The Need for Empathetic Research: From Consumer to Human Insights

A well-known observation we all agree with is that consumers lack attention today across most categories and segments. So, what do we do? Do we leave our efforts to chance by saying this is the nature of the market? Is there a way to understand consumers and connect with them? I feel it makes sense to investigate the rearview and then gaze into the future.

How marketing research was done in the past

Research initially was carried out for census by the government or to get feedback on products in order to understand people’s recall and perception about a stimulus that was broadcasted. This was the era of asking ‘what’ (viz. what did you recall, what did you like or dislike etc.). This shifted to understanding the motivations, desires, beliefs, dreams, and aspirations of consumers. Since these were detailed deep dives into the consumer’s psyche, the coverage was not as vast as quantitative (feedback-led research). But these informed the marketers about the ‘how to market part’.

The next big leap in research was about understanding mindsets and grouping people into similar mindsets based on their attitudes, beliefs, dreams and desires. This combined qualitative and quantitative methodologies that were deployed separately. This is when segmentation, targeting and positioning gained importance in the marketing universe. But what happened after this was interesting. Our behaviours could be recorded and observed based on what we clicked on, what we watched, what we did not watch, the kind of phone we used and other similar parameters.

With the internet becoming air for most of us, the way we understood consumers shifted. We started categorising and grouping people into segments based on their behaviour. With the development of tech horsepower fused with the improving analytical skillsets, we started talking of Big Data and predictive analytics. Moneyball was a good case in point of how tech and analytics came to predict the outcome in sports. That is pleasantly outstanding! I would urge everyone to stop and take a breather. Do we feel we have been able to predict consumer behaviour using these tools and techniques? If we haven’t what are we missing out on?

Why is empathy important in research today?

We keep talking about consumers have evolved, and their relationship with brands has changed.  They no longer want to be the lean-back consumers, but they are participating and walking the walk with the brands. They consider brands as equals and hence their interactions with the brands have become more participatory, talk of experiential marketing.

In our pursuit to ‘understand’ our consumers, we enhance our sense of knowing by asking what they consume, how do they consume, where do they consume, when do they consume and even why do they consume. Most of the above questions will be available in the transactional data and the ‘why’ can be unearthed through the qualitative methodologies.

Are we missing out on anything here? Yes, the role of emotions. The above construct has considered humans as rational beings and therefore, a belief that our behaviour will be predictable based on the context.

It’s a known fact that we are emotional creatures and most of our decision-making process is intuitive and driven by past experiences and beliefs that we develop over time, most of which are based on how we felt in our previous experiences in the same or similar situations.

The moment we start breaking the above fact into its components, it won’t be a surprise to understand that these experiences influence us not because we got to ‘know’ something out of them but because these experiences made us feel a certain way. It’s easy to observe someone’s behaviour or analyse the database of transactions, but it will be difficult to identify what emotion was felt while deciding, what we call a ‘moment of truth’. Our knowledge of ‘moment of truth’ and ‘category entry points’ are based on what, when, where and why; what is also needed to be added as an important layer in the emotion (how we feel in this situation).

Empathising within the context is what Design Thinking has been propagating. Do we deploy the principles of design thinking to our research as insights professionals? What would it take to integrate questions related to how we feel when we interact with something? How would our appreciation of consumers’ context change when we add this layer of feeling in the moment of consumption?

What if we created a map of feelings associated across categories and associated them with the emotional associations that these categories or product experiences triggered, would that change the definition of category adjacencies? Would that change the way we defined our categories? Would we then start looking at how people behave considering how they felt while thinking of consuming or interacting with a product? Were you feeling happy while swiping your card for a vacation; were you feeling stressed while swiping your card to pay the overdue fine? The card remains the same, and transactions remain the same; what changes in the two situations is the emotional context and hence what gets impacted is the expectation from the product.

There are quite a few tools and techniques out there that can be integrated for a full-fledged enquiry of consumers’ emotions. One of the handy ones, that I use is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions; I have used Plutchik’s wheel to identify the associated emotional zone and then use that lens to see if a certain positioning would appeal to that state of emotion. Another powerful technique that I use is the metaphor elicitation technique to understand the world and pivotal associations in the consumers’ minds, these metaphors are linked to stories that we tell ourselves, and that, in turn, are based on our worldview linked to deep-rooted feelings. Even I am experimenting with this and would love to hear about this from you. What tool do you feel comfortable using in your research work to understand the emotional map of your category entry points and moments of truth?

Are we staring at another breakthrough where we figure out how to quantify emotions and their linkages drawing up a deep-rooted map of emotions and category consumption?

Let’s take steps towards appreciating our behaviour through the lens of being human, tools and techniques will evolve to help us appreciate and not just understand our own behaviour better!