Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not exactly fashion-conscious. In fact, I’m just grateful when I get to work and discover that I’m wearing matching shoes.
So it was somewhat ironic that while sitting in the Heathrow departure lounge last week awaiting a flight home from London, I was approached by a uniformed woman. She had excellent posture and carried a clipboard.
“May I have a few minutes of your time?” she asked, and then sat down next to me without awaiting an answer.
What have I done? I worriedly wondered. Had I packed 5 oz. of shampoo? Was my passport expired? Did they know I’d inhaled in 1972?
“I’d like to ask you about your impressions of Heathrow Airport,” she said briskly, but with a tinge of desperation.
The light dawned. She was a market researcher! This was an airport lounge intercept!
My heart went out to her. “Ask away,” I said graciously.
She did, page after bloody page.
They’d unloaded the arriving flight by the time we finished with what was important to me in an airport. (“Fresh fruit” and “clean bathrooms with hundreds of stalls” weren’t answer options. If they had been, both would have scored a 5 – Very Important.)
By the time the plane was cleaned and I’d triumphantly recalled the name of that movie with Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman (Last Chance Harvey, where she plays a beleaguered market researcher who works at – wait for it – Heathrow!), we’d advanced through how I felt about my actual experience since arriving at the airport 90 minutes earlier. (It hadn’t been bad, actually, except for this entrapment. But that wasn’t an answer option either.)
I thought we were in the home stretch when she suddenly whipped out a laminated folding card containing lots of pictures of sunglasses advertisements.
“Do you recall seeing these adverts?” she asked, waving them in front of my face so quickly that I felt a welcome breeze.
In my mind’s eye, I started flipping through every poster I’d seen in the past five days. “Um, yeah, I think so.”
“Where did you see them?”
I thought back to riding the endless escalators in the London Underground. Were there ads for anything other than The Lion King? “In the Tube?” I answered hopefully.
“Was it a poster or an electronic sign?”
Think, Julie, think. Did they have electronic signs in the Tube? “Poster,” I answered, far more definitively than I actually felt. I was hoping my bravado would hide the fact that I had no frigging clue.
“Do you think this advertising is appropriate for Heathrow?” she asked, this time not even going through the motions of showing me the ads again.
Appropriate for Heathrow, I mused. What advertising would be inappropriate for Heathrow? Well, explosives, of course. Or anything with ex-Duchess Fergie. “Yes, I do.”
“Would it make you more likely to purchase sunglasses at Heathrow?” she demanded.
Only if there were sunlamps on the airplane, I thought gracelessly. “Hmm … I don’t know. Is that an answer option?”
By now, the volcanic ash cloud had moved from the skies over the North Atlantic to the skies over the South Pacific; Krakatoa had erupted, and sea levels in Europe and North America had risen by two feet, errr, meters. But amazingly, we were finally done.
It was only as I watched her still starchy but somehow defeated figure leave the lounge that I noticed, yes, a large, flashy electronic billboard advertising stylish sunglasses for sale at Heathrow. I’d been sitting opposite it for at least a half-hour before she came.
Exhausted, I slumped into my husband’s shoulder and pointed mutely at the billboard.
My husband’s a journalist, and when he’s training rookies, he always tells them, “Don’t ask people questions they don’t know how to answer.” He chuckled, not at all surprised by my obliviousness to the ad. “Clearly, she didn’t know who she was talking to.”
And that, dear reader, is the point of this little anecdote.
I might have been a random sample, eligible for this research largely because I was breathing and sentient, but the only time I buy anything other than earrings, food and books is when my feet are barefoot, my skin is scorched or I’m out of coffee.
I didn’t know how to answer the researcher’s questions about the efficacy of that sunglasses billboard. Her time and mine were completely wasted and her data completely lacking in validity because she didn’t know who she was talking to. Had she simply conversed with me, she might have learned that I actually buy sunglasses routinely because I lose them routinely, that if had they been for sale at a kiosk just outside the airport instead of wedged between two high-end stores I never go near, I would have bought them in a heartbeat. She might have learned that I value durability above appearance. And maybe, just maybe, I would remember her as a curious and empathetic person, not as an intrusive and indifferent one.
No offense, Emma.
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Hear hear!
I completely agree with your premise that pedantic or slavish attachment to traditional ways of conducting many forms of marketing research should be examined. However, I would caution that many client organizations rely upon certain types of traditional measurement programs (i.e., tracking studies) for key business functions.
How will we migrate these clients to newer forms of “listening”?
Thanks for the feedback, Eric (and as a lover of language, I’m especially appreciative of “pedantic” and “slavish” in the same sentence!) To your point, some clients remain wedded to traditional methods, and for good reason. Tracking studies can be very valuable in surfacing and monitoring trends. But even they can be conducted in more meaningful, real-time and naturalistic ways with the aid of mobile surveys or lifestreaming tools. And because most tracking studies tend to be retrospective and conditions can change so quickly, many of our clients rely on their online communities to validate and dig deeper into what their tracking studies indicate.
I think you are right on the button when discussing the collaborative relationship between the researcher and the consumer. Simon Chadwick Recently did a video interview with InsightsNow about the changing way that we should be communicating in Market Research (among other things). Check out the video, I hope it serves to also further the discussion about the new, exciting direction of market Research.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6clSVeVhU_c
Hi Erika. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t agree more that the Internet and social media are allowing us to understand the consumer holistically, or “in the round”; and likewise that MR methods are rounding out to offer more robust set of tools and approaches. I am also heartened to see how the shift to collaborative inquiry. Thank you for sharing your voice (and Simon’s!).
[...] Simon Kendrick I’ve just finished reading Communispace’s latest position paper “You are now leaving your comfort zone: 21st century market research” (link points to their blog post, which in turn links to the pdf). It is unquestionably one [...]
Interesting. I would place myself in the traditional market-research audience you discuss. However, my question would not be whether the audience participation exercise would be qual or quant, but something much more fundamental. How representative are the thoughts, perceptions, and opinions of this audience of my customer/potential customer base? Gathering ideas, floating concepts, establishing a discussion with customers is certainly legitimate and laudatory. It is when such activities are perceived as representative of some larger population that I, as a traditional market researcher, would take exception, unless I had done the fundamental work to establish the parameters. That is the crux issue that is unresolved in the industry.