We’ve been facing tradeoffs since the Garden of Eden, and they shape all of our decisions.

There are a lot of good frameworks for thinking about consumer decision-making, but Tradeoff Analysis is one of my favorites. Often, much of the assessment individuals engage in when evaluating alternatives involves weighing what they are giving up against what they’re getting in return. Utility, a term from the field of economics, refers to the ability of something to satisfy needs and wants. Realizing this, and using my Utility Tradeoff Model, provides valuable opportunities for smartly designing, conducting and analyzing qualitative research.

Why are tradeoffs so important? Consider General Mills during the early 1950s. They had introduced Betty Crocker cake mixes in 1947. Sales, originally brisk, plateaued a few years later. This made little sense given the selling proposition – pay a small premium over the cost of the component ingredients in exchange for convenience. That offering seemed like a winner in a postwar America focused on time- and labor-saving innovations. After conducting focus groups, the company realized that what they thought was a simple tradeoff was actually more complex. It became clear that the product was actually TOO easy to use; all that was required was a box of mix, some water, and a few common kitchen implements.  But, because it asked so little of a 1950s American housewife, it made her feel that she wasn’t giving enough of herself in preparing the cake. The solution: eliminate the powdered egg in the mix and have the user add her own fresh ones. Problem solved! The lesson learned: because the product was too easy, the user wasn’t just paying an economic price, she was also paying a price in self-esteem, and that became too much to pay in exchange for convenience.

Why recount this case? It’s about tradeoffs! Here was a situation in which the company understood what their consumer was getting, but didn’t fully understand what she was giving up. And that’s why tradeoff analysis is such a useful tool. It provides a framework for looking at both sides of the value proposition– the benefits AND the costs—so we can obtain a full understanding of how a product or service creates utility.

We all seek to maximize utility. But, contrary to the pronouncements of classical economists, there is more to utility than money and other quantifiable factors. Utility is complicated, and squishy and messy. That’s a lot of what the field of behavioral economics is about – providing a more nuanced and complete definition of utility – and the Utility Tradeoff Model has some of its roots in that field

I was originally exposed to behavioral economics in the 1990s by Vic McGee, a former business school professor of mine. Vic had sent me some academic journal articles on the topic by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. My takeaway from these papers was that utility is much more complicated than I’d originally been taught, that money is only one building block of utility, and that decision making is not always as neat and rational as we’d like to think. So, in the combination of my going-in knowledge of consumer tradeoffs and what I was learning from Kahneman and Tversky, the Utility Tradeoff Model was born.

The Utility Tradeoff Model is based upon the premise that consumers express utility in terms of five currencies, with each decision carrying both gains and losses. Those currencies are:

• Time

• Energy

• Money

• Performance

• Self-esteem

So, the idea is that consumer decision-making is essentially an exercise in unconscious mental algebra, with the decision maker figuring out which of the five factors go on which side of the equal sign to make the equation balance.

In future newsletters I’ll go into detail on these currencies, as they all benefit from a bit of unpacking. All have multiple dimensions, some of which – in a given situation – contribute to utility, and some of which might detract.  Some dimensions are pretty straightforward – even quantifiable—while others are much more subjective.  I’ll also provide a detailed, specific blueprint for how to use this tool.

Tradeoffs are the stuff of life. In a world of finite resources, we’re always giving something up for what we get. Just as Eve was confronted with the choice of paradise or wisdom, we are constantly reminded that we usually can’t have it all. This realization shapes individuals’ perceptions and decisions, so we need to be aware of it when designing and executing research.

“Ah, look at all the lonely people.” These days loneliness is everywhere, and that has important implications for qualitative research.

Not long ago I wrote a post on scarcity, and what a scarcity mindset does to perceptions and decision making. Often, when we think about scarce resources, we tend to restrict our thinking to things like time and money. But there are a lot of resources for which scarcity can affect our lives, and a particularly resonant one right now is social scarcity—loneliness.

