The interview guide is not as important a document as most people think. Most if not all qualitative research would be improved if researchers stopped focusing on the guide, and focused more on the research questions.

Many qualitative researchers have had this very same experience: the client wants to add too many questions focusing too narrowly on their product. They are afraid to have open-ended, general questions for fear they won’t get the insight they’re looking for. They insist on structuring the interview guide to only see a tiny slice of the customer experience.

The result is a narrow understanding of the overall customer experience, which fails to provide deep insight.

This week I was reminded again why it’s more important to spend more time on research questions than on the guide itself.

I have the good fortune of having very informed, sophisticated clients. Just this week, in two separate meetings with two separate clients, we had the very same conversation about the details of the interview guide. I’m lucky enough that my clients agree with me, that the interview guide itself is not the most important output — it’s the final report that matters.

But they, like many of us, have other stakeholders to whom they are accountable. We collaboratively discussed how to handle questions from these stakeholders when they want to add innumerable questions to the interview guide.

This is how I typically handle this issue.

• Help the client understand the difference between a response and analysis: Many clients have been trained by their research providers that customers are the source of insight. They are not; research analysis is where insight comes from. I often give clients the example of “No one ever asked for a Post-it note” to show that we cannot put the burden of thinking onto customers. We still have a job to do after they talk to us.

• Create a separate document of research questions: When your client insists they want to know why someone uses a competitor’s product, you can record that question in a “research goals” or “report outline” document. The client will learn that you intend fully to answer that question, but that the research participant isn’t responsible for answering it.

• Show the gaps in current customer knowledge: I often like to ask clients what they know about their customers. They usually start by saying “a lot” but when you delve deeper, it turns out they don’t know much beyond their immediate product space. What keeps her up at night? Would she drive a Volvo or a Hummer? Is she interested in book clubs? They often have no idea because their research has been narrow. I then show them that knowing if she likes book clubs will help them reach her better.

• Put the consumer in the centre: It’s all well and good to say to your clients, “Trust me.” But chances are, they’re going to need some more evidence. The best way to do this is to put the consumer at the centre of every project, and not the product. You can use past projects to show clients what you’ve managed to achieve with open-ended questions. You can demonstrate that narrow product answers is no substitute for deep understanding. But you can only do this if make the consumer’s own experience the main research question. Product fit into the consumer’s world (or perhaps they don’t). In everyday life, people don’t run around thinking about products. Deep insight comes from this starting point.

Truly relevant questions may appear as only tangentially related when crafting the guide. It’s our job as researchers to show how general questions are always valuable.

Christmas shopping season is in full swing, but one retail company stands out for its message: don’t buy our stuff. That’s right, Patagonia is telling its customers that they should NOT buy more of its products. From their blog:

What kind of crazy reverse psychology is this? Is Patagonia trying to fool its customers into buying something? Are they lying? What are they doing?

IMHO, this is the bravest, most honest campaign I’ve seen in…well forever. The company has said repeatedly that it values the environment above its profitability. It wouldn’t exist as a outdoor recreation company, were it not for the amazing natural beauty of the world.

So they decided to put their money where their mouth is. They recognize the true cost of consumerism:

“Think twice before you buy anything….take the Common Threads initiative pledge, and join us in the fifth ‘R’ to reimagine a world where we only take what we can replace.”

Patagonia is appealing to their own, broader vision with this campaign. Instead of stooping to get the easy buck, they stay true to their value of environment over people. Some marketers might say this is a dumb way to sell outdoor clothing. But this approach appeals to the values of the very people who do buy these kinds of clothes.

This is evocative of the model we use with our clients, called the Value Orientation Model, which guides good, values-based marketing. The value orientation model shows us the 5 central values humans use to organize their lives and understand the world:

Value Orientation Model

When your brand’s values are clear, decisions like this are easy. Put the value at the centre of your message, and the campaign writes itself. The hard part is keeping true to that value system. Patagonia has done this, and in so doing, is ensuring the loyalty of its most valued customers.

Value-based marketing isn’t cynical reverse psychology. It isn’t even marketing. It’s about finding a moral centre of where you want to be. This can only be done with deep social insight.

Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:

The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.

Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal its passage.

