By Dave Florin, Barry Callen, Mike Pratzel and Jeane Kropp
The content of this article is the importance of understanding the complexities of consumer motivation for purchase and usage of products. It emphasizes the necessity of the deeper understanding of the “whys”, whens” and “hows” of human behavior in order to knowing who they are, how they think and feel and what they really what. A competitive edge comes from truly understanding of target consumers.
This paper explores the questions of: “why are insights so important? How deep must you go? how do you dig for meaningful insight?”
There is a challenge for traditional consumer understanding. Traditional consumer researches we can say lot of things like the age, gender, ethnicity…But they can’t give us the answer of whys. Until recently it was possible to predict which soap a person who is 42 years old would buy. And it would be the same soap every time, but now there are endless numbers of body washes, soaps etc…Can age really predict soap purchase?
There are four basic rules for understanding target consumers:
1) Context matter: Is the consumer just buying a product or seeking advice in solving problem? Maybe a “we help you make the right decision” should be the brand positioning or, consumer may prefer retailer with trustworthy, informed, approachable salespeople. It is important to see the real need of the consumer.
2) Consumers are not self-aware: Consumers are often cannot explain their purchasing decision. We have to ask real questions even they are ridiculous things, like “why would hiking boots have been wrong at the fancy dance? It can be anything to understand what was really going on under the surface.
3) Consideration sets rather than competitive sets: Competitive set is usually industry –defined like luxury car category. But consideration set is wider that comp set. For consumers, choices are much wider.
4) Usage not purchase: the essential understands when and why products are used. It provides opportunities to solve problems for consumers so it can provide valuable direction for communications, promotion and development. When consumer thinks that his needs are understood, he will believe that the brand or product is relevant to his life.
There are some key points...
-The research must explore emotional and rational. A good exercise is to start with our self.
-Ask consumers about real-life recent situations: Devil is in the details. We have to get very detailed in questioning and compare situation to situation. For example we can start the discussion with: when did you realize you were thinking about a new
-Make it bout emotion: Ask feelings the customer had in the moment and what feeling she was looking for in the new product or brand.
-Think consideration sets and context versus competition and categories: Understand consumer’s consideration sets, understand what is going on in the targets day life and life overall.
-Keep in mind that no behavior is behavior too: No usage too is a part of a consideration set. We can ask” tell me about the most recent time you thought about x but did not use it...”
Case of mom’s shoes…
Famous Footwear, a national chain of family shoe store made in interesting challenge. Their positioning, “brand name shoes for less” became so successful that competitors had copied it. The target was mom: how mom connects with shoes?
Insight 1: there are two kinds of shopping. Get in and out quickly and look around & enjoy
Insight 2: Do not always remind her that she is always stylish
Insight 3: Women with families don’t have perfect body like models.
Insight 4: She believes herself to be pretty fashionable, but her actual recent purchase is always the same (black)
Insight 5: she is thrilled when she finds just the right shoe that fits her lifestyle.
These insights provided the new repositioning: Balanced mom’s needs for both herself and her family and matches Mom’s fashion fantasy down to the smallest visual cues. This new focus changes everything in the company. Store design, point of sale signage, merchandise selection and communications, they are all changed. The results were a steady increase in both awareness and sales.
As we see, with insight comes the potential for vastly improved profits. In fact, the trick is a true understanding of consumers. Consumers do not define their needs by business competitive parameters. The same person will make different purchasing decisions in different context without realize what they are doing… For deal with it, there is both a simple and complex question: “Why do people make the choices they do?"
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