An article by Tracy Teweles

Reprinted in its entirety, with permission, from the May 1998 issue of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review

I have a personal relationship with my brand of toilet paper. Call me crazy. It goes beyond expecting softness and wanting a "name I can trust." It has to do with stuff I would never tell you about -- things like how I want you to see me ("I’m not overly fancy. I’m practical."). And, how I want to feel.

And you know, nothing makes me feel that my life is in order like stowing six to 12 extra rolls in my closet. Let it get down to two or three and I feel a little nervous. You probably do too.

To put all this in marketing-ese, I can say that I interact with my toilet paper on three levels -- on a physical level, on an image level, and on an emotional level. And all three of these work to reinforce my brand choice.

So rather than looking at consumers and their interaction with products and categories as a one-way street, I like to look at it as a full, two-way thoroughfare. A full-fledged interaction.

Where I’m a bit different than some folks out there is that I believe these insights are more than odd -- they are valuable; that is, understanding our underlying relationship with brands and categories can provide marketers with powerful instruments for building meaningful brands. Brands that consumers will naturally be drawn to because they build upon natural behaviors and relationships. Relationships we are all but unaware of.

The idea of this article is not to talk about my personal habits but to share my experience in working with ordinary consumers to mine their underlying category and brand experience in order to strengthen brands. We provide several services at C&R that leverage this experience through metaphorical and right-brain thinking.

I have mined the world of white and red meat, of toilet paper and soup, of utilities and pickles, of cable TV and fast-food burgers. And I have learned two things: the good news is that we all have these relationships with brands and categories; the bad news is that not every consumer can easily tap into this level of experience.

If you are interested in mining consumers’ brains, there are three guidelines you may want to follow:

• zero in on the right consumers;
   

• build an intimate team environment; and,
   

• use a toolbox that allows people to articulate these underlying experiences and perceptions.

Zeroing in on the right consumer

Because the success of a project of this kind relies wholly upon respondents’ ability to explore this uncharted territory with you, we need to be more selective than for a traditional focus group. We’ve found a few things that make for a successful recruit:

• Articulate, articulate, articulate. While in real estate location is key, you can’t get anywhere in understanding underlying stuff if you have a group of people who can’t articulate their thoughts or experiences.
   

• Let’s talk about me. Openness is essential too. We need to start out knowing that this will be a group of people who are relatively comfortable speaking about themselves.
   

• A bit to the right. While political views do not matter, rightness of brain does. We’ve got to be sure that our cohorts in exploration can defy the allure of logic and venture forth into right-brain or associative thinking. Stuff that requires no rationale. Free-flying fragments are welcomed here. And that’s not necessarily your basic respondent -- though more consumers have this ability than you might think.

Building an intimate environment

The right environment is also essential to delving into consumer depths. Some things I’ve learned along the way:

• The only thing to fear. A key job as we explore new territory is to establish a setting of fun, not fear. It can be pretty scary to reveal habits with strangers; as a moderator my job is to provide permission for all thoughts and to make the process feel like cocktail party games rather than a psychological test.
   

• Group discovery, together. And, for this kind of process to work well it needs to be a joint venture. Between moderators and respondents, and between client and moderator. Learning won’t be transparent; hypothesis is part of the process as the group progresses. This is part of the camaraderie and the uniqueness of this kind of venture. We are, as C&R’s Founder Saul Ben-Zeev says, together with the respondents in the hot pursuit of learning. And respondents like that role -- and power.

The moderator/client venture is truly a team effort too. We are working together to digest learning as we create a new language to describe things no one has ready words for.

• A buddy system. To bolster respondent comfort -- and help them clearly articulate their associations and ideas -- we typically pair consumers based upon their brand preference or habits with what we call Champion Pairs. Because they share a viewpoint, they bond as they work together. This makes their work more fun and engaging -- and their ideas and private feelings seem less vulnerable. Thus, the results are more revealing and informative for us.

A toolbox of projective techniques

It ain’t easy to talk about relationships with inanimate objects. So something is called for to help people express the automatic and the unnoticed in words.

This is where a bag of tricks is definitely called for. Straightforward, left-brain fare simply won’t work. We need something that will provide a fresh expression of what’s on automatic. Something that’ll trick the dominant left-brain to ditch logic so emotion can come through.

This is the natural habitat for projective techniques, a place where they thrive. These kind of techniques work in two steps: diverging -- launching off into blue-sky stuff -- and then, converging -- bringing it all back home to marketing fare.

How to make projectives work for you

• Critical mass: go for quantity. While quality is surely an aim, in this kind of work, projectives work well in quantity.
   

• Play Highlights magazine. Remember those games where you try to see what three or four different images share in common? Well that’s the idea here. By doing a series of projective technique, we can begin to see patterns. These patterns will lead us to define brand essence and the consumer-product relationship.
   

• Build-in contrasts. A projective is basically a metaphor, and a metaphor without a contrast or parameter is pretty useless. To learn that Soup A is homey doesn’t tell you beans about the brand unless you’re sure this isn’t a category "price of entry."
   

• By establishing some brand contrasts you can be confident what realm you’re really in, and understand what’s brand-relevant and what are category issues.
   

• Wonder. Finally, don’t forget the reason why. It seems like a silly point, but it can be really easy to assume that if consumers think of Pickle A as being like Neiman-Marcus, it must be the best pickle around. I’ve been surprised more than once by respondent’s explanations -- this could be the Neiman-Marcus of pickles because it’s a big pickle and Neiman-Marcus is based in Texas, where everything is big. It could be like Neiman-Marcus because this man believes that Neiman-Marcus’ stuff is just the same as JCPenney, but twice the price -- so this is a parity product sold at a premium price.
   

• Distill. Once you’ve mined, you’ve got to refine. To digest and to order. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have an organic understanding of your category, your brand, and just how consumers interrelate with both. What a great base for making a brand be all it can be.

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