Perspective

“What does this make you think of” is a much better question than “what do you think of it.” Because it reveals just how much (and in what way) someone will bring that message or concept into their life.

“What do you think of it” is an opinion-based question so you’ll get answers that are based in liking, not liking or comments on executional details. Someone can really like an idea, message or product but will not bring it into their life. Or they may bring it into their life in a way the brand doesn’t intend. In short, “what does this make you think of” is a question about meaning not liking.

There is a psychological concept developed in the early 1900’s by an Austrian art historian called “the beholder’s share.” This was developed on the premise that an artwork is not complete until the beholder’s share (what the viewer brings to the artwork) is considered. This same concept is in play with viewing and responding to any idea. There is an intended message by the artist or brand and there is a message received by the beholder.

Asking about associations is a way of understanding the complete picture… not just what the message or idea is trying to say… but what it means to the person who is viewing or experiencing it.

The first analytic filter this question creates is “are there any associations?” If not, that’s a problem. If so, what are they and do they match up with what the brand is intending?

The second analytic filter is “how rich and meaningful are the associations?” If someone can tell a rich and meaningful story about what an idea made them think of then chances are quite good they’ll bring this message or idea into their life. Further questions can help a brand team more deeply understand “the beholder’s share” that their message most connects with (or not).

Asking about associations gets to deeper, often unspoken, human motivations. “What does this idea make you think of” is a simple question that can help you be sure your brand is making a more meaningful connection with your beholder.

If you think about it, all of our motivation comes from our life experience. So, imagine what we’re missing if we don’t ask people about that. Build questions into your studies that will illuminate their life experience in a way that’s most helpful to the kinds of insights you’re seeking. Don’t dive straight into the category. This can be done in any type of study.

Over the years, I’ve often started an interview or group discussion with this simple statement… “If you think about it, our motivation comes out of our life experience… the people who’ve influenced us and the things that have happened to us. So, I’m going to ask you a bit about your life in our discussion. It will help me understand where you’re coming from.” Heads always nod to this truth and people have been willing to tell me the stories that have shaped them. This invariably leads to deeper insight.

At face value, this seems easier to do in qualitative than quantitative. Here’s my challenge to that perspective… if surveys are meant to uncover motivations, shouldn’t we strive to include life experience influences within them? This can be done in closed-end questions, but open ends are particularly well-suited to provide the sort of personal stories that bring an emotion or identity to life. These can be analyzed very efficiently by text analytics which helps your speed and efficiency.

For example, in an education study we started with a quantitative survey asking respondents about their values and priorities through a series of closed-end questions in addition to gauging the appeal of a specific concept. We used this to define a more specific audience based on their values and attitudinal priorities. We couldn’t have gotten this by just evaluating the concept.

Closed-ends that force study participants to make choices about who they are and how they feel can be highly effective… particularly if they’re focused on beliefs, emotions, identity or a desire for transformation. In other words, focused on the audience not the brand or product. Just a few questions – properly set up – can uncover tensions that would be lost if you dive straight into a category, brand or idea.

Our natural inclination in the insights world has been to talk a lot about asking questions. We have things we want to know. People on our team have a lot they want to learn. So, what questions do we ask and how do we ask them? The result is, we talk a lot about what we’re going to talk about, but we don’t spend much – if any – time talking about how we’re going to listen.

This happens in all types of research. One of the consequences is we can lose the meaning of how someone is responding because we’re so focused on our questions. We can end up taking people literally when there might be a nuance or intent we’re missing. We can misunderstand context. We can end up forcing people to answer all our questions just because we thought they were good questions when they might not matter to the person we’re asking.

I would offer this up. Don’t just listen to what people are saying. Listen to what they’re talking about. When developing any kind of study, have your team talk about how you’re going to listen as much or more than the questions you want to ask.

And do this without agenda. Leave your role and what you have to get done at the door. It will cloud your listening filter. I’ve seen this happen in so many studies… messaging, concept evaluation, exploratory work. So many of us listen for what we want to hear and filter out everything else.

It’s possible to build a listening plan into any kind of study. A plan that helps you discover meaning – not just what people are saying. And if you do this enough, you’ll become a better listening organization. A listening plan can be as simple as helping team members listen for meaning and content or a more all-encompassing review of what you plan to do with what you hear. This is possible to do no matter what method you’re using for your study. It works in quantitative, qualitative or a hybrid approach.

