Monday, August 20, 2007

What is the group really doing with the topic?

In Gestalt Psychotherapy, there are four common ways to avoid contact. First off - contact between human being is considerer a model of health in Gestalt - the more contact one makes, the healthier he or she is. Anyhow, the four ways are confluence, introjection, projection and retroflection. While they may seem like fancy words, they're really quite easy to understand. Anyhow, one of the reasons I like focus groups is that I get a chance to see which avoidance a group uses when I discuss a particular topic. The results are often quite revealing.

First, a brief synopsis of the four avoidances.

Confluence This is often a state of cluelessness and self-absorption. Teenagers are notorious for it. I'm reminded of the scene in Ferris Bueler's Day Off where Ben Stein is taking attendance among the class. The kids in it have absolutely no interest in him because they do not even recognize that he is there. That is the key symptom of confluence - in the group, people have no interest in you or the topic. There's an energy in the focus group room that gets sucked-out of it when a group is confluent, or there is a sense of phoniness. There can also be the exact opposite - too strong a sense of endearment to the particular topic, kind of like a puppy love if you will - which is also a teenage characteristic.

IntrojectionEver have a group that seems to passively and politely accept or reject what you are saying? It's the well-considered "Ummmmm.... I see what you're getting at" response. Or it's the "I don't know Brian - what you're saying doesn't sit well with me" response. What is actually happening is that the person is deciding to either accept or reject themselves and their beliefs, and not me or my topics.

ProjectionIn this type of neurotic behavior, group members actually feel something - it could be fear, anger, joy, sadness or pleasure, but they do not own it. Instead, they disown it in some sort of way - usually by not taking responsibility for their thoughts, feelings or actions. Instead, what they do is put these on someone or something else.

RetroflectionAt this point, the group is using its brains to sit on the fence and avoid contact. That is, it is wondering - should we risk exposing ourselves and our feelings? Should we take a chance and embrace what is being said?

So what I look for is how the group gravitates and behaves on a particular topic. While behaviours may start off disparate, within a few minutes of the topic, a skilled researcher can often tell how the group is behaving. From there, proper probes and client recommendations can be drawn.

Rather than give specific rules for specific behaviours, I will use examples. The fact is, there is no specific actions based on just observed behaviour, and besides, a lot depends on the nature of the product or communication being tested.

In my first example, my client was selling a service, but people did not want to acquire it because they were unsure about many of its attributes. Within the focus groups, this uncertainty took the form of projection - people were scared of this product, and people were even more scared about their lack of knowledge concerning it. My recommendation to the client was NOT to come up with solutions to each of the objections, or make the product more appealing. Since the product involved personal sales, I simply told the client to have its sales reps listen, emphasize and say "this is a difficult product to wrap your mind around." An indirect acknowledgment of the fear surrounding the product would make it more salable. Overloading with more information would have caused further fear, projection and distancing from the sales force.

The second example involved examining people's perceptions of safety and crime in their communities so that communications messages could be developed. What I noticed in the groups is that people were retroflecting their fears - they were spending a lot of time describing issues in the community, but stopped short of saying that they were personally scared for their lives, even though I knew they were. I began launching a few probes to see if I could get the participants to contact the deep fear inside of them, but they were having none of it. All of my probes brought-up further justifications and intellectualizations, which was a sign that what I was saying was really making them uncomfortable. The communications recommendation to the client was easy - do not mention words like "personal safety" or "harm". Instead focus a message on the fact that safety equals comfort and gentleness. Safety need not come with increased vigilance, with a lock-down of one's freedoms or with increased enforcement. Instead, increased safety can come organically from more community involvement and improved infrastructure measures. The goal of the communication was to provide safety alternatives that would not further fan flames of fear, but rather reduce the anxiety people would have about increased safety measures.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

We're A Hit Down Under!

I recently did a search on my company's name on Google, as was very surprised to find that two account executives from Markinor, a leading firm in South Africa had used my thoughts on projective techniques when submitting a paper to SAMRA, the South African Market Research Association.

To download the paper, click on this link, and note their distinction between "metaphoric and emotional" research responses.

