A Marketer’s Guide to Research Methods for Deeper Insight

When a deeper consumer insight is required than traditional focus groups can deliver, two research tools that come into play are ethnographic research and co-creation. In this blog, we look at how these techniques can be used to help marketers understand their customers better.

1. Ethnographic Research

The key to designing innovative products and communications campaigns is understanding how consumers behave when it comes to your product or your category. Uncovering how consumers behave is however not as straight forward as it is may seem. Through ethnography, we can test your beliefs and hypotheses with a methodology that allows us to delve into your consumers’ lives. This will enable you to make both strategic and tactical decisions, based on real life data.

Asking consumers directly may be ineffective

Asking consumers to tell us directly how they behave can often prove to be ineffective. People may not always be willing to share what they did, or even recall what they did. And often, even if they are willing to, they may not remember perfectly or even inflate certain behaviours or avoid telling us about others to fit into the norms of society. Sometimes the behaviours that researchers are interested in studying may even be hard for the respondent to report. For instance, acknowledging the number of drinks people have in a day or the number of cans of soft drink they consume could be an acknowledgement of a problem.

Some behaviours may be so ingrained that the respondents themselves fail to take note or do it on autopilot. Shopping behaviours are a perfect example of this.

Ethnography brings to the surface behaviours and biases

Ethnography helps circumvent the failings of relying on reported behaviour, allowing the researcher to get to the crux of what people do. Ethnography involves observing firsthand how people behave within their natural environment where they are comfortable, and those behaviours are not contrived. In doing so, it helps bring to surface behaviours or biases consumers themselves may not realise or admit. Biases we try to avoid include self-serving bias, confirmation bias and optimisation bias. Consumers often lack self-awareness of these biases in self-reporting.

An ethnographic approach can be applied wherever an understanding of consumer behaviour is required. This could include:

• Understanding how consumers use a product.
• How they shop an aisle.
• How much they consume.
• How they interact with technology.
• Any behaviours where observation is possible.

Ethnographic research can help you decide how your product should be packaged by observing how people shop, where they use them, or even how people stack their pantries. It can help with designing new products by exploring how consumers use them and the features or functionality they rely upon. Ethnography can also be used when researching sensitive topics where consumers are likely to provide a response they think is socially acceptable. For example, when studying how and when people consume unhealthy foods.

Ethnographic research tools

At Ruby Cha Cha, we have a range of flexible tools to conduct ethnographic research that can be tailored to each client’s unique requirements. These may include:

1. In home sessions.  We sometimes spend hours or days in home observing consumers as they cook, clean, eat and watch TV.  We utilize tools such as video, and social media to help consumers see them when they aren’t there.  Going in home provides context, values and lifestyle observation that is missing from many research methods and may be important to incorporate into a larger study such as a brand audit or exploratory study. The key issues with this method is that it is time consuming and costly. That’s why we now rely more on digital communities.
2. Conducting accompanied shop-alongs. We go on shopping mission with respondents to observe what they are doing instore, how they shop a category, how they interact with products and the shelves, and how they choose one product over another.
3. Using online communities or digital diaries. When it’s important to observe behaviour over time we use online communities or digital diaries, where we get respondents to video themselves and make entries each time they do something – for example, eat fast food or drink spirits. The benefit of using technology to conduct ethnographic research means that we can reach participants wherever they may be, at any point in the day, and can ask them to report on what they are doing or get them to participate in tasks where they inflate, reduce, or even stop consuming a product – and observe how they react.

2. Immersion

Immersing your team into your consumers lives is a very popular trend.  Lots of businesses are recruiting consumers from their panels and sending staff (from CEOs to HR and Finance along with marketing) to meet and understand the true lives of their consumer franchise.

Whilst there is great benefit in having this for your business, they are time intensive to set up and run and there are traps in sending out just anyone into your prized customer’s homes when they are not adequately briefed and trained in the finer methods of interviewing and listening skills and most importantly body language and understanding that people live differently to marketers.  The point of the exercise!

Ruby can help business set up an immersion process for your business.  We have worked with many clients helping recruit participants, train staff in interviewing techniques and pitfalls, create immersion reporting tools, film and provide video footage.  Most importantly we can help you turn interviews and data into useable insight in your business, with footage to take to trade partners or into training, sales or ideation workshops.

3. Co-creation

Co Creating is a powerful tool to identify key factors which impact customer experience, and to identify key opportunities for new product development (NPD). It is a crucial process in creating shared value i.e. customer centric value, and it is particularly helpful with brand development, brand positioning and ongoing brand management.

It can be conducted at any stage; during the development process, from inception and ideation through to the last stages of development.

Ruby Co-Creation sessions provide the perfect hybrid solution for many client needs. Ruby Co-Creation has a creative approach, provides a degree of challenge and idea generation, as well as recycling and reviewing existing ideas, in a holistic manner. As the session progresses ideas and concepts are built and layered upon, allowing us to refine them in a dynamic and fluid way.

The process relies on the right team of ‘experts’ being recruited – client stakeholders, creative consumers, but also ‘wild cards’ who could be people from R&D or outside the company, such as industry experts, or advertising or design agencies. These sessions work best when armed with strong strategic or creative minds, influencers and future oriented types.

We can also use Co-Create with consumers in consumer only sessions, using our proprietary tools such as Brand Magic.   See the separate blog on Brand Magic for more detail on this method.

Co Creation as a method works in the following way:

1. Co Creation is best achieved by BUILDING on existing ideas, rather than creating from scratch, however it can be used both ways.
2. It is critical to have great stimulus materials like concept boards or provocation statements with both text and imagery, and any other visual tools which can help unlock thinking, bust myths and get people building, not creating from scratch. If there is good foundation research available, this can be very useful. If not, it should be created.
3. Participants are mixed into cross-functional teams. Seated at the different tables, each table showing a different ‘territory’ or start-point. Ideation is driven by clever use of stimulus and thinking pathways.
4. The big point of difference for these sessions is that, once each team has exhausted their ideas, they set challenges for the next team to solve and optimise, so that the process continues to build as team’s progress through the session from one territory to the next.

The output from the process is a series of optimised and ranked ideas that can then be assessed in terms of feasibility and size of opportunity within the business. Alternatively, it may result in clear tension platforms that need resolution or development of best practice case studies and implications for the business.

The ultimate goal is to ensure we have the best of collective thinking (stakeholder, customer, consumer) on your pipeline of ideas and messaging to pressure test, optimise and build launch ready marketing opportunities for your business.

Want to know more about the research tools we can offer your business? Get in touch with our team of market research experts here.