It's important to listen in a different way and to different things depending on where you are in the strategic process. Are you in the early stages of development of positioning, messaging or product concepts? Then develop a listening plan that helps everyone on the team stay open. Listen deeply to where study participants take the discussion or how they interpret your survey question. Are you in the later stages of an innovation process? Then focus the team on listening for the details that will help you optimize the design, functionality and presentation of your idea. You can also give specific people on your team specific listening assignments.

Listening is something we do without thinking about it. It’s kind of an involuntary muscle. But we can learn to listen with empathy and intention.

Talk about listening as much as you talk about the questions you want to ask. You’ll get a much richer and more human set of insights.

Don’t allow the team to use broad societal labels to describe a particular group or target. For instance, if you’re targeting teens don’t let anyone use that word. There is stigma in the word “teen” just as there is in the word “techie” or the phrase “senior citizen.” You will find your brand vocabulary gets much richer if you can’t use labels as a shortcut. And you’ll think of your “target” as a person in your brand’s audience.

We feel vocabulary is important in internal team discussions – particularly thinking about not using words such as “consumer” or “target” because these words actually distance us from the people we want to understand better. In addition to the distance created, the label also reinforces a false assumption that everyone under that label is the same.

Oh, and who likes to be labeled? We don’t and we doubt you do either. In today’s world, the sense of individual identity has never been stronger and there are no longer universally understood meanings about labels we’ve used to describe people for many years.

If you went through your strategic documents and stripped out all the societal labels, it would make you think about your brand’s audience in a much more interesting and involved way. It would put you in their shoes, create a greater sense of empathy and help you focus your message to one person vs. a group. And if you’ve done your insight homework, you can learn how compelling that message is on a broader level.

Try replacing the word “consumer” with “person.” And the word “target” with “audience.” Take away demographic labels and focus on speaking to individuals within your audience that might represent a specific mindset.

That brings us to segment names. These are obviously labels of sorts but can be useful vocabulary because hopefully they have human beliefs, attitudes or motivation baked in. Be sure that segment names don’t elicit judgment or aspiration. That can make it easier to favor one segment over another so be conscious of building that bias into defining your audience. You may also want to develop a persona that’s representative of an audience or a segment. If that’s the case, then bringing that persona to life and naming them can be very effective.

Going beyond societal labels to define your audience in more specific human terms can help the whole team think differently about how your brand can fit into its audience’s life. And the brand has a better chance to come across as more genuine and empathic in its messaging and perception.

Look for ways to get study participants to tell stories instead of answering questions. This gets beyond platitudes to the reality of what they feel or aspire to. People – in studies and otherwise – can be very quick to offer up platitudes. For example, many if not most of us would say we’re concerned about the environment or our health yet every day we make decisions to the detriment of each.

It's superficial and misleading to describe people as having environmental concerns or wanting to eat healthier. Getting them to tell stories or describe scenarios about these issues is critical to understanding the underlying tensions we all experience as humans – some of which may be beyond our conscious decision-making.

Every positive breakthrough in technology, efficiency or any form of “progress” has a shadow. There are very few black-and-white decisions that can be made about a product, brand or service because of that shadow. It’s no accident that almost every powerful technology company in the last thirty years has gone from savior to suspect in the eyes of its users. Almost every product category in the history of modern marketing has brands that have experienced this arc of perception (or the category itself has experienced it… i.e. oil companies).

Demonstrative storytelling sounds more intimidating than it is. It can be done simply by creating scenarios for a study participant to react to or put themselves into. For instance, don’t ask them what sort of parent they are, find a way to get them to demonstrate it. The question can be of the ”tell me about a time when” ilk. By describing a time when they’ve been a good and/or bad parent, you and your client will learn much more about the tensions they experience and the motivations they end up acting on.

Telling stories sounds like an exclusively qualitative thing. But these stories can be found in large-scale data sets through open-ends or quant-qual approaches with some form of text analytics built in.

And keep in mind… this doesn’t have to be the focus of the whole study. I’m just asking that you make it a part. You will be understanding human motivation in a much fresher and more meaningful way.

