Through “research” done in focus groups it was revealed that people didn’t like Domino’s pizza. (I put research in quotations since I have heard CPB – the agency who did the ad – has a great disdain for focus groups.  Plus, I don’t think Domino’s would have taken the handful of opinions from focus groups alone to convince them to trash their recipe, but I digress.)

While “research” has been used in advertising in the past (remember Ford’s Swap Your Ride campaign?), I personally think this is on a different level.  Will respondents take focus groups less seriously, use stronger comments to get attention, or just not want to bother with participating if they think they’ll receive unwanted attention (granted, all the people in the commercial surely signed releases)?

More than likely, this one ad, or even ad campaign, will have little lasting effect on focus groups. And it does show companies acting on customers’ feedback.  But it’s important for researchers and end users to be aware of these pop culture uses and possible shifts in opinions towards research among participants, especially if we see more of this type of ad in the future.

What do you think?

(Reminds me of a previous commercial created for Windows Vista.)

One of the draws of phone app research is that it can be immediate.  Just saw a movie?  Review it while walking out of the theater.  Just left the store without buying that flat-screen TV – what kept you from buying?

While actively seeking feedback through phone surveys may be immediate, passively listening to the conversations already occurring can also be immediate, but without the interruption of a survey request.  While we often think of surveys and polls for gathering information, with the adoption of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (and many others), just listening to the conversations can yield real, unfiltered, and immediate feedback.  Anyone who spends time on Facebook or similar sites has seen their friends praise a great experience they had or denounce a company’s poor customer service.

While drawing statistical findings from sampling online conversations may be difficult, they can yield insights.

While there are services that specialize in monitoring social media, small companies can easily get started with services like Google Alerts that alert you when your keywords are mentioned.

The post’s author posted again in response asking for any examples of videos to illustrate, yet nothing has turned up.  Can any reader of this blog offer any examples?

Today I ran across this article written by another professional respondent.  While somewhat old, I believe it still rings true nearly five years later.

For reasons that are probably apparent from watching the video and reading the article, the current system that most firms employ for focus group recruiting is defective.  Sure, it’s quicker and cheaper upfront, but those valuable “insights” you’re gaining are costing you in the long term.

While Corona conducts and hosts many focus groups, we do not recruit from pre-screened respondents for our projects.  We recruit fresh sample for each project and our participants have often never participated in any group before.  Yes, it costs marginally more, but the quality of the respondent is worth it.

Want to find out more?  Please contact us to discuss your project.

First, my view of loyalty.  We are all familiar with customer loyalty programs.  You can find them nearly everywhere, from simple punch cards, to complex airline programs, for your morning latte, gas, and, of course, groceries.  Many of these programs, however, only foster a transactional loyalty.  Meaning, once you earned your free reward, are you any more loyal to the company?  If you get 10 punches on your punch card and get a free coffee, are you any more likely to return to start over?  (Maybe yes, but it probably isn’t because of the punch card.)  Why not defect to another coffee shop and start using their punch card program?

In my opinion, true loyalty is fostered through experience, special privileges, and incremental rewards.  The coffee shop you frequent may be more due to you having a regular barista that knows your name and usual drink (experience), giving you samples to try or an extra shot of espresso (special privileges), and a frequent customer program that doesn’t always reset to zero (incremental rewards).

Lately, while visiting grocery stores, I’ve been conducting my own observational research, of sorts.  Specifically, I’ve been noticing several ways that the typical loyalty card could be designed to be much more powerful. (For reference, I usually shop at King Soopers or Safeway here in Colorado.)

• At the self-checkout, why does it always ask what language you speak?  How you prefer to pay?  Shouldn’t your card remember this for you?
• More and more people are bringing their own totes to use for bags and most stores give you a slight credit for this – when they notice.  If this is your default behavior, why not prompt the cashier overseeing the self-checkouts that they need to confirm you have them?
• Looking up fruits and vegetables are time consuming if you don’t have the little PLU code.  Most people, I believe, buy many of the same fruits and vegetables regularly.  Why not have a shortcut menu with  fruits and vegetables commonly bought by that customer?
• Millions of Americans have food allergies and they constantly have to check that some little ingredient hasn’t snuck its way into their food.  Why not prompt someone when they are about to purchase a food containing whatever they are allergic to?  Same could be done for vegans, or other food preferences.
• What if it reminded you if you forgot to buy an item that you always buy (i.e. milk)?
• How about an option to have a shorter receipt, or no receipt at all?  I love it when people buy a gallon of milk and their receipt is a foot long.

This is only a start.  As RFID, smart in-store advertising, and smart shopping carts become more common, the possibilities for improving the shopping experience are endless.

As a footnote, as I was writing this, I received an email from my wife about a new service from Safeway that tracks your family’s nutrition based on what you bought.  Hopefully this is a sign of many services to come.

Photo from Wikipedia.

This video reminds me of why we only custom recruit for our focus groups.  We use no panel and do not accept opt-in participants.  Instead, we custom-recruit for each project ensuring few if any “regular” focus group participants are in the group and that the group of participants are actually the ones you want to hear from.

I recognized the rooms immediately – two-way glass, audio and video recording, etc.  Instead of group discussions though, they use the rooms for communication trainings (for example, watching other doctors and students communicate with clients), or just anytime too many people in the exam room would be a hindrance.

