Why you cannot understand social behavior through traditional market research techniques
Many companies are trying to understand and predict online social behavior using traditional marketing research techniques – both qualitative and quantitative. In most cases those companies are in for big disappointments.
Let’s take a classic social phenomenon to make the point.
You have a crowd of 300 people who come to fill a theater with 500 seats. When they are all set and done, you will have clusters of people with big empty chunks of seats in between them, maybe nobody sitting in the front, and perhaps some surprising groupings of people.
How would a market researcher approach this situation?
The qualitative person would probably try to interview everyone ahead of time and make cluster predictions based on kinship, friendship, professional affiliation, etc. Not knowing when people arrive, nor understanding the true social motives for sitting in a particular place at a particular moment, most of those predictions would be wrong. Yes, maybe a couple will tell you that they intent to sit with a pair of neighbors, but when they get there, spot a potential client who they did not know would be there, and realize that the neighbors are not there yet, they might very well change their mind. There is no qualitative data, that you could have uncovered ahead of time, that would let you make that prediction.
The quantitative person would wait until everyone sits, lift up the curtain and take a snapshot of the sitting arrangement for further data analysis. The problem is that the data won’t tell you anything. If there is a cluster of single women in the theater, you have no way to know, based on the data, whether those people were motivated by being with others who are just like them, or whether they maybe all came together as part of a mommy social group. If there is a cluster in the back, you have no clue whether those people were motivated by the desire to potentially leave early, or whether they wanted to be in a position where they could observe everyone else in the theater and just have a better people-watching vantage point. The data is meaningless when it comes to predicting social behavior.
So what can you do? You need to be more like an anthropologist and less like a market researcher. If you have the luxury to interview people ahead of time, and then watch the seating arrangement in progress, you will be able to make more informed assumptions, but you will still need to validate them through qualitative interviews afterwards. If you don’t have the luxury of interviewing people ahead of time and see the seating arrangement in progress, you can still make assumptions and validate them through qualitative interviews.
But by focusing on understanding the parts of the whole through individual qualitative interviews or the whole by capturing data about the end result only, you will not learn anything meaningful about the true social drivers of this social gathering.
The lesson – don’t try to understand online social behavior by doing traditional qualitative market research like interviews or focus groups (in which people will tell you what they want you to hear anyway), nor by doing sophisticated quantitative analytics research. Neither one will give you good results. Instead, focus on observing what happens, make assumptions and predictions based on basic human cultural behavior (need for status, need to hang out with like-minded people, need to impress others, being competitive among groups, etc.), and validate those assumptions through qualitative interviews and more observation.
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May 16th, 2011 at 6:47 am
Francois,
I appreciate the intent of what you are saying and the useful analogy.
Although your suggestion is to focus, objectively, on real observations, the resultant suggested methodology would actually be entirely subjective in that it requires individual interpretation. I agree in true observation but would suggest you add in some quant methodology, taking that snapshot of individuals and correlating it with their demographic and ideally purchase information. That will then inform not just conclusions based on the ethnographic approach but active next steps – what should marketers do next?
Some other ideas: It would also be really interesting to use eye-tracking on participants as they go in the room, validating their stated process of selection of location. If each of those groupings was given a video and 5 minutes to film each other, what would they say or do? Would it be based around their existing relationship, a shared interest or someone’s hair? A self-forming qualitative questionnaire.
What do you think?
natasja
May 16th, 2011 at 9:43 am
I almost agree with you. I mean, you’re absolutely right that most of the times focus groups and surveys may be biased by company intervention (it’s quite like the uncertainty principle in quantum physics) and that listening activity – managed like an etnographer or anthropologist – gives really more sincere results about human behaviour, or better about human beliefs, considerations and opinions. But the best results, IMHO, are achieved by the intergration of social unstructured data with the structured (transactional & demographics) one.
May 16th, 2011 at 9:55 am
@natasja — I like the eye tracking angle
Ethnographies do not have to be entirely subjectives. Sure they contain personal interpretations by the researcher, but that person can be a trained cultural/social anthropologist which would minimize the personal bias. Besides, everything you come up with will have to have human intervention – so it’s hard to avoid human bias altogether.
@Andrea – I don’t disagree with you – in some cases the demographic data may be useful in making assumptions.
Thanks for taking the time to comment on my post.
May 18th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
The approach you’re talking about is very much the approach we take when doing usability testing. When I usability testing first emerged, there was a lot of debate about whether the “data” was acceptable because the approach was more like anthropology and less akin to traditional research. Now, it’s widely accepted.
I absolutely agree that this approach should be used (in conjunction with other, numbers-driven methods) to do marketing research. And, it’s one of the reasons that I believe user-experience personnel should be part of the social media marketing team, as I blogged about: http://ht.ly/4XGyH