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FreshMeat #7 from Steve Portigal

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If you build it, will they articulate their user needs?
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Many years ago, some friends and I climbed a hill
overlooking the Pacific Ocean and talked about the future.
We talked about the Internet – this technology that was
going to likely change something, somehow. This could have
been a scene from a Douglas Coupland novel, but we were
more of a cynical bunch than the introspective protagonists
he favors. In sneering giggles we hypothesized various
ridiculous uses for the Internet.

“Oh, in the future, you won’t pay money to people, you’ll
just send it to them…through the INTERNET.”

“Yeah, yeah, and in the future, well, you’ll be able to
do ANYTHING. On the INTERNET. People who do research with
consumers will do their research on the INTERNET!”

Ahem. Does wisdom = attitude plus time, or is it simply
that there are no ideas so bad that someone won’t try
them? Because that skeptically envisioned future is here
now.

In fact, the largest consumer of market research, Procter
& Gamble, held a press conference back in May to announce
their plans to do even more research, much of it
ethnographic. The best article I saw on the topic was in
the WSJ (“P&G Plans to Visit People’s Homes To Record
(Almost) All Their Habits,” May 17, 2001), describing P&G’s
history with this type of research, and the scope of their
plans.

Almost as an epilogue, the article described P&G’s ultimate
goal, the creation of an online library of indexed,
searchable video that could be accessed by marketers
from the comfort of their own desks.

And now, from September’s Fast Company comes an article about the future of online customer research, suggesting that eventually, all qualitative and quantitative research is going to move online. Quicker, cheaper, and more convenient, apparently.

Really?

Who said that getting closer to your customer was
supposed to be EASY? It’s hard, it’s very hard. If it comes
easy, that can be very dangerous, giving an organization a
false sense of empathy without really requiring anyone to
see something new, something beyond the unspoken assumptions
about their customers. This is often delivered as video
ethnographies turned into rock music videos, a collage
of quick cuts of “everyday people” chopping broccoli,
layered deliciously with a stirring P. Diddy soundtrack.

But at least there you get some (albeit false) version of
empathy. How much empathy can be created when you only
know your customer as Jeff_The_Best, SuperDiva, or
sexygirl2041? Online focus groups as qualitative research?
Say goodbye to all the rich unspoken cues – the body
language, the nervous laughter, the false starts, the eye
contact.

So video is better, right, it’s richer? It’s got all that
cool visual stuff. You can see how customers chop broccoli.
But anyone who’s ever watched a video ethnography knows the
insights are not simply flopping around waiting to be
scooped up – it requires inference, extrapolation, and
synthesis, more than simply watching. These are special
skills. If it were that easy, people like me would simply be
video camera operators – shooting some video of the clients’
customers and handing the tapes back to them. Innovation in
a box.

The truth is that there are a variety of tools to get at a
variety of data, to solve a variety of problems. Early
adopters of new methodologies would do well to keep a suite
of tools at their disposal. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow,
(or was it the Indigo Girls?) “If it seems too good to be
true, it probably is.”

Tags: customer, ethnography, freshmeat, internet, online research, user needs

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FreshMeat #6 from Steve Portigal

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Serendipitous discovery of the customers marketing forgot
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Over the past few months I have been attending a local
photo club, held in a small room in the City Hall of a
small Bay Area town. The group gathers about once a week
to share techniques and images.

I am by far the youngest member of the club. I would
put the next youngest person at about 20 years older
than I, and I’d put the average age at 30 years older.

This has made the whole experience interesting, and
very useful. My fellow club members not only have photos
that are 50 years old, they have 50 years of expertise
in taking photos. In a recent meeting, the discussion of
archival materials took on an interesting slant as each
of several men in their seventies dismissed the whole
notion with great bemusement. “Archival materials? But
I’m already archival!” joked one.

The pacing of the meetings is very gentle, and at
first I found that jarring, but I’m learning to ride
with it. As a newcomer to the club, I’ve had the chance
to do a microethnography of the meetings, and I’m going to
share a few of my findings here.

