Blog 6 - The Persuaders

In the Persuaders video, the three-stage technique used by Dr. Rapaille sounds like a very unique and interesting way to leverage focus groups. He takes his subjects on a psychic expedition past intellect, through emotions, into the primal core where the doctor strongly believes all purchasing decisions are made. He politely asks his subjects to not hold anything back and tell him exactly what is coming to their minds.

The first stage is purely intellectual. Dr. Rapaille asks the study’s subjects a question in order to give them a chance to show how logical or intelligent they are. In the video, he is trying to research and understand the topic of luxury. He asks his subjects, “When people try to sell you luxury things, what kind of words do they use?” The doctor does not care how the subjects respond to this question. He then gives his subjects some time for a break.

The second stage is all about the subjects delving into their own emotions. Dr. Rapaille says, “you are going to tell me a little story like I was a five year-old from another planet.” The doctor’s goal is for his subjects to go from being logical or intelligent in their thinking to being purely emotional. He wants his subject to not understand what they are doing anymore. He wants his subjects to be slightly confused and think that he is crazy. Dr. Rapaille gives his subjects another break.

When the subjects come back to the focus group room, there are no more chairs. The doctor wants his subjects to be wondering where the chairs went. He then asks his subjects “to go back to the very first time that they experienced what we are trying to understand.” The doctor is actively searching for the subjects’ primal urges. He is looking for what he calls the “reptilian hot buttons” that compel us to action. His theory is that the reptilian always wins. He does not care what his subjects tell him intellectually. Dr. Rapaille even turns off the lights in the room so that his subjects are in the mindset a little bit like the one when they wake up each morning. According to Dr. Rapaille, “things come back to your mind that you had forgotten for twenty to thirty years.”

The doctor and his team somehow decipher the chicken scratch of his subjects in order to unlock the code of the topic he is researching. The chicken scratch is made up of half-remembered words and pictures associated with the topic he is researching. Dr. Rapaille believes that the code he discovers from his three-stage process enables him to understand the real needs of consumers. For example, “the code for SUVs is domination so Rapaille told car makers to tint the windows and beef up the size of their SUVs.” The doctor also recognized that a French company that was attempting to sell cheese to Americans was off code. He told them that cheese is dead in America and is put in the refrigerator. Dr. Rapaille suggested to the company’s marketers to market their cheese in America as something that is safe, is wrapped in plastic, and can be refrigerated.

Song’s goal of forging a real connection with women was a great idea because women are in a large group of consumers that were being ignored by other airlines. The benefits of offering low fares, organic food, and more entertainment options fit well with the target market Song was going after. Song was trying to create an emotional and optimistic experience for its consumers. Hiring the brand visionary, Andy Spade, as a consultant for Song sounded like a positive idea at the beginning. His decision to keep the initial advertising focused primarily on emotions by not including any airplanes or passengers was very risky and could later on turn out to be a big mistake. He was very focused on showing the audience what made Song different than other low-cost airlines, its unique style and spirit.

When a product is brand new and is unfamiliar to your target market, the best thing you can do is to show its points of parity or similarity to its competitive frame. That way, your audience knows what your product is. According to the video, only fifteen percent of their sample truly recognized Song. This means that a very small percentage saw the advertising and knew it was Song. Also, many consumers didn’t know what the advertising was for. Andy Spade tried to skip a crucial step in building brand equity and jump right into becoming part of culture. Song would have probably seen much better results if they would have waited until Song was well-established in the minds of consumers as a low-cost airline before bringing in Andy Spade as an advertising consultant.

Blog 5 - Customer Insights

Lesson 1) “We can learn a lot more about what people think by observing their body language or facial expressions or looking at their bookshelves and the pictures on their walls than by asking them directly.” This is not shocking to me personally because I have heard that 55 percent of communication comes from body language and facial expressions. “While people are very willing and very good at volunteering information explaining their actions, those explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily correct.”

According to the Kenna’s Dilemma chapter in Blink, our reactions are shallow “when we are outside our areas of passion and experience. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding.” Most people are experts in one or two fields. There are not many people out there in the general public who are experts in all fields. That’s why this lesson is so important for marketers. If you are not an expert in a given field, then it is very difficult for you to articulate a correct response and thin-slice an experience or product reliably. Marketers need to focus on observing behaviors rather than gathering unreliable information from direct questioning of the general public.

For example, a brand manager from Dr Pepper recently came to my Brand Management class this semester. She and her colleagues performed many taste tests in order to better understand why there are so many light drinkers of Dr Pepper versus heavy drinkers. Instead of only asking the taste testers how the Dr Pepper tastes, they also observed how quickly the taste tester consumed the Dr Pepper. Through many tests, they found that the taste testers who really enjoyed the Dr Pepper drank it more slowly than the taste testers who drank it in a quicker amount of time. The marketers at Dr Pepper were able to obtain valuable and reliable market research through this process. They were also able to apply this to a marketing strategy that they have employed via TV commercials that emphasize “Drink it slow. Dr’s Orders”.

Lesson 2) The recognition of sensation transference is vital for marketers to be successful when conducting marketing research. “When people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself. Most of us don’t make a distinction – on an unconscious level – between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined.” Gladwell gives a great example of this when he talks about how E&J inexpensive brandy was starting to steal market share from Christian Brothers leading inexpensive brandy. The packaging of the E&J brandy was more appealing and fancier than the plain packaging of the Christian Brothers brandy. They discovered that “the problem (was) not the product and (was) not the branding. It (was) the package.” The company should service all dimensions of the customer experience. Companies should test their products with the packaging included so that the marketers can formulate realistic and reliable conclusions from the results.

The majority of the time, I only buy national brand cereals even though they are more expensive than the private label cereals. This is very odd for me because I normally shop almost exclusively on price and don’t mind buying private label products (I think most are about the same quality). The difference is that the packaging is usually so different between the two. My perceived value of the national brand cereals is much higher than my perceived value of the private label cereals (especially the ones not packaged in cardboard boxes). Many private label cereals package the cereal in plastic bags without cardboard boxes whereas all of the national brand cereals have only appealing cardboard boxes that are visible. I believe private label cereal marketers of the cereals with no cardboard box would make a strong impact on sales if they were to recognize this and change the packaging. If they were to run some various methods for gaining insights afterwards, the marketers would most likely discover that the extra cost of designing and adding a cardboard box is worth it in the long-run. They would probably also see an increase in consumer’s perceived value of their cereals and willingness to pay for their cereals.