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.