When I moved to the great state of North Carolina, I learned an important lesson: Never talk about religion, politics, or college basketball in polite company. College hoops is taken seriously in these parts.

This is rivalry week in the Triangle, with Duke and UNC meet for the first of two (or three) times this season on Wednesday night. One the eve of what will certainly be an epic matchup, one of the nation’s leading political polling firms, Public Policy Polling, have released their annual UNC/Duke Poll.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• UNC is North Carolina’s most popular school, with 32% of respondents saying it’s their favorite college. Duke (19%) and NC State (18%) are in a tight battle for second place, with ECU claiming 8%, Wake Forest 6% and 17% saying “none of these” schools are their favorite.
• UNC also leads when voters are asked who they’ll be rooting for in Wednesday’s Duke-UNC men’s basketball matchup, 41-31.
• There’s a healthy amount of respect between the fanbases. 49% of UNC fans say they “respect” Duke while just 16% “hate Duke.” And 53% of Duke fans “respect” UNC with only 16% “hating” the Tar Heels.

The world is always a bit off kilter. Nothing is exact. But my current profession as a market research guy has, in my opinion, developed a mantra that requires that the reseach I conduct for a client be “rock solid,” i.e. grounded in either well-founded objective fact (when dealing with quantitative data) or succinct insights (when delving into the qualitative realm). Regardless of the nature of the project or methodology employed, my point of view is expected to rest well within defined lines. I must be precise.

This current market research lens may actually cloud my findings. Rather than stuffing marketplace phenomena into a presentational bullet or pithy one-liner for my client, I often find myself wanting to “go wide” and start speaking on the non-alignment of the phenomena I’m investigating, for that’s where I believe interesting findings float.

A great example of this is the Italian fashion practice of sprezzatura. Sprezzatura is the belief that to look correct, things should always look slightly wrong. It is the act of studied effortlessness. A description of naturalness, by design. And when I think of either the natural or manufactured world in which people live and make consumer decisions, it answers a lot. My goal now is to further integrate this concept into the design and execution of the work I do, rather than drawing arbitrary lines in crafting market research. It’s the right direction to take.

A good starting point has been re-examining the basic tenets and overall premise of how I approach market research. Up until now, market research has, more and more, emphasized the science of its practice. Born of the social sciences, it continually seeks legitimization as a ‘true’ science. Unfortunately, in my experience, to use a well-worn phrase, it’s ”too fuzzy” for such rigor. Rather, I believe breakthrough research is more likely to occur if we allow the foundation of the practice to flow from the humanities, and not social science: writing, illustration, design, voice and performance.

So far I’ve found this premise to be powerful in the work I do. It’s decidedly different, and refreshing. Let’s face it, market research as we’ve known it for the past fifty plus years can be stale and uninspiring, regardless of how lofty our ideals. I think research should take a shot at being beautiful instead.

OnTheMap is useful for more than work location, however.  It’s a multi-layered mapping tool, with companion data on demographics, earnings, industry characteristics.  We’ve also used it to identify exact metropolitan statistical areas and radius ranges, to find transportation routes, greenspace, and tribal and military lands, and to simply better understand a physical marketplace.

For years, organizations like the Census Bureau relied heavily on point-in-time estimates, tables of statistics and physical and static maps for data exploration like this. As new systems come online, are developed further, and improved over successive versions, our ability to access information from our desktops is not only facilitated but empowered.

Beautiful series of infographics by Peter Orntoft about how the Danish people feel about a number of pressing social issues. Though shortfalls of time, budget, and creativity force us to revert to PowerPoint Smart Art, it’s inspiring to see work that challenges what an infographic can be.

There are varying degrees of scope and sophistication in our wildly different projects and initiatives. Our work is passed to our clients, to internal teams, to executive management, to various partners and outside parties. The names of studies, reports, presentations, tools used in the process, task force teams, strategic plans, products in development, etc. do matter.

Names should be clear and communicative – presenting the topic but also the considering the audience. Names should not be overly technical or detailed. Names should be intuitive, parsimonious, and should be readable (and intelligible) “out loud.” But names should also hold up over time, regardless of how related issues change or evolve. Future researchers should be able to refer back to your work, referencing a name that still communicates something to them. It’s somewhat a lofty challenge, if you think about the implication of the choice of title. The goal is to strike a balance between communication and brevity – if the name simply “fits” in these terms, it will likely carry and communicate as desire.

Goldenberg believes that laggards tend to ‘leapfrog’ over generations of technology. In essence, let’s say that while laggards may have shied away from buying an iPod, they would be first in line to buy the iTouch.  Given the group’s fairly broad base, it would be foolish not to target their buying power.  Goldenberg’s study led him to conclude that if a mere 10% of the group leapfrogs to a particular new gadget, their purchases could drive sale profits up by 89% – which may prove the “difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” as he puts it.

The argument is logically viable, so let’s assume his findings are accurate.  How does one toggle between messages speaking to savvy adopters and resistant laggards? Purchase motivations for the two groups, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are disparate enough to warrant unique marketing strategies: adopters want a revolution; laggards, a tried-and-true evolution.  Capturing both types of consumers will require a firm understanding of how aspects of your products can be framed in such a way as to meet one group’s needs, without alienating the other.

After nearly 70 years, publisher Condé Nast abruptly stopped production of the monthly magazine due to lack of advertising sales and a shift in consumer interest. At the time of Condé Nast’s decision, both Gourmet and its sister magazine, Bon Appétit, were struggling with ad sales. Bon Appétit made the cut. Gourmet didn’t. Bon Appétit was offered as a substitute for Gourmet for the remainder of almost one million subscriptions.

