Three months ago, a potential client came to me with a concern that many established brands share. They needed to plan their marketing mix for the coming year and felt they did not have a clear understanding of their ideal customers and brand positioning. There was some frustration as an extensive customer study had already been done earlier in the year. The insights shared from that study did not help the client team understand what their customers really wanted, or how their positioning and products resonated in customers’ daily lives.
The client was a B2C home decor brand in India, one of the oldest in the category and well regarded for its product quality and engineering expertise. But the market today has changed with very active new entrants with deep pockets, many boutique brands emerging, and a large informal sector providing range and value for money. The brand had real strengths but no clear story to cut through with.
The client commissioned us to do another study which we have now completed. The client told me last week, “We are so much clearer now on what is to be done – our target customer segment, the product we want to lead with and our messaging. Even the agencies we are briefing are remarking on how much clearer we are compared to three months ago!”
Why market research often fails to address strategic questions?
The culprit is what I have written about earlier too (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-wasting-time-market-research-monika-gera-louwc) – factory research model that dominates today’s market research practices. Most research projects are undermined by
- Poor design stemming from inadequate understanding of business objectives: Research teams rush into fieldwork without spending sufficient time understanding what strategic questions actually need answering.
- Professional respondents delivering misleading insights: Recruitment agencies, find it very challenging to get qualified participants for the study and rely on professional respondents who participate in multiple studies. These individuals have developed their own understanding of what makes a ‘good’ respondent, skewing the authenticity of insights.
- Insufficient expertise in the field: The shortage of seasoned researchers conducting fieldwork means insights remain superficial rather than reaching the strategic depth that can drive business decisions.
Why our research delivered value?
What was the difference in our approach that it could provide clear strategic guidelines for the brand? We do what could be called the good old fashioned honest research. The tools evolve – from handwritten notes, to spreadsheets, to excel macros to AI tools – but the fundamentals of human understanding and insight endure.
Our research was designed to deliver three strategic outputs. First, who is the core customer. Second, what do they seek from the category, and how is that evolving rapidly due to the many socio-cultural changes reshaping how people think about their homes and living spaces. Third, where is the brand differentiated, both currently and potentially. Bringing all three together is what produced the clarity the client was looking for.
1. Understanding the business challenge first
We invested significant time upfront understanding the client’s business objectives and specific questions. Through discussions with the leadership team, we understood that while the brand had many strengths – product range and quality, distribution and reach – they were struggling with their brand story. The market was noisy and competitive, and they didn’t know what communication or products could cut through to the customer and build preference for their brand.
These business challenges indicated that we needed to help our clients gain a deep understanding of customer segments and their relationship to both the category and existing brands. To arrive at potential differentiators for the brand in a crowded market, we needed deep fundamental truths about how customers think, feel, and make decisions in this category.
So, we designed the research to be exploratory, immersive, and ethnographic. We would spend time in customers’ homes, observing their lives, asking open-ended questions, and following tangents that revealed deep insights about what the customers knew, felt, wanted and needed from the category.
2. Making strategic research immersive and iterative
Typical research model today is rigid. Clients and agencies agree on project objectives and commercials based on the number of customer interactions to be completed. This creates a dangerous incentive as agencies focus on completing numbers rather than finding honest strategic solutions. For strategic research, the iterative nature of research is critical. Let me share two examples from this project.
Iterating on design:
The research was initially designed as a mix of depth interviews and focus groups (the client wanted focus groups as part of the study). Whilst focus groups can generate rich discussions, they’re particularly vulnerable to the professional respondent problem I mentioned earlier.
After the initial sessions we realized professional respondents were performing their role of a ‘good participant’, and precious time was being spent navigating around their posturing rather than uncovering authentic insights. At the same time we were discovering deep honest insights from the in-depth interviews conducted in customers’ homes.
We recommended that we discontinue the focus groups and increase the number of at home depth interviews. This decision improved the authenticity of insights and allowed us to observe customers in their homes. This proved crucial to understanding them and their relationship to the category.
A depth interview soon illustrated the value of this approach. A customer spoke passionately about a brand she had great expectations from, but that had failed her. When we asked her to show us the product, it turned out to be from a completely different brand. This research moment highlighted both what customers sought from the category and the lack of differentiation between brands in customers’ minds. This disconnect could only be understood in an immersive home visit setting.
Iterating on the research questions:
Questions determine answers. Given the exploratory nature of the study, we followed an open conversational approach that allowed for spontaneous discussions and tangents. But the research still needed to answer strategic questions, so the discussion guide had to be carefully designed to prevent conversations from becoming completely unfocused.
Midway through the research we paused to review emerging patterns. This review helped us refine the discussion guide. We added specific probes and sharpened the guide to get richer, more nuanced insights for positioning and product innovation ideas.
3. Building alignment as the research unfolded
Customer insights, no matter how briliant, only create value if the organisation can act on them. One of the reasons research so often fails to drive decisions is that insights are not easily understood or owned by people who need to act on them.
Our process is designed to close that gap between the customer and client world. The client team members were part of our research process throughout. They attended in-depth interviews and home visits, and sat in on the focus group discussions. The research team and the client together developed a shared understanding of the customer world.
Beyond fieldwork, we were continuously soliciting inputs from different stakeholders on both the research enquiry and brand direction. This meant the research was grounded in real business objectives and challenges. This process ensured that different internal stakeholders were continuously getting aligned on a common understanding of the customer world, brand challenges and opportunities. This made the insights we shared at the end easy to understand, challenge, assimilate and act upon.
4. Analysing data with rigour and inspiration
Multiple AI tools exist today to spot patterns in qualitative data, and we used several of them. But I realized (admittedly with some surprise) that the most nuanced and relevant insights still came from plain human brainstorming.
Our approach was deliberately hybrid. The team of four highly seasoned researchers worked on all aspects of the project – research design, fieldwork, analysis, and insight framing. We went through data from every interview minutely and met for multiple brainstorming sessions to discuss patterns and nuances we’d observed.
Once we (humans) identified certain patterns, we returned to AI tools to examine the data and validate emerging insights. The AI provided stimulus for different ways to think about what we were seeing. Then we came back to human brainstorming to refine insights with the AI inputs.
It was a creative, messy, iterative process with each brainstorming session building on another. Together, we struck gold with a positioning that finally gave the brand a clear, distinctive, and ownable story.
In Conclusion: There is no short cut to deep strategic insights
This process resembles what people call intuition. An intuitive insight doesn’t arrive mysteriously out of the blue. It’s based on deep thinking, learning, and listening over an extended period. As knowledge seeps into us through immersion, an insight may occur. But it’s based on hard work that we put in before arriving at it.
It’s a fallacy to think AI technology will simply turn out a breakthrough insight for us. High quality humans are still needed to provide the fundamental body of qualitative data and to engage with AI to extract relevant, strategic, insights. Humans bring judgment, context, and the ability to recognise what matters. AI tools can enhance the work of humans by providing a variety of stimulus to our thinking.
The brands that will win are those willing to invest in this kind of deep, honest, iterative research. Honest and deep human insight (enriched by technology) remains the only way to really know your customer and your brand’s differentiation in an increasingly noisy world.