In a presentation given to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Strategy Conference in 2005, Wendy Gordon, co-founder and brand researcher of Acacia Avenue, talked about the Iceberg of resistance. By this she meant that people are clearly affected by emotional brand influences that they may be either unwilling to acknowledge or unaware of at a conscious level.
Resistance to a brand can take many forms and be for many reasons, but when the brand-owners attempt research into this they may not always discover the right ones. Interviewees or focus group participants will often post-justify their response to a brand to make it appear more logical and more rational than the emotions which governed their initial response. Wendy Gordon’s metaphor refers to the seven eighths of hidden response that lie beneath the surface of any research interviewees answers.
Good researchers are evidently aware of this and will have the techniques to try and counter it in attitudinal surveys that try to discover consumers’ real attitudes to the brands and products they buy and the services they consume.
Rita Clifton, chairman of Interbrand commented in Research, One of the challenges of research is looking through what people say, to what they mean. That’s easy to say, not so easy to do.
This may be an interesting phenomenon in consumer research, but just think how much more widespread it is in B2B research projects. We have seen in previous editions of B2B Marketing how much more important branding is becoming in B2B markets. And this branding is applied to more complex products and services and sales are subject to a more complex buying process than in consumer markets. The process of post-justifying your decisions and by implication attitudes is more ingrained in the B2B world. Any executive with the power to commit their company’s money will need to feel that they have made a logical choice, and have the need to justify that choice not only to themselves but to other members of their DMU.
But research shows that purchasing decisions are so often driven by more emotive than rational decisions. People at work are still people.
As an example, at my agency Base One, we have worked with a research company to tease out the softer issues behind one particular commodity purchase.
Issues such as reliability, customer focus and trust lay at the heart of the interviewees’ attitudes. And while price was a fundamental part of the decision making process, the other attributes were of equal importance.
ABBA agencies have always understood the necessity in their marketing communications of the balance between a rational and emotional appeal. We are all committed to the emotional concept and importance of the brand and how associations with need to be fostered and managed to create the brand representations.
I question whether all clients always understand the importance of looking beyond the obvious. Too often I have come across research projects where the obvious and expected answer has been readily accepted. It’s an easy and lazy way out, and at best it usually negates the purpose of the research by simply reinforcing preconceptions. At worst it can lead to poor business decisions with severe consequences.
For example, if our client had been persuaded by the initial reaction, that their products were sold on price only, they could have been led to assuming that dropping their price was the only way to achieving higher sales. Fortunately they had the foresight to try and understand their market better and realize that customer attitudes and loyalty were, in the end, as important as price, and that brand management would be a better investment than a price war.
Designing the right research project to discover attitudes in B2B markets is a real skill. So here are a few tips to consider when you do:
Think about what you want to discover about your markets, and stretch horizons beyond the obvious questions.
Think about how you ask it. Avoid framing a question that will give you the answer you want to hear.
Don’t always rely on focus groups to tease out the seven-eighths of the iceberg under the surface. Focus groups are notorious for being influenced by a few strong characters, and rarely will a B2B buyer admit emotional rather than rational motivations.
Cast a cold eye over the results quantitative is great for measuring ‘how much’ but not good at discovering ‘what should we measure’.
Involve your marketing agency in the project. They should give you better insight into what to look for, help you interpret the results more creatively and get a better idea of the type of work they should produce as a result.
Finally choose research methods carefully. As Giep Frantzen, Professor of communication sciences at at the University of Amsterdam, points out, Things can often go wrong in research into brand representation. Too often standard instruments are used for all product categories. It remains to be seen whether an instrument that provides insight into FMCG can also be used for something like financial services, or B2B markets for that matter (from Giep Frantzen & Margot Bouwman’ The Mental World of Brands’).
