The Nursery Blog

Stanley Milgram and Focus Groups

Interesting Milgram/Asch experiments on my cycle commute across London: I don’t wear a helmet but I always stop at red lights. (It makes the whole process safer, more chilled and even gives some interval training benefits.) Most cyclists carry on through the red light (and I have to overtake the slow ones again but hey ho.) If two of us stop most others will still carry on, perhaps with a bit of a wobbly hesitation, but if a third cyclist stops then most others seem to stop. I’ve almost never seen anyone go through a red light if four of us have stopped.

People use Milgram to argue against group discussions: ‘Two or three influential people can swing a group. ’Certainly Milgram found that two stooges could nearly always sway a third participant to administer near lethal electric shocks to a subject (another stooge) who kept failing in a task.

In western society we assume that we are unique individuals. Marketing has strongly bought into the idea that to understand your customer you have to dig deeper into their individual psyche. This leads to an understandable belief that people should be interviewed individually to get at their essence, to truly understand their relationship with a brand. But this overlooks the fact that we are always influenced by others. Even when we are alone we wonder how our actions would be perceived.

A one to one interview is equally likely to sway somebody. Milgram’s core experiments involved just him as (neutrally rational) research interviewer in a room with one participant. The participants picked up that the way to please him was to influence near lethal shocks to the subject.

The argument for interviewing people in groups is that we might as well see how the unavoidable social influences work and how word of mouth plays out. When a group agrees with one member’s view it is very easy for an experienced moderator to spot whether this is genuine agreement or there’s an element of conformity. This apparent conformity can be probed more easily in a group setting (“I’m sensing we’re not all in perfect agreement about this”) than an individual setting (“Are you sure you’re not just saying that?”)

Often it is only by having a bit of a discussion with others that we work out what we really feel about something we have never really bothered to consider before – (a category which includes the vast majority of brands we buy.)

Chris.

Dumbing Down

For years there’s been a  lot of worry in adland that the cleverest graduates don’t choose advertising as a career, pressure on margins means agencies are cutting back on training, the industry’s going to hell in a handcart.

I don’t agree.

Partly thanks to the plannersphere we have a generation of (self) trained brand communications professionals that are smarter than ever.

The IPA Diploma supplement is out with Campaign today. I am a judge on the awards and set some of the delegate reading list. The essays were fantastic. It’s a cliché but the standard was so high it was hard to find a winner.

My personal favourite essay was ‘The Age of Osmosis by Alex Dunsdon’. I love Alex’ analysis of the primacy of Instinctive learning and that brands should focus less on the Idea and more on the notion of associations.

Have a read, be impressed and feel optimistic about the business.

Chris.

Stratstock

Last Monday I went to Stratstock where lots of interesting people were speaking.

 

The format was pretty good with 9 speakers spread across 3 stages, with each of them speaking twice. This gave the whole thing a more relaxed vibe with speakers and those just watching all able to discuss what they’d just seen between presentations. However, perhaps a bit of a bigger room would have made things easier. David Bain (BMB) is a big man with a big voice and could therefore drown out the other stages at times.

 

Anyhow, the speakers I saw were all good fun even if most also had that slight hint of the sales pitch that inevitably lingers around events such as this. Simon Wilden from Goodstuff spoke about how any distinction between brand and channel behaviour is meaningless and he was absolutely right. Although the participants we research are increasingly marketing savvy they can’t distinguish between the two. The channels a brand uses are a vital part of their DNA.

 

Sam Noble was billed as talking about Sales Promotion but actually produced a far more interesting talk than this suggested about the need for brands to do good stuff and make the consumer’s world a better place. It is only through being a brand that is able to do this he argued that a brand can ever hope to help people buy.

 

Both of these speakers and Paul Gage of Proximity all had the same key thought; it’s all about understanding people and the world in which they live. This may sound simple but it was reassuring to hear clever people saying it. All of them highlighted this and how it has only increased in importance now that we’re entering an economic downturn. Now, without meaning to leave the odour of a sales pitch lingering on this blog, the key to gaining this understanding is using the very best research available!