Corona’s focus group facility only uses closed-circuit television to allow client viewing since we have always felt that mirrors can cause an unwanted distraction, especially when you can hear people behind them. At CSU, this has, on rare occasion, been problematic with the occasional noise coming from behind the mirror, though the majority of the time it is hardly an issue.  Most clients readily forget about the mirror (of course, they probably have other things on their minds considering they are there with their sick pet) and the mirrors are covered with blinds when not in use.

Next time we have focus groups in Fort Collins, maybe we’ll have to look into holding them at the vet hospital – but we’ll be sure to remove the examination table first!

Another great way to get a pulse of what is being said (and, potentially, create a conversation).

Thanks to Seth Godin’s blog for the tip (and if you like Godin’s perspecitve on marketing, you can currently download the audio version of his new book Tribes from Audible.com).

This is the fifth in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa. To see our other posts, click here.

The land rovers could hold up to nine people if they enjoyed crowding, and it was obviously in the lodge’s best interest to keep them full.  So whenever small groups arrived, they were assigned to a land rover and a ranger en masse.  Three or four couples might ride together during the day, and as a bonding exercise, they also ate their meals together at night, back at the lodge.  When we arrived, we saw some of the groups that had been together for a few days, and they all seemed to get along famously.  It was a good marketing idea for the most part, as it let guests meet each other and added a social element to the bumpy rides.

For the first couple of days, Karla and I rode alone, because there were no other groups checking in during an unexpected lull in business.  We knew that we would eventually become part of a bigger group, though, and hoped that it would include some interesting people.  We were a Fred and Wilma looking forward to meeting a Barney and Betty.  On day three, an extended family of six joined our land rover, another group of Americans that included three adult siblings, a spouse, and two parents of the siblings. Photo: Our land rover (in which we were ignored).

It seemed like we would get along well, but … hey, we tried.  The family wasn’t mean or smelly or uncouth, but rather they completely and unilaterally ignored us.  All conversations were between themselves, and any attempts by us to converse were generally met with cursory answers and no back-and-forth.  I don’t know how you can ignore other people in the same vehicle, but they somehow accomplished it.  Overall, it was more than a little disappointing, and made for some rather awkward dinners and other forced interactions.  (Admittedly, however, it made for some rather humorous moments from a humbling perspective, such as our last night as a group, when the patriarch called for a group picture.  We had driven as a group from the lodge into town, for a beach outing and a nice dinner: Karla and me, their family group, our everpresent ranger, and a temporary driver who had been assigned to us that day.  “We should get everyone together for a group shot,” the patriarch said at dinner, and the youngest daughter (in her 20s) gestured to us.  “Maybe we can get those people to take the photo.”  After nearly a week of spending hours together every day, they still hadn’t bothered to learn our names.  But it got worse:  as I patiently took their camera to take their photo, and the patriarch said, “Y’know, this isn’t a complete group shot, now that I think of it.  Go get that temporary driver!”)  Photo: Our retaliatory group photo, minus the other family.

So anyway, the nice thing about this situation is that, while we didn’t exactly make new friends, it was a great opportunity to do ethnographic research.  In ethnographic research, the idea is to “live amongst the natives” and observe their behavior.  One challenge with that is that you can’t “live amongst the natives” without impacting their behavior.  If they know you’re doing research, they may change their behaviors as a result of your presence, which can taint the findings.

In this case, though, it’s safe to say that our presence did not change one thing about their behavior.  They knew nothing about us when we met them, and they knew nothing about us when we parted ways, and if pressed, I’m not sure that they would have acknowledged that there were other people in the land rover.  Since there were occasional bouts of boredom when the animals weren’t leaping from the bush, Karla and I conducted an extensive ethnographic analysis of the family, plotting and discussing how each family member interacted with each other, examining the social structure of their little tribe, and generally developing what could be a fascinating magazine article some day about family dynamics.

And you know the most interesting thing we found? Remember that Safaris and Girls, Girls and Safaris blog post last week?   Well, we proved that it held true for this family.  The youngest daughter, even though she was legally an adult, was the one who had singlehandedly caused the trip to happen.  Hopelessly spoiled and relentlessly doted on by every other family member, she was the one whose initial idea was immediately adopted and turned into a $50,000 family vacation at the patriarch’s expense.  So yes, marketers, point your safari ads to girls and young women, because they appear to be the decisionmaking heart of your market.

We won’t extend this blog article to include the full results of our ethnographic study of this family, in part because they were dysfunctional enough that it would be more entertaining than educational.  Suffice to say, though, that we know exactly how any marketing should be aimed at that family, and any others that are unfortunate enough to have similar family dynamics.  I’d be willing to bet that we know them better than they know themselves.

I guess if you ever find yourself on vacation with people who own a market research company, you should see if they’re taking notes at dinner.

Do young girls like African wildlife more than young boys?  I don’t know.  I don’t have kids myself, and maybe every parent in the world would nod knowingly and say, “Oh, yeah.  They’re in their giraffe phase at that age.”  Maybe that’s the case.

However, it struck us that the only reasonable explanation for seeing such a strong gender skewing is that someone – the daughters or the parents – was making a decision to go on safari for their daughters’ enjoyment.  This means that a significant portion of the power to select an African vacation may not lie in the hands of the people with the pocketbooks, but rather in the wheedling power or the wistful vacation dreams of preteen girls.  That may be insightful to those who market such vacations.

This observation links in with a global theory we’ve been developing about the social development of the next generations, by the way, but that’s not quite ready to be unfurled yet.

Photo: Prime marketing material for African tourism.