We’re all spending a lot more time at home these days, and having far less in-person interaction with friends, family and colleagues than we used to. Loneliness has been a growing problem around the world for a number of years, but it has become particularly acute in recent months. Recent studies – which are cited at the end of this blog post – have shown a significant uptick in feelings of loneliness since the onset of social distancing.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is not something we should ignore.  Socialization correlates closely to life expectancy—it’s one of the reasons women outlive men in most of the world.  It’s also has clear connections to overall health, mental health, and to factors specifically linked to immunity and recovery from disease. One statistic I’ve seen is that chronic loneliness is as debilitating as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Yikes.

So, clearly, loneliness is something of which we need to be aware for our own well-being.  But it’s also particularly important to keep loneliness in mind right now when conducting qualitative research. I, and many of my fellow qualitative researchers, have noticed recently that our online research respondents are pretty open about feeling lonely—in fact, while it used to be that people felt that talking about their loneliness was an admission of failure, as they were admitting to not having a social network to support them, COVID has changed all that; loneliness has become socially acceptable.

This increase in loneliness seems to be leading research participants to have more need than usual to bond with researchers and their fellow participants. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it can lead to participants who are more engaged, and often quite grateful to be participating in the research. One reason people are participating in your research is simply to connect with others. It’s important to give them an outlet for this desire— fighting it is only going to get everybody frustrated. However, this also needs to be managed, as it is possible for lonely participants’ need to connect to distract you from your research objectives.

That being the case, here are a few approaches that I have been employing recently during online focus groups and interviews to address loneliness.

Say ‘hi!’ Before the group starts, take the opportunity to say hello to the people in the virtual waiting room. You can give them a bit of information about how the research is going to proceed, show them the cool features of the online research platform (markup tools are particularly fun to play with), and get to know them a bit. You can even introduce them to the tech support people and maybe even the client, if appropriate. This is time well spent.

Create community. As a general rule, the more you can create a sense of fellowship in the course of conducting research, the better your research is going to be. When you’re dealing with pervasive loneliness, this becomes even more important. For an opening exercise, get people to share details about their lives, and then to look for similarities.  When people find commonalities with others, they feel more connected and less alone. I like to ask somebody to start the introductions by sharing two or three things about themselves. They can be anything—things they like to do, things that make them unique, things that they’re passionate about, etc. Then, ask the next person to share three things, with at least one that relates to at least one thing the previous person said. There you go—ready made connections. Bear in mind that this is a bit more time consuming that a typical intro exercise, but is worth the extra time.

Provide positive feedback. I’ve noticed recently that some participants, because they’re consciously aware of how lonely they feel, worry that they won’t do a good job in the group or interview. So, I make sure participants know they’re doing great. I compliment them on being particularly thoughtful, on being especially candid, on disagreeing with somebody agreeably, on answering a complicated question very artfully, etc.  This is always a good research practice, but it’s particularly valuable now. Remember that words matter. The things you say to the participants in your group have a profound effect on how they feel, and how they participate in your research.

Have some chitchat. Don’t underestimate the value of a little bit of small talk, and build in some time for it. For the most recent online focus group studies I’ve done, although the planned discussion was 90 minutes, I scheduled a two-hour group (and paid the participants accordingly). Once the group started, I let the participants know that we weren’t quite ready to start, so we’d begin in about fifteen minutes, but that we would still end at the scheduled time. So, we had a free fifteen minutes just to chat about anything we wanted. These have been fun discussions: people have talked about what they’re watching on Netflix these days or a new recipe they created, have shared pictures of their kids and pets, and have used the screensharing feature to share fun YouTube videos. By the time we started the group, everybody was in a good frame of mind and we had a great discussion.

The guiding principle here is to be kind, compassionate and empathetic. Loneliness is a very human feeling. It needn’t compromise your research if you have a plan to deal with it.

Note: Below are links to some other good resources about loneliness.

https://socialself.com/loneliness-corona/

https://www.valuepenguin.com/coronavirus-loneliness-survey?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=f3e6bb82c2-MR_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-f3e6bb82c2-152047705

https://www.hrsa.gov/enews/past-issues/2019/january-17/loneliness-epidemic