 

David Bain talked about the energy and diversity needed to give a start up momentum in the first few years. We’ve worked with BMB and he’s true to his word they had energy and a diverse bunch in their planning department.

 

Finally I decided I should go and see Guy Murphy from JWT talk about Global advertising networks, even if only because I’ve been writing a global debrief this week for a project JWT are involved in and have met their people in Kuala Lumpur and Australia in the last month. It was good fun listening to Guy, he’s a funny chap and he basically communicated all the reasons I love the international element of my job. International work allows you to find out about people with completely different reference points and preconceptions about brands. By doing this they then make you question your own preconceptions; ‘Where do they come from? Why does brand x mean this to me, there’s no reason why it should?’

 

(Of course doing all of this while travelling Business Class and staying hotels you couldn’t afford to have a coffee if you were paying yourself is nice as well!)

 

All in all an enjoyable way to spend a drizzly Monday, and as a bonus I bumped into an old school mate and a friend from my APG course. Only criticism; the segments of lime were too big and tricky to get into the bottles of Corona.

 

Andy

Blistering August

Between us we have over 100 years of research experience (scary thought ;-) but none of us have known an August like it. The news is full of doom and gloom but the phone has been ringing off the hook and we have two excellent freelancers on board to help with the volume of work.

It’s nice but at the same time it makes you feel powerless to predict or influence your workflow.

Weird.

WARC Advertising and Consumers

Went to the conference that Chris has put together and chaired for WARC each summer for the last few years.

Eighty odd of the most switched on digital, new thinking savvy people attended. I loved the talk from Stephen Phillips about Snakes and Ladders being how people make major purchase decisions. It feels so right. Great talks also from Toby of Dare and superstar DJ sets from uber bloggers Mark Earls and Faris Yacob.

There’s an official blog write up here.

Barcelona Blogging

Just back from the AQR/QRC Worldwide Qualitative Conferencein Barcelona. Some great papers and fabulous networking and drinking with the cream of qualitative researchers from the UK, USA and rest of world.

Caroline Hayter (Acacia Avenue) and I gave a paper called the ‘Focus Group is Dead, Long Live the Focus Group’. Caroline was arguing that we need to look at doing different things with the group format. There is no reason why it has to be 8 people. I was arguing that groups are great 1. because it is useful to see how the herd influences each other, to use co-creation and 2. because  researchers like them. At the end of the day clients aren’t buying people’s responses. They are renting a researcher’s brain for the insights they will bring.

My other point was that if you analyse most of the attacks on focus groups they boil down to 1. False oppositions (“ethnography is great, therefore groups are stale”) and 2. An emotional dislike of sitting in a dark claustrophobic viewing space for an evening with a growing resentment of that woman in the yellow top. It’s much easier in front of the glass! The viewing experience is difficult and often depersonalising, not unlike Milgram’s experiments.

I used this image from the excellent Jason Oke’s Blog. I met Jason at one of Faris’ Beerspheres. He’s a great guy who started one of the most interesting blog threads of last year but his visual perspective on groups here is very revealing.

The ‘back room culture’ of institutionalized dehumanizing needs to be stopped. Out front the focus group is fine (and incidentally Jason most of our participants go away more engaged with the brand they’ve been discussing.) It is the viewing group in the back which needs methodological innovations.

How about removing alcohol from the room? Having a quiz, to maintain attention? Or better still not having a team behind the mirror, forcing them to watch by video link from the office? Or even better why not stop using viewing facilities?

When I started, virtually all groups took place in a recruiter’s home. The very first specialist studio opened in London in 1984. Today, 60% of groups (and 90% of the ones clients see) are estimated to take place in one.

