Posts Tagged ‘Psychology’
There is a big difference between feeling rugged when wearing Levi’s jeans and expressing the strong, rugged side of you by wearing them. The differences between the two can be important.
Brands essentially deal with different kinds of benefits. An identity that is based on intangible associations or brand personalities provides the brand with more strategic scope and gives you more liberty to extend the brand.
On the other hand, a brand that relies on the superior performance of a key attribute will eventually get beaten by competition, because the attribute is a fixed target for competitors. The result can be a loss of differentiation, or worse an inferior position on an attribute that is associated with the brand.
- In: Books
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The Book: Qualitative Market Research by Wendy Gordon and Roy Langmaid
About the Authors:
Wendy Gordon and Roy Langmaid run successful qualitative research practices in London. Roy Langmaid is one of Europe’s leading consumer psychologists and Wendy Gordon is the co-founder of brand consultancy The Fourth Room. One of the authors has a psychology degree, and the other a social anthropology degree; both of them have experienced clinical psychology first hand and are one of the most celebrated authors in the field of Qualitative Research.
Review:
It is the authors’ commitment to accumulate the knowledge of forty years of their experience that created this book. I congratulate the authors for taking on such a challenging task of writing a comprehensive book on Qualitative Research.
This is the first book to bring all the practices and principles of the sister discipline of market research – Qualitative Research. The book starts with the introduction to qualitative research and the contribution to the growth of Qualitative Research. The authors state that the days of endless debates about the superiority of quantitative and qualitative research are over. Both the methods have their strengths and weaknesses and are friends and not enemies. The authors go on to describe the problem areas suited to Qualitative Research such as consumer perceptions, understanding the dimensions of brands, new product development, creative development and diagnostic studies. Furthermore, the authors describe the choice of research methodology and the process of research brief and research objective.
Starting from Chapter Three is the group processes and group dynamics. This is about what factors influence what people say and how they behave in groups. This chapter discusses the components of group discussion, how group discussion is used in research, and the Do’s and don’ts for the interviewer. This describes the several stages of a group process like Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Mourning. There have been some very good ideas and techniques like anchoring on how to do better group interviewing.
Starting from Chapter Six is my favourite part of the book: the individual depth interview, non-verbal communication (NVC) and projective techniques. The book describes the skills required for good depth-interviewing and the internal and external parameters of body language. It describes the application and usage of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), study of eye and head movements and body postures during the interview. It provides a complete coverage of major projective and enabling techniques and this is the best part of the book. It covers all the different association procedures, completion procedures, construction and expressive procedures used in NVC. The usage of psycho drawing, thought bubbles, brand mapping, sentence completion, word association, mirroring and other techniques are explained in detail with examples.
The book flows into the interpretation and presentation of qualitative research. Various techniques of interpretation are explained given the fact that people often ‘don’t say what they mean’ and ‘don’t mean what they say’. Also, there has been special focus on how to conduct research with children and the techniques used in such research. The book concludes with the various hybrid methodologies and statistical procedures used for the analysis of qualitative research.
This book really helped me to get a holistic picture of qualitative research. It helped me interrogate and digest the various techniques involved in qualitative research. I just loved some of the psycho drawings and associations presented in this book. It made me ask some interesting questions of how music can be used in qualitative research and consumer behaviour.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to have a good understanding of all the techniques of qualitative research that are making qualitative research influential. The book doesn’t have much of technical jargon and is a very simple and beautiful read for anybody slightly interested in market research and any form of behavioural sciences.
Thank you. It has been pleasure writing this review.
© Sai Krishna Balivada 2010
Every smoker is a marketer
Posted on: February 7, 2010
- In: Business | Marketing | Philosophy | Psychology
- 7 Comments
A smoker is extremely loyal to his brand. A smoker feels that the brand resembles him and he acts as if he resembles the brand. One of the biggest advantages with tobacco companies is it has a process of network marketing for free. Most of the people who smoke would’ve been taught how to smoke by other smokers. This is the way they have a sense of oneness and they feel happy as a part of a group like cigarette brothers. This is why I say ‘Every smoker is a marketer’.
Sometime ago, I had an argument with my friend over the packaging changes to cigarette packs to make people aware of the problems of smoking. Finally we decided that may be the tobacco companies will not let any changes be done in the packaging as any minor change is going to make the consumer conscious about smoking. But we were wrong.
Three months later, the Supreme court ordered for all cigarette packs to carry a ‘Smoking Kills’ pictorial warning which covers at least 40% of the front of the pack. I went to a few stores in Hyderabad and found that the retailers are displaying the cigarette packs on the other side, the side which doesn’t have the warning. This seems to be nice marketing gimmick by the retailers and the tobacco companies.
BRANDING THE CIGARETTE PAPER
For the ‘Smoking Kills’ campaign to be more effective, I think it should also be extended to the cigarette paper. I think we need to brand the cigarette paper with something that the consumers really cares for, wherein they don’t like it to be burnt as they smoke. The immediate question is: what is it? My answer is YOU. Yes, brand the cigarette paper with the word YOU vertically. As and when he smokes he will be burning the word ‘YOU’, which is a direct indication of what he is doing to himself by smoking. It may not be effective immediately, but gradually it makes a subconscious impact on the smoker. Unlike the picture on the cigarette pack, the smoker will be forced to see this text as long as he smokes the cigarette. Though I don’t have any proven results, I think this will be more effective at the subconscious level and it will more effective.
A smoker spends 99% of his time with the cigarette, not with the cigarette pack. Moreover when the text YOU is burning it actually makes a subconscious impact on the people. A smoker is very conscious about the anti-tobacco advertisements which makes life more difficult. If you are consciously ignoring something it is very difficult to make you do it consciously, which is how the anti-tobacco campaigns ask the smokers to quit. For the anti-tobacco campaigns to be effective, the best way is to attack the sub-consciousness.
WHAT THE TOBACCO COMPANIES SHOULD DO?
If you are a smoker or a marketer, ask yourself ‘What is the biggest and the most common problem for a smoker?’. Yes, lighting the cigarette is the biggest problem. So I feel the tobacco companies should provide the dotted striker material on one side of their packs, with a few match sticks in their pack. This removes the dependency of the smoker and it may actually make people prefer your cigarette pack. Many people who smoke don’t like to carry lighters, match-sticks or anything that would indicate that they smoke. This is the best solution to address such problems.
All the above views are completely my individual opinions. Thank you.
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