Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

How can you bring more empathy into your own work? It doesn’t necessarily require a team of experts or weeks of preparation. Here are a few of the different techniques that we use to gather insights and aid our understanding of what matters to customers:

Stakeholder Interviews.
Why not start with the people who (hopefully) know their customers’ best- your clients. But don’t limit yourself to your immediate contacts. Reach out to anyone in the organization for interacts directly with customers. Call centers are a particularly rich trove of people who know what’s on customers’ minds.

Secondary Research.
In addition to professional resources, including this publication, the Internet has created an explosion of user-generated content. There’s a nice synergy between our desire to better understand consumer behavior and motivations and the explosion of sites that allow regular people to catalog their lives online. I love combing through Flickr photo pools and sites like Grocery Lists or Squirl, a social catalogue.

Quantitative Research
Clients are usually most comfortable and familiar with this kind of traditional market research. We usually offer closed-end surveys to random samples of site visitors, and more directed questions to panels. Online surveys are less expensive than phone surveys, and are particularly useful for web-only brands.

Qualitative Research
This is a broad category that includes conversational discussions with customers, in-depth interviews, intercept surveys, and focus groups. These are typical methods used in advertising to find the voice of the customer. Customers can say what they want to if they are asked to make choices within a familiar product category, for example, how seat leather should smell. You run into limitations when you ask customers about the unknown. Nobody ever asked for an iPod in a focus group.

Within the world of qualitative research, there are several interesting sub-categories that focus particularly on developing an empathetic understanding of customers.

1. Observational Research
We observe customers in their natural environment, at home or at work rather than in a formal research setting. It’s time-consuming to collect this data, which makes it important to pick the right subjects. We also set aside time for analysis. Professional ethnographic research firms do highly structured, multi-week and sometimes global engagements – I call our basic observations Napkin Ethnography.

2. Experiential Research
Why not become a customer yourself? When we first signed on Geek Squad as a client, two members of the strategy team scheduled in-house service calls to see what it was like to be a Geek Squad customer. We also booked a rival company to compare the experience.

3. Participatory Research
For the bravest of clients, we involve users themselves in designing the ideal experience themselves. This can range from card sorting exercises to choose understandable taxonomy to suggestions about site functionality. Beware feature creep! Customers don’t expect to have to make tradeoffs (remember Homer Simpson’s dream car?).

Once you have all this research, what should you do with it? At Organic, we distill our research into personas, archetypal representations of actual users and their needs. Personas include basic demographic information, psychographic profiles, and insights about observed behavior. Great personas should invoke empathy. If your persona doesn’t generate affection, empathy or opinion from your team, in all likelihood it’s too generic.

We tend to customize our research approach based on how much a client feels they already know about their customers. But we will not skimp on persona development. The persona itself can take many forms, from a single sheet of paper to a video biography to a set of physical artifacts. I’ll talk in more depth about the way personas are expressed in another column.

Overall, I find that our focus on empathetic research is moving us away from the techniques of traditional marketing (typically focus groups and other consumer panels) and closer to the realm of user-centered design, particularly disciplines like product design and environmental design. As advertisers, I would love to see us work more closely more freely from design community. Ultimately we share a common focus—the design of meaningful customer experiences.