Recently, I attended a webinar by a professor at my business school alma mater, Kevin Lane Keller, who literally wrote the book on branding. Professor Keller has probably forgotten more about this topic than most of us will ever know. He spoke about the imperative of tending to your brand in a time of crisis. Of the factors he cited that are crucial to this task, the first was empathy.

I share this point of view. One of the key things qualitative researchers do is help clients stand in the shoes of stakeholders – their users, their consumers, their customers. And that’s empathy: sharing and experiencing the feelings and perceptions of others. This is a challenge under the best of circumstances, but in a time when we must avoid physical proximity, it’s even more difficult.

Empathy is particularly crucial to those running brands. Effective brand marketing is predicated upon seeing a brand’s value proposition from the point of view of those on the receiving end of that proposition, so finding ways to foster empathy is required to build and maintain a strong brand. Pre-COVID there were many effective ways to do this. While approaches centered on online tools and social media were useful, I always found face-to-face methodologies to provide the most value. Having clients observe in-person focus groups or interviews is a highly effective way to get the end user’s perspective. Conducting research in the locations where experiences happen, decisions are made and perceptions formed, such as retail locations, homes, offices, etc., is another. But those approaches aren’t so easily available to us now, while the need for empathy has become only greater.

So, what to do? I’ll confess to not having a perfect solution to this dilemma. However, there are a few things that I’ve done recently that have served as pretty good workarounds:

• I’ve had clients be active participants in webcam focus groups. The consumer participants knew exactly who the client participants were, so everything was fully transparent (for one study we introduced the clients at the beginning as employees of a company in the category, and then revealed the name of the company at the end of the group). This allowed direct conversation between client and end user. But, more importantly, it allowed them to divide into breakout groups to collaborate on creative exercises, such as storytelling, collaging, image sorts and metaphor exploration. Working together in this fashion created an opportunity to develop a high level of mutual understanding.

• I’ve conducted webcam and telephone interviews with a single consumer in which a client took the lead during part or most of the conversation. This required me to provide some training to the client beforehand, and I also stepped in here and there during the conversation to probe, follow up or clarify a point. Allowing the client to conduct a large part of the interview engendered a level of connection between client and consumer that would have been unavailable simply by observing a webcam interview or listening in on a phone conversation.

Hopefully my experience with these techniques will inspire others to try similar approaches.  Please let me know how you’re approaching the challenge of fostering empathy these days.  I’d love to know.

I’ve been thinking recently about my world since March 21, the day Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey told us to stay home. Perhaps the August heat has me in a reflective mood.

Along with so many of my qualitative colleagues, I’ve had to adjust and reinvent. These 4+ months have been a time like no other. All planned business and recreational travel got cancelled. We’ve lost some people we loved. Our adult daughter moved home (temporarily, she keeps reminding us) and we’ve only recently been able to visit our adult son. But, our lives have been altered profoundly in other ways as well.

Business for me has been good; I feel fortunate for that. Healthcare, which was always a big part of my practice, has been my dominant source of work. And, while I’d regularly conducted research online over the past decade, it’s now 100% of what I do. I haven’t yet talked with clients about resuming face-to-face research, but I imagine those conversations will come in due course.

Some other things worthy of note:   

Life is just slower. I’ve been forced to relax more, something I’ve never been particularly good at. My dentist reports that I’m grinding my teeth less, so there’s that. 

We’ve created grilled summer analogs of winter comfort foods. Let me know if you’d like to learn how to make Summer Lasagna, Summer Chicken Parmigiana, or Summer Moussaka.

We’ve also invented some lovely new cocktails, and are happy to share the recipes for Liquid Brunch and the Thai One On.

Because we can’t hang out in coffee shops – a favorite Rich family activity – I’ve finally learned to make decent coffee. As a result, I seem to be drinking a lot more of that glorious beverage.

Most importantly, I still adore my wife, and she still (for the most part) tolerates me.

So, how has your life changed? I’d love to hear about what’s different for you.  Send me an email  with some examples, and I might include them in an upcoming post.  And if you’d like those summer recipes, just click the ‘Download’ button below for a PDF file of our culinary creations.