We love the perspective Carl Rogers offered us with the phrase, “What is most personal is most universal.” We can certainly see the truth in the idea that the things we care most about as individuals are likely present in most if not all of us. As human beings, we share the need for safety, freedom, connection and more. So, the closer we get to what is most important on a personal level, the more likely we are to be hitting on a universal need.

That said, Rogers was a psychologist and author, not a CMO or Brand Director with the responsibility to grow brands quickly and profitably. Insights or brand people out there would be highly reticent to make wholesale changes to a brand’s positioning or messaging based on an individual’s personal story. So, they protect themselves against that by developing positioning and messaging strategies aimed at a universal audience. It’s not news to say a message that tries to appeal to everyone often ends up not being memorable or meaningful enough to anyone.

We’d offer up another way to think about this. Let’s develop a positioning and messaging strategy focused on individual stories crafted to appeal on a personal level. Then we can test how universal that appeal really is.

I’ve seen this work on a strategic level with brand narratives, specific brand vocabulary or iconic elements that tell a personal, human connection story about the brand. These can be fine-tuned, optimized and then tested pretty inexpensively on a quantitative basis.

We did this with a brand narrative and some iconography from an alcoholic beverage brand. Part of the assignment was to understand why this brand was growing in leaps and bounds in a specific demographic. Study participants wrote stories with a common essence of “playful danger” that represented an aspirational fantasy for this audience. The brand was speaking to them on a highly personal and meaningful level without ever fully realizing it. Once the brand leveraged this essence it experienced even greater growth.

Let’s develop strategies based on individual connection and then test how universal they are. It’s actually safer and has more potential than hoping a large group of people will find a broadly targeted story appealing.

The most compelling strategies have a through line that connects a human identity or state of mind to a brand or product characteristic. For instance, if your audience wants to see themselves as resilient look for product or brand characteristics that reflect that feeling. This allows you to create messages that are focused on your brand but are really speaking to an aspirational identity.

This is not a secret in the world of marketing but it’s surprising how often the simplicity and meaning of this process is left on the preverbal cutting room floor of strategy development.

I worked on a comprehensive study about beer in 2004. During this time beer was under attack from wine and spirits. One of the most compelling insights that came through in this study was an emerging expression of masculinity focused on being “interesting.” The client was excited about this but pretty set in the ways of how they wanted to portray the drinkers of their brands. A few months later a competitive brand introduced ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’ which became one of the greatest campaigns in the history of beer advertising. In the spirit of beer advertising, this campaign used humor to express the desire to be interesting.

There have been so many examples of this over the years:

Dove “Real Beauty”
Always “Like a Girl”
Apple “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC”
Pepsi “The Pepsi Generation”
BMW “The Ultimate Driving Machine”
Snickers “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”

These campaigns and many more have framed a brand identity around a human identity. There are a lot of great and successful campaigns out there that may not do this as overtly but some linking of identity to brand characteristics almost always pluses the campaign and links it more distinctly to the brand.

So, for me the moral of this story is to listen closely to the vocabulary of your audience to find that sense of aspirational identity that defines who they want to be or how they want to feel about themselves in certain situations. Listen for meaning, pay attention to specific words that get used a lot and look for similar qualities that your brand possesses.

Linking these identity characteristics to your brand characteristics means you’ll keep the human in your strategy and give your brand a better chance to mean more to your audience.

Find a way to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. This can be done in a number of ways – most of which are fun, engaging and highly enlightening for a brand or project team. It can be done through immersion programs that set up 1-to-1 direct contacts with someone in your audience.

If it’s done with honesty and a discipline to truly connect with your audience, the marketing speak will go away and a truer, more human voice will emerge.

That’s because you feel the insights instead of just understanding them on a cognitive level. In my experience, when insights are felt they stick with you and – as a result – are much more likely to be acted upon. And they’re generally much more effective because they’re more personal.

I’ve just taken a brand team to a rural part of the country to meet face-to-face with a lot of people they would never typically interact with. The team met with these people in groups and had individual conversations. The insights were flowing as the team actually felt what these people had to endure just to get by. All of the team’s preconceived notions were blown away. The specific, individual stories struck a deep chord. They were inspired and moved to help their audience. The vocabulary, tone and perspective will drive their brand strategy moving forward.

Immersion can give your team a greater sense of purpose because they see how their brand or offering can truly help people’s lives. Helping. Not selling. Just from putting yourself in your audience’s shoes in whatever way you can.