New year, new insight

David TAYLOR

If you really want to know what your customers think, why not video their reaction to your product instead of sending them a questionnaire?

As we forge ahead with the new year, why not take a fresh look at how to gain insight into our customers and markets? We still tend to rely on the traditional twosome of market research: the focus group and the quantitative questionnaire.

These tried and tested techniques have their uses, but today there are other ways to dig deeper into what people want.

The first way to gain great insight is nothing to do with research at all. Instead it involves hiring people who not only understand the consumer - they are consumers themselves. Employees who are close to the target category have a much more emotional connection with the consumer.

Pedigree Petfoods Marketing Director in China, Carlos Peon, has put the technique to the test. The brand idea is all about loving dogs, and he believes that this starts with hiring dog lovers to work in the marketing team.

They are encouraged to bring their dogs to work and use the special facilities that have been built where their pets can play. He is even known to let his dog, Apollo, join him in meetings.

Along the same lines, financial services company Royal and SunAlliance looked at hiring call-centre staff with experience of the small business sectors they were targeting.

The idea was to have people capable of truly understanding the issues, the language and the culture of the small business owner.

Looking at a peer group of brands from outside your category can be a lot more inspiring than just monitoring direct competitors, many of which are likely to be using similar marketing activities.

The Dubbelfrisss soft-drink brand in Holland was inspired to create limited edition flavours Cool Citrus and Wild Berry after looking at the way Lynx body sprays launch a new concept-based fragrance each year.

For ideas on how to improve customer service, T-Mobile looked beyond other mobile network brands to service companies such as Pret A Manger and First Direct.

This led to innovations such as the Business 1-Plan, where a company can save money by pooling the monthly minutes and texts of all its employees. One of the issues with focus groups is that they only scratch the surface of what motivates customers. They rely on people recalling brand usage that may have taken place days or even weeks earlier.

Ethnography can help dig deeper by videoing people as they use a product or service.

Kenco's marketing team used this idea to better understand what was most important in a coffee-shop experience to improve its sales to coffee shops.

Kenco found that while its own focus was on the coffee beans, a range of other things were just as important to consumers, including the crockery in which the coffee is served.

The video project had the added advantage of being much more inspiring when it came to the research debrief.

Watching consumers talk in situ beats sifting through stacks of data. So instead of going straight for the focus group, why not try something else next time? It may not only give you better insight, it could even liven up your day.