples of normative consumer behaviours that suggest new product opportunities:

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.

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.