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.

The LA Times is reporting a shocking finding: men are doing the grocery shopping! In other news, they also apparently buy clothes, change diapers, and book swimming lessons. Will wonders never cease. The Times tells us that the grocery retailers are finally waking up to this supposed gender revolution:

The nation’s biggest food and personal products manufacturers are taking notice, trying to market products and adjust store layouts to cater to men. It’s a paradigm shift for the $560-billion retail food industry that has patently referred to the primary customer as “she,” focusing marketing and advertising firepower on women, and mothers in particular — sometimes making fun of dads in the process.

This type of analysis is as superficial as it is insulting. Men eat food. Men love food. Men cook food. Men shop for food. Trying to “adjust store layouts to cater to men” is short-hand for “caving to stereotypes about masculinity.” To really understand men and groceries, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of men.

An amazing sight: a man shopping for food -- LA Times

In our work, we recently did a study about a food category and men. We showed our client that food has implicit gender “maps” to it. You can pattern food to this gender map, but don’t insult your customers. Don’t cave to the easy stereotype of “meat and potatoes = man.” Men, just like women, are diverse in their understanding of food.

To illustrate, we developed this framework.

Foods have implicit gender schme

Just because “steak” is masculine doesn’t mean most men want steak or identify with that type of masculinity. Remember that masculinity (just like femininity) isn’t a “must have” but a “should do” that we all grapple with, and some of us ultimately reject.

The Times goes on to profile P&G and Kraft’s attempts to understand men and their grocery shopping. We approve of their ethnographic approach in general, though we would want our clients to know that there is not one single category called “men.” You can’t be sure to be successful with “men” if you have a single idea of who a “man” is.

If grocery stores want to “cater to” men, they need to first understand that masculinity is a social construct. From there, they can make their in-store experiences more attuned to implicit gender maps that customers hold in their minds when they walk in.

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.

I had the privilege to work under Roger Martin when I worked at the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity. Roger’s got much to say about innovation, and I find his take to generally reinforce the “qualitative lens” Copernicus takes to its projects. Roger recently wrote for Harvard Business Review that companies don’t get growth from mere “analysis.” What they need is “appreciation”:

If instead, the core tool is not analysis but rather appreciation —deep appreciation of the consumer’s life — what makes it hard or easy; what makes her (in this category) happy or sad — there is the opportunity to imagine possibilities that do not exist.

He goes on to point out that it was this kind of “appreciation” that lead to great products like The Swiffer and Febreze. What he’s really talking about is the transformative nature of qualitative research. When you really understand (or “verstehen”) the consumer, you can’t help but feel their pain when they get frustrated or annoyed with your current products. You have empathy for them because you deeply understand them.

This is the kind of work that Copernicus does with its clients. We the consumer to the centre of your universe, and show you their needs, wants, desires, and frustrations.

Harvard Business Review has a great post about making effective surveys. Rob Markey is a partner with Bain and Company, the consultancy, and huge proponent of the “Net Promoter Score.” He tells us that he himself ignores email invitations to surveys routinely, even though he’s in the business of surveys.

Response rates below 40% in consumer businesses or 60% in commercial environments indicate a problem. And if your response rates aren’t increasing, your customers are telling you that you don’t respect their time.

That sounds a bit familiar to us.  Customer surveys (or employee surveys, or stakeholder surveys) all too often are exercises merely in “data collection” and not meaningful engagement with customer feedback.  The challenge with quantitative surveys is that it’s relatively easy to treat customers as data points. In face-to-face interviews, it’s relatively impossible to ignore the real concerns of real people, particularly if you have a senior executive witnessing the interview first hand. But in surveys? Every customer becomes a data point.

If your response rates are falling, that is a finding. If you cannot get your surveys shorter than 10 minutes, that is also an indicator that you are placing your company’s needs for insight above your customers’ needs for free time.

