The gurus of marketing have never exactly been scientific in trying to divine our innermost desires - but Crayolas? Yep, and while you’re at it add collages, home surveillance and ““ambushing’’ to the list of unconventional tools being used these days to extract precious insights into the habits of the American consumer. Focus groups - where half a dozen ordinary folks are assembled to discuss Brand X while observers busily scribble notes behind a one-way mirror - may still dominate research into selling everything from dish soap to politicians, but they are slowly losing cachet. Explains Jim Spaeth, president of the Advertising Research Council, the race is on to find methods that dig beyond what consumers can articulate to what’s ““deeper in their mind.''
Focus groups were avant-garde in the 1980s, but years of experience with them have now taught ad execs their drawbacks. Consumers have been so bombarded with ads that they unconsciously (or, perhaps, cynically) parrot back what they’ve heard in commercials instead of reacting to products spontaneously. Even more troublesome is the ““loudmouth’’ problem - when one highly opinionated person drowns out the rest of the group. Tom Hollerbach, executive vice president for the ad firm BBDO West, complains that some of these voluble bullies have even become focus-group regulars, signing up repeatedly because they like the idea of dictating ad campaigns. For them, he says, ““it’s like being boss of the boss for a day.''
To dodge such problems, marketers are finding ways to make people shut up and emote. Fallon’s use of crayons is just one variation on the theme. Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency asks subjects to collect small personal items from their homes that remind them of the brand he is testing. Catherine De Thorne of Chicago-based Leo Burnett encourages people to describe their feelings about products like sunglasses by cutting pic- tures from magazines and pasting them into a collage. ““People are just better visually than verbally,’’ she explains.
Another favored method for ferreting out the true tastes of consumers comes straight from cultural anthropology: observing the natives in their natural setting. When Warner-Lambert wanted to find out what customers thought of Fresh Burst Listerine, a new mint-flavored product designed to compete with Scope, the company hired House Calls. The Manhattan-based firm paid 37 families to let it set up cameras in their bathrooms and film their routines around the sink. Users of both brands said they rinsed with mouthwash to make their breath smell good, but they treated the products very differently. Scopies gave the green stuff a swish and spit it out. Devotees of the new Listerine felt obliged to keep the wash in their mouth for a lot longer. One subject went so far as to hold on to the Listerine after he left home and got into the car. Only when he reached a sewer a block away did he expel it. The message to Warner-Lambert was clear: though Listerine needs to seem user-friendly to take on Scope, it hasn’t yet shaken its mediciney image.
If marketers can’t film you at home, sometimes they’ll just move in with you. Both Honda and Toyota have sent staff to live with families and observe how they use their vehicles - a tactic that Honda says confirmed its decision to add back-seat room to the 1998 Accord. BBDO West sent Tom Donovan, its account executive in charge of Pioneer Stereo, to Austin, Texas, to drive around with the kind of guys Pioneer hopes will buy its car stereos. He incorporated their lingo - ““My car is my holy temple, my love shack, my donut maker, my drag racer of doom’’ - into an ad campaign that has helped catapult Pioneer ahead of rival Sony. Political consultants have also picked up on such ““natural environment’’ research. When President Clinton’s adviser Mark Penn wanted to test a new message during the 1996 campaign, for example, he often skipped the usual focus groups and instead went straight to shopping malls, where he quizzed voters in a more relaxing setting.
Andy Greenfield, president of Greenfield Consulting, takes such methods one step further in something he calls ““ambush research.’’ It works like this: a beer company, for instance, wants to test a new product it’s launching to compete with upscale microbrews. Greenfield goes to a bar frequented by the target group, male Yuppies 21 to 26, pays the bartender and waitress to play along, selects his man (hopefully on a date) and approaches. Telling the guy that he’s researching something totally unrelated to beer - ocean pollution or animal rights - he offers to buy the couple a drink in return for a few minutes of their time. As arranged beforehand, the waitress brings the brand Greenfield is researching instead of the chic beer Mr. Yuppie ordered. Mr. Yuppie gets angry, so the waitress apologizes and says the beer is on the house. If the subject won’t take the freebie, Greenfield starts gathering heat-of-the-moment information on why he won’t even try the new beer. Pretty clever tactics, but it’s enough to make you think twice the next time a stranger serves up a bit of hospitality.