I was doing some research last year for a Copenhagen based e-commerce brand. The groups were in-home near Reading. At the last minute two of the groovy young Danes said they would like to attend. They flew in, sat behind the sofa, were enthralled throughout, chatted to participants at the end and raved about this innovative new methodology being so much more rewarding than boring old viewing studios!

On the day our talk was a bit rushed because naughty Peter Cooper used twice his allocated time despite Philly holding up a sign saying STOP NOW! Funny how often speakers still do that.

The AQR has asked us to repeat this talk back in London later in the year.

Judie Lannon should be writing the official blog here

If you’d like a copy of our paper please get in touch.                                  

Chris.

Into CHI today to see Neil Goodlad and take him through our quant thinking so far. Obviously the timing gods are smiling on us. Neil was struggling to find a sensible research proposal to track the new Tiger Beer campaign targeting drinkers in trendy bars with ambient and in bar activity. None of the proposals had anything that was going to provide useful feedback for a campaign that would slip beneath the radar of conventional tracking. He was already steeling himself to the prospect of more ‘flatline’ tracking.

So a bit of a win win really - we came away with our first client hooray and he came away with a piece of research that could actually help!

Must do this more often

David.

New people

Two new researchers have just joined The Nursery. Oliver Feldwick comes to us as a graduate, whilst Andy Cooper brings experience as a qual researcher at TNS.

Both will contribute enormously and help balance what was becoming an increasingly female company!

They both braved the Nursery Christmas lunch, so anything after that will be a breeze.

It's a real stimulus to a small company when new people join. The people already there end up making as much of an adjustment as the new people, which is quite a different phenomenon from what happens in larger companies. I really like the way new people force you to look again at the way you do things and ask questions about why things are the way they are. It brings a real rush of energy - perfect for the New Year.

Post from Lucy.

Warming up

They always tell you in qual training that you must never skimp on the warm-up when you're moderating groups - however little you time you have.

Normally I'll spend around 20 minutes in warm-up chat and it's one of my favourite parts of the group. I get respondents to tell me a bit about themselves: home, family, job and then ask them a basic question about something they did recently, such as one thing they did at the weekend, or what they were doing this time yesterday.

It's great because you never know what you're going to hear next yes there's a lot of watching Coronation Street or cooking the supper but there's also 'in bed with their girlfriend' or 'smoking a joint'.

Last night however I had 1 hour groups and lots to cram in so I went straight to a conversation about advertising respondents had seen recently, which was a great way of priming them to talk about a new TV script and getting them chatting, but I found I missed hearing those insights about their lives, those little scraps of detail about husbands, wives, kids, home life, getting drunk, doing the ironing, watching Big Brother, online betting, falling asleep, leaving for the night shift. The groups went fine, but the respondents were names and opinions and nothing else. Efficient, but I missed some of the soul.

GQ Man

A couple of months ago I was a respondent in a qualitative survey of qualitative researchers that GQ conducted to find out what we all know about men. What a great methodology to interview us researchers over a slap up moderated dinner at Vogue House. It was also instructive being a respondent. I could do that more often.

This morning GQ launched their resulting ‘State of Man’ survey at the Soho Hotel.

 

It suggests a spectrum from determinists (traditionalists) to evolutionists (new man) which is not in itself rocket science but they had some nice observations about how this dynamic is central to the success of ‘Life on Mars’ and thoughts about the imagery that brands could use to attract each type. ‘Father handing on to son’ imagery works well for determinists but ‘successful relationship’ imagery works better for evolutionists.

This explained to me why I love the latest Patek Philippe ad. Their previous ads, associating the brand with material wealth, speeding around Lake Garda on a Riva might have rung bells for ‘determinists’ but they left me cold.  

 

I’m pretty sure I’m closer to the evolutionist end of the spectrum and I got goosepimples from this evocation of father and son being baffled by homework together.

 

 

It feels even more powerful when you come across it at 30,000 feet in High Life magazine just at the moment when you are feeling guilty for not spending more time at home. Just this subtle evolution in creative strategy almost made me want one of their watches. How superficial us modern men are.