Groups Vs. One-On-Ones

One of the things that has always given me pause for thought is whether to use groups or one-on-one interviews to conduct qualitative research. I've finally figured it out. Focus groups are generally good at producing middle-of-the-road results - say the kind of results you want when you want to reach an audience in a very general way - like with mass advertising. In this instance someone is likely looking for a lowest-common-denominator type of marketing. I will clarify that there are a lot of uses for this kind of approach. One-on-one interviews, however, are much more useful when testing something that is new, unique or takes time to be adopted.

Let's start with groups. Early on in my career, someone asked me "why do groups when you can just do a series of one-on-one interviews?" The answer always stuck with me - focus groups produce "group dynamics", and those are the key results of focus groups - it is not necessarily what people say that is important. We get to watch how an idea changes, where there is resistance to it, and where there is acceptance of it. We get to see how strongly people hold on to ideas, and how they react to having their ideas changed, rejected or challenged. A marketer can observe these dynamics and figure-out what arguments or factors will move people and change their opinions. This is why I love using groups to evaluate policy issues, which are very dynamic and flexible.

What prompted me to write this blog is a continual interest in why groups can still perform so badly at predicting certain product successes/failures, and why people always assume that "mediocre" products are something that have been "focus grouped." I finally came up with my solution. In observing group dynamics, I've come to realize that the group is always moving towards (or away from) something. Ten people take an idea, play with it and either change it or reach an opinion about it. When group processes like this happen, you can't help but get a watered-down version of the original.

In a focus group people are not themselves - it is sort of like "mob mentality" minus the violence - we would do and say things in a group that we would not do and say as individuals (hmmmm - maybe that's why groups are such bad predictors of behaviour). In a focus group, people ARE swayed by dominators - they are shy and they do advance their agendas. A moderator is there to observe, balance and interpret these phenomena. As such, they are not negatives - this is what happens in real life as people live in a dynamic world, and if what is being tested is something that needs to meet these criteria.

Let me give two positive examples of this. The first is a psychologist put jellybeans in a jar and asked individuals to guess the number inside. Each individual answer was significantly off, but when all answers were averaged together, it was surprising how close they came to the truth. The second one comes from Malcom Gladwell's book "Blink". In it he describes how market research and focus groups that are used to predict Top-40 hits were very tough on a singer named Kenna, yet the music industry claimed that his was the most innovative sound they had heard in a long time. Gladwell asks how can focus groups differ so much from experts? The answer is what I wrote above - focus groups are great when you want to appeal to the masses (and I know nothing more mass-oriented than Top 40 Radio), and that's what the research is geared towards.

It is worthwhile to note that what Gladwell fails to ask is whether it was actually a good thing that the groups were so negative towards the singer. If indeed standard groups produce "mass-oriented results", then what the groups are saying is that this person will not be a hit on Top-40. Maybe, however, there are other marketing avenues to get this singer across. Perhaps the masses do not hear what the record executives hear, and therefore Top-40 is too wide an audience. That to me is what the focus groups are saying. It is not a negative that the groups did not like the Kenna - in fact he even says "the problem is that this type of music requires a leap of faith." The fact is though, that Top-40 programers do not take leaps of faith.

So, this brings me to one-on-ones. In these settings, people make decisions independently, and the moderator has more time to probe deeply. Now what do I specifically mean by probing more deeply (focus groups often claim that they do "deep dives" into people's opinions, so how much more deep can a one-on-one interview get?) Well, Gladwell in "Blink" says that when people evaluate new and unique products, they don't have the words to describe them, or relevant frames of reference. As such, people need time to develop these - a moderator can take the time to develop this language with an individual participant more easily than in a group setting. A moderator is able to initiate more challenges and probes in a one-on-one interview.

Evaluating a new product or even a new signer in a group does not leave room for individual opinion. Moreover, in a group, people are not willing to take the "leap of faith" that Kenna recognizes is necessary to enjoy his music. A one-on-one will determine whether there is long-term success for a product. A group will help determine if there is mass, instant-term appeal. The issue for marketers is to determine which is more important to them. Unfortunately, in my opinion as a consumer, the latter seem to dominate.