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.

On or around October 7, BlackBerry users in Europe started noticing problems with their email and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service. By October 12, the outage had spread to North America. Not all of BlackBerry’s 70 million customers were affected, but a significant portion certainly were.

"How did the recent BlackBerry outage make you feel?"

Copernicus saw an opportunity to understand a little more about the BlackBerry user and their attachment to their smartphone. We decided to strike while the iron was hot! We immediately launched an online survey to get users’ fresh impressions of the BlackBerry outage.

This is the first of several analytical papers we will offer, based on the data collected.

BlackBerry Outage Survey Report by Copernicus Consulting Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at copernicusconsulting.net.

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

The bane of many women’s existence appeared in today’s New York Times: irregular clothing sizes. The journalist interviewed one young woman who complained about irregular sizing:

“I can be anywhere from a 0 at Ann Taylor to a 6 at American Eagle,” she said. “It obviously makes it difficult to shop.”

A scanning kiosk advising customers on their correct size - NY Times

The woman used a body scanner, set up in a Philadelphia mall, to give her a more accurate size for the stores she prefers:

This time, the scanner suggested that at American Eagle, she should try a 4 in one style and a 6 in another. Ms. VanBrackle said she tried the jeans on and was impressed: “That machine, in a 30-second scan, it tells you what to do.”

Why are fashion retailers providing such poor sizing? According to the fashion historian quoted in the article, this is partly historical — sizing has never been fully standardized. But it isn’t just the numbers, it’s also the cut. Clothing is frequently cut for a single body type. If you’ve ever seen a catwalk, you’ll know that designers favour the straight-lined boyish look of models over the “apple” or “pear” or “hourglass” shape of average women.

Retailers are missing a key aspect of the fashion experience if they have inadequate sizing. Mary Alderete, vice president for women’s global marketing at Levi’s, seems to get it:

“When we try on 10 pairs of jeans to buy one, the reason you feel bad is because you think something’s wrong with you.”

Women are cramming themselves into inaccurate sizes, cut to fit only one type of body — and they’re feeling bad about it. It’s amazing that fashion retailers, who go as far as scenting the air in their stores, fail to cater to this most basic aspect of the clothing experience.

What does “size” means to women? It is conversation between her and the garment, one which all too often ends with a judgment of the woman.  When a woman takes a piece of clothing to the fitting room, she is asking the garment, “Are you right for me?” The garment “speaks” first in through its listed size. But imagine when that size does not match how the garment fits. It is now telling the woman, “You are too big for me.” This is obviously a touchy subject for most women, as we are expected to maintain a small size. We are trained to take up less space, less food (among other things).

The size is a “normative” expectation, as sociologists would call it. A woman is “supposed to” fit into a certain size, and if she does not, “something’s wrong with you.” Retailers are making women feel there’s something wrong with them, not to mention frustrated, and are also wasting their time.

When the customer is at the centre of what you do, it’s inevitable that you design better products. In this case, fashion retailers are failing to achieve this most basic tenet of design. Levi’s has the right idea by introducing “It’s not size; it’s shape,” campaign. They have several body types and sizes, making it easier for the garment to say, “Yes, you’re exactly right for me.”

My column in University Affairs has finally been published. In it, I argue that social scientists have both practical and moral reasons to seek out work in the business world:

Social scientists can improve business outcomes by doing what they’ve been trained to do: examine the social practices around the product or service. We are studying the social practices first, and the product’s role in those social practices second.

Read the entire post…