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

When I conduct research, I often like to have conversations with participants about hopes and fears. Lately, we’re talking a lot more about fears than hopes.

Risk— and its mitigation— has always been at the heart of marketing. Think about why marketers issue coupons or take temporary price reductions. It’s partly to reduce the perceived risk of trying a product or service. Why do brands put testimonials in their consumer communications? Or work so hard to get good online reviews? Because this information reduces perceived risk. The list goes on and on. Nearly every marketing tactic is aimed, at least in part, at risk. Think about, on the most fundamental level, what a brand actually is. I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that a brand is a promise—a reason to believe that the user or consumer experience will be a positive one. So, the very process of establishing and maintaining a brand is a perceived risk reduction strategy.

And that’s why risk has always been one of the fundamental things we study in market research. So much of the research I’ve done over the course of my career has been about either understanding risk, or about evaluating the effectiveness of marketing strategies and tactics at addressing specific risks.

This is a particularly important issue now; we’re all living in a world fraught with risk. I have friends and colleagues who have felt unable to leave their homes since March because they see the dangers as being too great. As a researcher, I’ve interviewed a lot people who suffer from chronic diseases over the past few months. The Pandemic-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named has dramatically altered their relationship to their health conditions. Because they see their condition as being a risk factor if they become infected with you-know-what, they report having become more compliant with respect to taking medications, and state that they are being more diligent at adopting a healthier lifestyle.

When it comes to the actual practice of research, risk has become a particularly resonant issue. Like my colleagues and clients, I’m eager to get back to conducting in-person qualitative. But it’s hard to know when the benefits of doing so will outweigh the dangers. And, regardless of how my clients and I feel, will research respondents be willing to participate face to face?

Because we are more conscious of risk in our personal and professional lives, it’s valuable to be able to think and talk about risk in a clear, organized and detailed manner. Which means that it’s helpful to have some frameworks to think about risk. One of the most useful tools I employ when trying to understand risk is my Perceived Risk Model, which I developed several years ago. It’s a good way to understand specifically how individuals see the risks they face. The model breaks perceived risk down into six specific types: physical, resource/asset, functional, psychological/self-image, emotional and social.

I’ve found that these perceived risk types are characterized by questions people ask themselves when evaluating risk. By watching out for questions like these when talking with research participants, we can get a sense as to the specifics of how they perceive risk.

Physical — “Could this be harmful? Could it injure me or make me ill? Could it endanger others?”

Resource/Asset — “Do I have time for this? What else could I do with the time or money this will require? Can I afford this? What could be the financial effects of an adverse outcome?”

Functional — “Will this perform as expected and required? Will it do what I need it to do? What are the chances of it failing to function as needed? What are the possible ramifications if it doesn’t perform well?”

Psychological/Self Image —“Am I doing the right thing? What does this say about me as a person? Will this decision affect how I view myself?”

Emotional — “Could this cause sadness or disappointment? Do I have the emotional reserves to handle this if it works out badly?”

Social — “How will this affect how others see me? What will this do to my standing within the groups and organizations with which I am associated?”

Here’s an example of how examining risk can lead to important marketing insights. A few years ago I was conducting research on a dietary supplement for individuals with a rare metabolic condition. Patients had, for years, resisted using the supplement, despite strong evidence that it would noticeably improve their health. The client had long believed that the primary concerns for users were linked to functional risk and resource risk, and so they had built their communications to patients and the registered dietitians who treated them around mitigating these risks. They provided data that the product would positively affect patient health, and was well worth the high cost because it could help patients avoid even more costly problems associated with the condition. However, these tactics were largely ineffective. Conversation with patients and dietitians about perceived risks revealed that the single biggest barrier to usage was actually social risk. It turned out that diet supplementation was perceived by influencers within the condition community as being either ‘unnatural’ or a sign of weakness. Once the client started orienting brand communication around this perceived risk, the business began trending upward.

So, once it becomes clear that risk is playing an important role in consumer decision making or behavior, use this Perceived Risk Model to understand that risk on a more granular level. This is just one analytical tool for understanding risk. I have quite a few more risk tools in my toolbag, and I’ll be devoting a number of future newsletters to them, so stay tuned.