In my last post, I discussed the process of buying school supplies in preparation of going back to school. In this post, we take a look at another kind of purchase: jeans. September is jean-selling season. Retailers gear up for the hordes of teenagers (and their parents) doing back-to-school shopping. I look at two retailers, one that uses ritual and one that does not.

The Gap: No Ritual
The Gap has traditionally been a jeans-driven brand, re-inventing “business casual” in the ‘90s. Their take on the jean, this season, is a curious position:

I took this photo through the window of Toronto’s flag-ship store on the tony Bloor Street West (the same street that will be thronged with Chanel-hunting Hollywood starlets during the Toronto International Film Festival).

Notice a few things about this woman:

1.        She’s blonde
2.        She has impossibly long legs
3.        She is wearing 2.5-inch heels with a pair of “casual” pants
4.        She is parting her mouth sexily

The caption, which you can’t quite read is “Putting the it in fit.” The copy is telling us that Gap jeans will fit. The picture is telling us that women are supposed to look like tall, blonde, sexy models who wear high heels with casual jeans. I find it hard to believe that jeans that fit her will actually fit me.

How might this positioning relate to autumn rituals? If you’re having difficulty explaining that, it’s because it doesn’t. This campaign is the tired, uninspired advertising laziness. Creative ad workers likely relied on the notion of the “aspirational” product. People will buy this product because they want to look like that model, this logic goes.

It’s the same logic that continues to market household cleaners only to women (even though men are doing more housework). This is what we “should” aspire to as women: being tall, skinny and blonde, and having a clean house.

Children going back to school, and their parents who bring along their wallets, are in back-to-school mode. This campaign says nothing about this ritual of rejuevenation, re-invention, “buckling down,” and getting “back to work.” The end of summer is irrelevant to this campaign.

Levi’s: On-Ritual
Contrast this with the Levi’s fall campaign. Levi’s has had its share of downs in the last few decades. Its simple, Coca-cola, American-as-Apple-Pie brand image worked during the big-hair ‘80s, but their relative underinvestment in either design on brand dragged down their sales throughout the ‘90s and the ‘00s.

But take a look at their most recent jeans campaign:

I took this in the subway in Toronto that is connected to the city’s mid-market shopping Mecca: Eaton Centre.

Other images of this subway campaign portray the jeans as “worker” jeans. Average-looking beautiful people (instead of beautiful, beautiful people) are featured in sepia-toned, 1930s-inspired photographs. The images evoke the waning sun of summer and the “back to work” spirit of “back to school.”

What’s strikingly different from the Gap campaign is the focus on “work.” “We are all workers” is an interesting take on this back-to-school time. The ritual of beginning a job often involves getting equipment or tools. The jeans are not positioned as “aspirational,” or something that will make you look beautiful. Instead, they’re positioned as necessary to “get the job done.”

The images are evocative of the iconic Depression-era photos of “Okies” working in California:

The brand has even played up the “workers” aspect on its Web site: http://explore.levi.com/news/we-are-all-workers/ with YouTube interviews with “workers” of the depressed town Braddock, PA.

What is the message of this campaign:

1.        People are hurting economically
2.        Jeans are for working in
3.        There is redemption hidden inside the lessons of hard economic times

Analysis: Ritual Still Needs Substance

These contrasts are stark. The Gap chose to rely on “features” (i.e., fit) and “aspirational” imagery. But Levi’s focused on the timing on the campaign, making it far more interesting and nuanced.

I personally am very intrigued by Levi’s campaign. The interviews in the videos are earnest, without guile and a little sad. But I find that more comforting than the pleasant fiction of the Gap campaign. In fact, I find the image of yet another 6’ blonde in a pair of jeans a little enraging.

If brands were to be honest, they would acknowledge these hard economic times. Notably, however, Levi’s stops short of acknowledging where its jeans are made. As a company, they must bear some responsibility for the end of work in the US: their jeans are made in China and Mexico. These jeans are not made by American workers, even those in Braddock, PA. And clearly that town could use a few jobs.

I loved it when I first saw it. Brandtags.net invites users to look at a logo and type in the first thing that enters their minds. I found it fascinating — until I realized it’s yet another example of poor research perpetuating negative stereotypes of women.

