Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

NINA = No Insights No Advantage

 
Daryl Travis
CEO Brandtrust

Last night I attended a MENG event where Daryl Travis, CEO of Brandtrust and Author of Emotional Branding, presented on “The Secret Lives of Consumer Insights - Where They Live, How to Find Them!”. The presentation was excellent.

Like Anderson Analytics, Brandtrust has been working on emotive research, and we both seem to be of the mind that today is a very interesting time for market researchers. Daryl believes in NINA (No Insights No Advantage), very similar to Anderson Analytics “Gain the Information Advantage”. Brandtrust does a lot of qualitative work but has also used “narrative inquiry” within quantitative survey instruments to get at subconscious thoughts/emotion. This is apparently very similar to the TAT/PSE (Thematic Aptitude Tests aka. Picture Story Exercise) and other probing/projective question types like Word stems that Anderson Analytics has been using together with PCA/Text Analytical (Psychological Content Analysis) software.

I also agree with Daryl that it’s not enough to get the voice of the customer, you have to get the mind of the customer. The problem with traditional survey questions is that they ‘prime’ respondents to give the same responses. An excellent example given of this was a survey test where 100 women were given 3-5 packages of pantyhose and asked to “Q. Please describe the differences between these panty hose and tell us which you prefer?”. And that is exactly what they did too, even though all three were IDENTICAL! Only one person didn’t rank the three, a psychology student who noticed something was off.

Next time you design a long boring survey stop and think for a moment. Ask yourself, how can I get some real insights, and understand the 95% of thought that is subconscious?

Tom