Markey has a few great suggestions, including make sure you reach out to customers later and show them what you’ve done with their feedback. We also suggest a few more steps:

• Pilot test your survey with real customers. This needs to be built into the timeline, but it will be worth it. You need to know if your questions actually get to the heart of what customers believe. And you’ll know if you’re asking too much from them.
• Avoid using “off the shelf” charts from Survey Monkey or Excel. Senior executives see hundreds of these charts every week. Be inventive and create your own charts.
• Tell a story. Just like with qualitative research, you need a narrative arc embedded in your report. Make it evocative. Make it human.
• Integrate qualitative findings: mixed methods are hard to do well, but they are the gold standard in good insight. Weave direct quotes from interviews or focus groups into the charts.
• Share the story with customers. This will be difficult if your results are not as positive as you’d hoped. But authenticity is a value that consumers value in companies. Be brave and face your truth. Your customers will respect you for it.

Two of us at Copernicus (Sarah and I) are working on a project, funded through Ryerson University, on smartphone usage. One of the key findings we’ve uncovered so far is that people tend to adopt new communication channels (e.g., text) when they purchase new handsets. This new handset/life change correlation is a symbolic ritual that leads to new ways of communicating.

New phone, courtesy of emotionaltoothpaste on Flickr.com

When do they purchase new handsets? When their lives change in some way. Here’s an example.

We spoke to one young professional who was telling us when he started using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). He noticed that he started using it more when he got his new BlackBerry handset, but it was also around the time he got engaged to his fiancée (who also had just gotten a BlackBerry). So he wasn’t sure if it was because he got the new BlackBerry or because he got engaged.

This type of life event was a recurrent theme. Participants got new handsets when they went away to university, when they started a new job, when they got a promotion, when they moved house. Or they purchased them for their children when they reached a certain age.

This type of ritualistic consumption is common. We have talked about this before in our analysis of autumn jean buying. People buy certain items to equip themselves for the new season, but also to symbolically mark the shift from one state to the next. There are practical reasons why one would purchase a new handset when one is moving house, for example, but there is also a deeply symbolic transformation taking place.

Participants are hiving off the past by giving up their old handsets. They are preparing for the future (at university, at the new job, with the new partner) when they are upgrading to a new, “futuristic” piece of technology. Just like new jeans are symbolic of a new school year, new handsets are symbolic of a new way to relate to new people or things in your life.

New handsets are not just new phones; they are new ways to communicate. Our participants did not intend to re-invent how they talked/texted/BBM’d but they did intend to change their lives in some way. Texting for the first time seems natural when you’re embracing another life change. Using BBM for the first time makes sense if your new fiance already uses it. Answering email on the bus for the first time is not weird if everyone at the new office does it.

I have argued in the past that financial services providers should only ever look to life changes as triggers for new products. It’s clear that new products go hand in hand with new life events. In this case, new products and new life events correlate with new technology adoption.

Technology designers should consider what events are the triggers, and incorporate these symbolically into their mobile platforms. Advertisers should understand that getting consumers accustomed to new mobile content means understanding their new life situations. Employers should understand that new hires and the newly promoted are adjusting to new ways of communicating, usually because they are given new phones without much discussion. And parents should realize that symbolic ages for their children (e.g., age 16) will often mean new ways of communicating. Just teaching your son or daughter to drive is the start of it — you may also have to learn how to BBM.

In our work with Ryerson University, we are uncovering some interesting findings about domestic mobile phone use. For example, mobile phones are affecting family management:

Smartphones bind families closer: some participants told us that their texting increased when they upgraded to a smartphone. A discrete text to one’s spouse is easily tolerated in the workplace, making it much easier to stay in touch than through voice only. Partners tend to be sending quick texts to each other throughout the day, thereby binding their lives closer together and facilitating their domestic management.

We know that the family is changing. Copernicus researchers have gone into family homes to understand how changing ideas of gender are affecting product use, cultural beliefs, and everyday practices. The mobile study is another example of how the family — usually a taken-for-granted category — is a dynamic, changing form.

Read more about these initial findings and our exciting project.

As we go forward with this work, we’ll be updating the public on these fantastic insights. Stay tuned!

I’m thrilled to be managing a research project on mobile technology use through a fellowship at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. I’ve assembled a research team and we have started initial research. Our “ethnographic stretching” exercise lead to some interesting insights:

“Attachment Paradox”: More than one person we talked to said that their mobile phone meant nothing to them. “It’s just a device. There’s no attachment to it,” said one person. Yet, this same person said she’d “panic” if she lost it. How can they be anxious of its loss, yet “unattached” at the same time? Again, more work to be done here.