Type in “Oprah” and see what happens. The top three most entered words? Fat. Black. Bitch. Yes, that’s right, Oprah, the maven of women’s media landscape is nothing more than a fat black bitch. How valid a representation of Oprah is this?

Oprah’s media universe is worth a fortune. She earned $260 million in 2007 and is worth $2.5 billion. Her daily talk show alone gets 7.3 million viewers (that’s compared to 2.9 million viewers for Grey’s Anatomy).

So I got to thinking. How is Brand Tags so wrong? So nasty? So racist? (Type in NBA or Citibank and you’ll see what I mean). Researchers are Harvard have shown how stereotypes work. We know that people rely on implicit stereotypes when they make snap judgments. This is the downside of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

We live is a complex social world. We try to make sense out of it by looking for patterns. Theorists Berger and Luckman call these “typifications” or roles that we take for granted. Typifications help us because they allow us to know what to do in social situations without really thinking about it, or, as Berger and Luckman explain it, they alleviate us from making “all those decisions.”

All Brand Tags really does is tell us what those typifications are for the people who visit their site. Who is visiting their site? We don’t really know. The first rule of sampling is to ask yourself, are the people who participate systematically different from the people who don’t?

People who participate in Brand Tags are obviously Web savvy. Someone forwarded them a link and they filled it out. Perhaps they read business media because Brand Tags has gotten some press. They have the time to enter text. They are also anonymous.

Is this what you would consider a “representative sample”?

Brand Tags has promise (I myself have used it to gain insight about a few things). But it mostly has the worst of our stereotypes. Is that insight? Perhaps. But it’s not insight about Oprah — it tells us a lot about the people who are talking ABOUT Oprah.

Brands have few opportunities to come alive, and the Web is one of those opportunities. Make sure the brand gives off the right impression. Researchers have found that a company’s Web site particularly shapes how a person views that company’s innovation and concern for its customers. In other words, the Web site is even more important in “giving off” the right impression.

Brands introduce themselves to people much in the same way that people introduce themselves to people. And just like for humans, brands often “give off” more information than they explicitly mean to provide. This is especially true for Web sites: the brand online is the same as a “self,” and must manage its impression just as people do.

We have all experienced this: you meet someone and develop an immediate sense of what they’re about. You have figured out that this person works in, say, finance, and he has money and children and likes nautical sports. You also find him curt, arrogant and a bit full of himself. Is it something he said specifically? No, not specifically. He did snap at the waitress. And he did mention something about a regatta. He also casually tossed his credit card down when the bill came, rudely brushing aside protestations from the most senior person at the table.

One of my favourite theorists, Erving Goffman, tells us there is an impression you GIVE, and then there is the impression you GIVE OFF. “Selves,” as Goffman puts it, engage in impression management using subtle symbolic signals.

Designers often implicitly think of their particular product — whether it be a kitchen product or a print ad — as something that “gives off” an impression. But this is much more important for immersive experiences like Web sites. A company’s Web site in particular is an immersive experience that gives off countless symbolic cues.

Some observers call this phenomenon “cross channel synchronicity,” or simply just “user experience.” The Web site is key to “giving off” the right impression for a company and its brand because it is the living embodiment of that company.

How should graphic and interaction designers create their products? Keep in mind the following:

• The brand is a “self” on the Web. This is a great opportunity but designers also run the risk of “giving off” the wrong impression immediately through interactions that suggest a stand-offish, arrogant, or selfish brand.
• Brand-critical interactions must be done right: I have had many clients who appear unconcerned about appear small interaction problems of their Web site. But if these interactions revolve around mission-critical symbols of your business, make sure they’re done right. If your brand identity if “fun,” ensure that interactions are full of fun, not hard work. If your brand identity is “trustworthy,” over-communicate that message in interactions.
• Provide the expected “props”: In an earlier post, I showed how individuals use symbolic cues, or “props” to manage impressions. Doctors use stethoscopes, for example, despite the fact that fewer than 40% of them know how to use them properly, mostly because patients EXPECT them to carry them. Web site designers should remember what users expect in terms of “props.” Does your brand really need AJAX? Are visitors surprised to find their is no flash element? Are visitors expecting form fields to have in-line editing?