the Insight Inn

Marketers all want to know it. So they think: why not ask people about it in research?

It’s the million dollar question— meaning, if I could just pry this information out of consumers in qualitative, I’d be a millionaire several times over by now.

But I have to be honest with my clients— consumers have little (if anything) to offer to help solve for that age-old, pesky conundrum:

What DO everyday folks want to see in marketing?

What really grabs their interest?

What seals the deal toward purchase when they see it in an ad?

I can save you some time and research budget— people have no bloody idea.

Don’t mistake my meaning— that doesn’t mean regular folks don’t have opinions on ads, they DO— and they can give hugely valuable feedback on potential communication ideas, or even provide commentary on existing executions via clutter reels. They are able to provide good “feedback”— and ‘feedback’ is the key term in that sentence: consumers can react TO advertising stimulus, but they cannot pull a discussion on communications out of thin air (the latter of which, my clients often wish they could).

Let me break that down in this next Research Fallacy Friday post:

Research Fallacy Friday #21— If You Want to Know What People Want to See in Marketing, Just Ask Them and Wait

Marketers think about marketing every day, and this means they can both mull over existing ads, and posit about marketing in a theoretical way. They’ve seen (and processed) so much marketing, they can spot patterns, and divide ads up into groups or frameworks to fuel a discussion about ads in the abstract.

(For example, they could identify that these ads include a strong call-to-action, these include an emotional main character, these are slice-of-life, and these others are problem-solution ads, and so-on).

Regular folks CAN’T do that. At all.

Sure, they have SEEN lots of ads in their lives, but they have hardly ‘clocked’ them (as the youth would say)— they have not given them the kind of deliberative attention that would lead to their ability to postulate about them on a theoretical level. Basically, they have not registered them on anything more than the most perfunctory level.

How shallowly are consumers processing ads? Even though they supposedly see thousands a day, they can’t recall a single communication in research when asked the simple question: ‘What is your favorite ad you have seen recently?’.

I have been mandated to ask this question before in fieldwork. It lands with a palpable THUD.

It is one of those ‘flow-breakers’ in qualitative research— participants really want to answer the question, and become quiet to search the recesses of their minds… but STILL come up empty-handed.

Rarely, they might be able name a current ad in response— but typically, the communications they recall on those occasions are almost always by the top 10-highest-spending marketers in the country.

Fancy that.

I’d also point out that ads are incredibly contextual— how people react to them is very category, case, and point-in-time specific. Humor? Great sometimes. And awfully tone-deaf at others. There’s no ‘playbook’ for what works with consumers each and every time, and yet— when asked to talk with people about ads on that theoretical level, that’s what marketers are hoping for.

And don’t get me wrong, I understand why that knowledge would be very nice to have. But without some kind of stimulus to help guide the discussion, talking about ads is really unproductive with consumers.

So, what do people want to see most in ads in STIMULUS-based research?

Like the worst answer to every question, it just depends — what they react positively to changes from project, product to product, brand to brand, or even moment-in-time to moment-in-time— pretty drastically.

After 10 years of talking with consumers, I can’t even predict how people will respond to storyboards or animatics (potential communication ideas that are exposed to them in exposure-based research). They rarely react how I perceive they might, and I’ve been exposing potential ads to people for a long time.

It’s all context-specific.

So, the next time your team is mulling over ads on a higher, more theoretical plane, and hoping consumers might be able to shed some light on evaluating ads in that same way— just remember, they cannot meet you on that level.

Unless you want your moderator to preside over a table of awkward silence.

Even though people are savvier about how advertising works than ever before, and technically ‘see’ more ads than ever before— they just aren’t processing them consciously enough to think about them more abstractly.

In order to understand what people want to see the most in ads, you have to give them STIMULUS, so they have the opportunity to provide feedback— to react to a potential communication in its specific context, with the specific product or service you are marketing, and by naming your specific brand.

It’s the only way to make a dent in the ‘million dollar question’.