Check out some of the other insights on the Mobile Work Life project Web site

I am a new home owner. Like many new home owners, I am both fascinated and repelled by the most terrifying show on television: Holmes on Homes. This show demonstrates a key aspect to understanding social life: normativity or what “should be.”

For those unfamiliar with the show, allow me to summarize the narrative arc of virtually every show. Mike Holmes is a general contractor. He arrives at a home as if he were arriving at the scene of the crime. Like Catherine on CSI, he takes a tour of the “scene.” The homeowners (usually a straight couple, about my age) regale him with the horrible story of their recent renovations, gone awry.

Mike clucks and mutters under his breath. He provides running commentary to the homeowners, assuring them that yes, their instincts were correct: their renovations were not “done right.” He then assures them that when his team arrives on the scene they will “make it right.”

The team duly arrives and as they peel back the layers of the house (the drywall, the floors, the ceiling, the insulation, the roof; Mike stops at nothing to uncover the truth), they discover how bad it actually is. About halfway through the show, Mike is stripped down to his crisp white tank top, with a pair of overalls. He is likely sweating. He is red-faced both with exertion and moral indignation.

“How can somebody do this to a family?” he asks. “They’re good people. They don’t deserve this.”

As the show progresses, Mike and his team make everything right. The magical closing moments of the show is the reveal: when the homeowners are invited back into their now-right home. They are typically overwhelmed. They gasp, whoop, and cry. They hug Mike Holmes. “This is how I get paid,” he tells the camera. The damage is un-done. Their home is now “right.”

If you are a homeowner, you know full well that your house will never be “right.” You have crumbling grout. You have an irritable furnace. Your kitchen faucet drips. Your livingroom window fogs up. You have any number of small or large malfunctions. Your home is “not right.”

What Holmes on Homes does is demonstrate to you what “right” look like. In other words, it demonstrates what sociologists call “normativity” or what “should” be. And you are not what you should be. Until Mike Holmes arrives, that is.

Mike Holmes plays the same role as Dr. Oz. He goes “underneath” the mere appearance of your home. In fact, houses that are well decorated are among Mike’s favourite targets because he can show how “looks can be deceiving.”

Dr. Oz does similar work when he takes blood from an audience member and shows her “the truth” about her blood sugar level, which is not readily apparent from her mere appearance.

Both Mike Holmes and Dr. Oz are showing us what “should” be. The truth is, none of us really notice if our electrical system is sub-par or if we are pre-diabetic. Our houses and our bodies are “asymptomatic” and we are quite happy with that state. Only through their expert intervention can you become “right.” This is what Michel Foucault talks about: experts and what they say in books and TV shows lead us to control ourselves.

Now granted, there may be homes or bodies that need significant intervention to survive. But we all too frequently raise the bar on what is “right.” Our homes are cleaner, drier, and more comfortable than they ever have been in history. Yet, we are continuously told that they are not “good enough.”

Mike Homes tells us what many marketers do: your home does not function properly. There is an entirely new universe of “properly” that you don’t even know existed. Instantly, there is anxiety about being “not right.” There is a compelling need to “make it right.”

Marketers and designers take heed. You may sell or design products based on what “should” be. You may subtly introduce anxiety in your customers without even realizing it. But you are not evoking good feelings or lifetime loyalty. You are scaring people. You are making them uncomfortable. You are making them feel inadequate. And before they met you (or Mike Holmes, or Dr. Oz) they felt perfectly fine.

Selling or designing based on normativity is also morally questionable. Advertising has a long history of selling anxiety, particularly to women. I exhort marketers and designers to eschew normative approaches, and instead, make people feel good about what they already have. Make them feel happy. And invite yourselves to that happy table.

I have mixed feelings about Mike Holmes. I thoroughly enjoy his ritualistic purification of people’s homes. I love it when what was so wrong is “made right.” It feels good to see that transformation. But now that I live in something that is “not right” and I do not have the limitless resources to “make it right,” I am in a constant state of dissatisfaction. I would have preferred to remain relatively ignorant of what “right” might be. I would likely be happier if I didn’t know how woefully inadequate my 60 amp panel is.

But my sociological lens helped me understand that Mike Holmes is just like my former doctor, who told me in one breath that I was very healthy and in the next told me to “lose weight.” Normativity is something we must recognize as just one view of “right.”

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.