The club provides value to its members by providing a
forum for sharing consumer information: what products
to use (say, for mounting a print), where to find them
for a good price, and so on. A typical exchange might run
something like this (all names have been changed):

Bob: …so now you take the edge cutter here…
Gene: Say, Bob, where do you find a cutter like that?
Bob: What, now?
Gene: I was asking about the cutter.
Marion: Gene is asking about your cutter, Bob.
Bob: Oh, the cutter.
Hugh: You can pick ‘em up at any photo store.
Bob: I ordered this one online.
Hugh: Or you can order ‘em online.
Bob: Or you can get one at that store down towards…
[pause]
Bob: Oh, I guess down near Belmont. What’s the place?
Gene: The place near the Safeway?
Bob: No, it’s by the store, there…
Marion: By the Safeway?
Bob: I say what, now?
Doug: By the Safeway?
Marion: By the Safeway?
Bob: …No, it’s down near Belmont.
Gene: Photo Paradise?
Marion: The Precious Frame?
Bob: No…down near Belmont, there, where Hap got his
press last month…
David: Oh, Linda’s place. The Darkened Room.
Bob: I say what, now?
David: THE DARKENED ROOM.
Marion: THE DARKENED ROOM.
Bob: That’s it. Down by Belmont, The Darkened Room.

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but not that much. But beyond my
gentle mocking is a great example of a social network
exchanging consumer information.

I am also fascinated by the level of computer knowledge
many of the individuals possess. There’s not a lot of web
surfing, or email usage. Club admin info is shared by
telephone, by snail mail, or by handing out photocopied
sheets at meetings. In fact, there is no way any of these
folks are going to be buying a digital camera. But the
computer is a tremendously important tool when it supports
and extends their existing photographic behaviors, namely
scanning and printing of images. Several club members have
invested a great deal of money in color printers, paper,
and ink. And remember, these are not the “grandmas” that
marketeers drool over, the one that will invest in anything
that might provide better connections to children and
grandchildren — these are photographers and artists. They
are wrestling with the technology to make it serve their
needs.

One woman came in and presented the results of a
benchmarking study she had done to get the truest black and
white image output. She built a matrix that varied the
paper (manufacturer, grade, matte/glossy), the printer,
the image source (slide, print, color, black & white), and
some software settings that affected the type of printing
being done (I think it was black ink or color ink). (Side
note: if you think the discussion about the store location
was crazy, you should have heard the discussion of how to
change the printing settings in Photoshop…) For each
cell in her matrix, she had a different printout, and we
could see the green shift, the blue shift, and so on. It
was quite excellent.

I’m not suggesting this is a huge market — my evidence is
purely anecdotal. It may not be cost-effective for the
manufacturers to better understand these customers, to
develop and market products especially for them. I don’t
know. But what is provocative is how easy it is for anyone
to stumble on a market that is clearly not well understood,
that absolutely flattens the beliefs about others that
marketers have foisted upon us, for better or worse.

Tags: adoption, elderly, freshmeat, photography, retirees, technology, users

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FreshMeat #5 from Steve Portigal

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FreshMeat has the power to charm and seduce. Surrender!
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The process of getting a good idea shelved can be tricky
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Have you seen that commercial for new “Special K Red
Berries?” It shows a woman shopping in the produce section
of a grocery store, walking from pear to papaya, picking up
the fruit gently, sniffing it reflectively, and placing it
in her bag. Beyond the pomegranates, she encounters the
new cereal product from Kellogg’s. Okay, we get the point.
The cereal is so fruity and so fresh that it belongs in
with the real fruit.

I guess this ad made me think of something lurking behind
the main story – the way that advertisers have started to
use the hidden parts of product development in their ads,
perhaps to better bring the viewer into the commercial.
For example, videogame companies, Rolaids, Levi’s, and
Kellogg’s have developed commercials that borrow from or
parody user testing and ethnography.

In this case, the development work being (inadvertently?)
spoofed is the placing of a product into retail. This is a
significant barrier to innovation. If Kellogg’s really
wanted to get their new cereal in the produce aisle, they
couldn’t possibly do so. Retailers tightly control what
type of products go in what aisle, as well as what brands
go where. Deals are struck, money is exchanged, products
hit the shelves. Promotions, discounts for consumers,
discounts for the retailer, special end-cap (the end of the
aisle) displays are all part of the negotiation. Even the
stocking and maintenance of the display (and special
hardware such as refrigeration units) may be part of the
deal.

This is neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Retailers
need to provide a coherent and consistent environment for
their shoppers. But today’s retail completely puts the
lie to the “better mousetrap” approach to product
development.

Many manufacturers regard this problem as hopeless, and
throw up their hands in frustration. Getting the product
in the store in a way that the store can sell it is most
certainly a problem. Manufacturers who have taken on this
challenge have often found themselves embraced by their
channel – the realization that their common goal is about
placing stuff in the customer’s hands can alleviate some
(not all!) of the contentiousness that may exist in those
relationships.

–

The NYT just did a story about consolidation in the
grocery industry and in the broker industry (firms that
work for food producers to handle much of the negotiation
around placement). The article is here/

Tags: freshmeat, grocery store, innovation, kellogg's, product development, retail, special k