Since then a slight margin (a slim 20 percent to be exact) of past Gourmet subscribers have chosen to switch to Bon Appétit. This seems odd for such highly dedicated and long-term subscribers. The lack of transferred subscriptions poses a hard question. Why did Condé Nast choose not to research the niche market of such an obviously successful magazine like Gourmet in order to keep those dedicated subscribers?

On the cover, the magazines look similar. Both share great recipes. Both feature articles about food, culture, and politics. However, the audiences of each magazine differ greatly. This is evidenced through both magazines advertisements as well as their contrasting takes on good living. Gourmet was luxurious and indulgent. It stressed extravagant travel and an elitist lifestyle. Bon Appétit stresses a comfortable home life, centering on family cooking. It offered complex, yet more accessible recipes.

While many Gourmet readers feel heartbroken about no longer receiving the magazine each month, Condé Nast’s decision makes good sense, especially when considering the economic forecast that sunk Gourmet. Foodies aren’t paying for exotic trips to experience food anymore. They’re cooking at home with their families, growing their own gardens, or buying local food.  Despite a large fan base, Gourmet’s attention to life’s luxuries and hefty subscription fees failed to keep advertisers interested. In the case of Gourmet and many other magazines, ad money trumps readership and loyalty.

But after loosing 800,000 subscribers, it seems that Condé Nast missed a really great chance to study their Gourmet readers. The magazine may have been out-of-touch with the current economic reality, but its subscribers were still writing checks every year. If Condé Nast saw the end of Gourmet magazine in sight, why not find out what it was that appealed to readers and kept some subscribing for decades. That sort of insight would have been exactly what Condé Nast could have used to align Bon Appétit toward the views and preferences of Gourmet’s readers in order to boost the number of subscription transfers and keep those loyal consumers.

“They said, ‘how about prime time?’ I said, ‘that will never work.’ No, no, we want to put you on at 10:00. We have done focus groups. People will love you at 10:00. Look at these studies showing Jay’s chin at 10:00. People will go crazy.”

Now I don’t want to pile on NBC and obviously I have no idea how extensive the research was, but this seems like a potentially good example of placing too much weight on a research study instead of utilizing research as a component of an overall decision making process.  Let’s hope that NBC didn’t make a decision with hundred of millions of dollars worth of consequences based on a couple of rounds of focus groups.  But feel free to mention this example the next time someone complains about a product launch not going as well as the research predicted.  Below is a link to the article with more quotes from Jay Leno.

Jay Leno Tells All About NBC’s Dysfunction

At what price would you perceive this product to be too expensive?

At what price would you consider this product to be priced so cheaply that you would worry about its quality?

At what price would you consider this product to be too expensive to even consider buying it?

These four very direct and intuitive questions form the basis of the Van Westendorp pricing exercise – a quantitative research technique that can actually yield robust and compelling data reflecting consumer demand. We’ve been thinking about the wide variety of quantitative analytical techniques we use in our work, and thought we’d provide a quick overview on this one.

The Van Westendorp pricing exercise is a price sensitivity measurement devised by a Dutch psychologist, Peter van Westendorp.  This technique uses four questions about a product or service (drafted more or less like those above) and requires the respondent to gauge prices that are too cheap and too expensive in context with the product or service’s offerings and perceived benefits.

Frequency distributions from these questions are derived and plotted, yielding the range of pricing options for the product. As the final step in this process, purchase intent is measured at the highest and lowest prices in the range of pricing options. The optimal price (i.e., the price which maximizes market share while generating the highest possible revenue) can then be computed, along with the precise range of acceptable pricing.

The data points on the example chart are plotted a little loosely, but the point at which the Too Cheap and Too Expensive responses intersect is considered the Optimal Price Point (OPP). The intersection of Expensive and Too cheap yields the Point of Marginal Cheapness (PMC). At this price point, the number of people considering the product to be too cheap is the same as the number considering it to be expensive.

The intersection of Cheap and Too Expensive yields the Point of Marginal Expensiveness (PME). At this price point, the same number of people regard the product to be too expensive as regard it cheap. The range from PMC to PME is the Range of Acceptable Prices (RAP), or the Optimal Price Band.

We also conduct pricing studies using conjoint and discrete choice designs, but the Van Westendorp pricing method is the most efficient way to evaluate price sensitivity itself, as the resulting data resulting is easy to interpret, identifies an entire range of acceptable price points, and provides a solid basis to assess future pricing strategies, ensuring that the optimal price-value balance is established. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about this research technique.

Do you think the push toward testing and metrics in advertising will get stronger?

Cuno: It’s very telling when companies cut marketing budgets. The idea of marketing is to sell stuff and raise profits. If you cut your budget because things are tight, it’s an admission that deep down inside you suspect your marketing isn’t selling. Why else would you cut marketing? When things are tight and you know your marketing is working, you will increase it. Cutting effective marketing when sales are down is like cutting insulin because someone’s diabetes got worse.

Quote pulled from an interesting Deliver Magazine interview here

Big news!  We have launched W5 Conjoint, in conjunction with our newest W5 white paper, “W5 on Conjoint Analysis.”

W5 Conjoint is a specialized analytical boutique of W5, a custom market research consultancy. We have launched the website to introduce the boutique, to complement the white paper, and to serve as a resource for those interested in the understanding, use, and benefits of conjoint methodologies.

W5 Conjoint specializes in the application and design of conjoint analysis for Fortune 500s and their respective advertising agencies. While we’re focused on specific analytical techniques, we’re still W5 consultants – curious, attuned to the needs of our clients, and focused on actionable results that help strengthen brands.

Check out the links and contact us for more information!