To Know Thyself is the Beginning of All Wisdom [Aristotle]… and as it turns out, it’s also the beginning of your Brand Strategy

At SIVO Insights, we spend a lot of time helping our clients understand who their consumers are, what they need and why.  It is just as important to help our clients understand the competitive context within which they operate, to understand where and how their brands can differentiate and create an ownable competitive advantage.

We work with our clients using a three-pronged approach to set a solid brand strategy:

BIG BOX, LITTLE BOX

A simple exercise that teams can use to consider and articulate the market that their brand best competes in, is the “Big Box, Little Box” Model. 

In this model, teams define the market, or “Little Box” that they believe their brand currently operates in, and what benefits they distinctly deliver to that market.  Next, the team considers a broader market definition, the “Big Box”, to understand who is in the brand’s expanded list of competitors and what benefits their product could distinctly deliver in that broader context.  By doing this exercise, the team broadens their view of who they are truly competing with and where they can source volume.  This helps teams reframe how they present their brand and its ownable benefits to the world. i.e., the brand positioning, which in turn, impacts future renovation, innovation, and communication efforts.

Trending

Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?

CONSIDER THIS EXAMPLE

A team that manages a coffee brand might define their “Little Box” as the Coffee category.  In that competitive context, the team will likely focus on functional coffee benefits such as richest flavor or best price, to compete with other coffee brands.  But when they broadened their view of the competitive context to the “Big Box”, they might find that they are competing with the broader ‘caffeinated beverage’ market.  In this context, the key benefits that the team may focus on to differentiate and compete with caffeinated sodas and energy drinks would be things like “warmth, comfort, and enabling your morning ritual.”

INFORM YOUR STRATEGY

The big box, little box model allows teams to…

Discover who they are truly competing with

Reframe their brand strengths within the broader, and likely more accurate, competitive context

Identify which brand benefits are most ownable and distinctive vs. the competitive set

Reconsider who their target consumer is and how to position the brand to meet the needs of this larger consumer target group

SIVO INSIGHTS ACTION PLAN

Our experts can…

Facilitate a Big Box/Little Box exercise with your team

Execute a qualitative exploration to understand where your brand truly competes

Execute an Attitude and Usage (A&U) study to quantify which competitive products/categories are true competitors

Facilitate a workshop, using the learning above, to rethink and redefine brand strategy

Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com for more information and next steps.

What is a Consumer Target 

At the foundation of all great marketing initiatives is a complete and deep understanding of the consumer target. The consumer target is a specific and detailed description of the type of person who has needs or desires that you believe can be served or helped with your products or services. Truly identifying and understanding the consumer target can inspire creative and innovative thinking to help grow your brand through new products, marketing campaigns, or promotions that fulfill their needs and wants. 

Segmenting the Market to Identify Your Consumer Target 

Teams must be focused and clear about who their consumer target is and is not. This consumer does not represent everyone that purchases your product or service.  

A typical first step to identifying your consumer target is to segment the market you operate in. Market or consumer segmentation is a market research approach that allows you to divide the universe of potential consumers into smaller groups or segments based on their characteristics. The segments are composed of consumers who will respond similarly to marketing strategies because they have shared demographics, needs, interests, values and/or locations. Once the market has been segmented, an assessment is required to understand which segment of consumers offer the most potential for growth, i.e., which group is most likely to find value and be motivated by your business proposition and respond to your initiatives, across the 4Ps of product, placement, pricing, and promotion. 

Building Knowledge About Your Consumer Target 

While segmentation is a great first step in identifying your consumer target, it is only the beginning. Every day you will be faced with making business decisions based on what you know about your consumer target and how you think they will respond to your actions. You should have basic knowledge covering five key areas: 

1. What are their basic demographics? 
2. How do they live their lives? 
3. What do they care about? 
4. How and where do they shop? 
5. How do they interact with media?

Answering these questions requires a combination of sales data analyses, quantitative assessments such as, attitude and usage studies plus, qualitative, or observational techniques such as, in-depth interviews, in-store shop-alongs, and in-home ethnographic research to fully immerse in how your consumer target thinks, lives and shops. Oftentimes, this is referred to as developing the consumer target persona.

Building Consumer Empathy 

The ultimate goal is to build empathy for and intuition about your consumer target. You need knowledge to understand what is in their head (how they think) and empathy to understand what is in their hearts (how they feel and their underlying motivations). Most of the time, you yourself are not the target consumers so you must spend time with them to truly understand their lives, values, beliefs, and behaviors. The goal should be to move through the following spectrum to be able to genuinely empathize with your consumer target.

How to Get to Empathy for Your Consumer Target 

Building empathy is different from conducting a typical market research study. Market research is designed to answer specific business questions by getting feedback and perspective from consumers. For instance, you might conduct market research to understand how your product compares to the competition or what product varieties you should launch next. 

An empathy trek is solely designed to gain better understanding of who your consumer target is. It is a listening and observation exercise, designed to help you “walk in their shoes” and “feel what they feel.” In an empathy trek, you’ll explore how your consumer target lives, what they value, believe and how they behave. By building consumer empathy, you will build your intuition about them, and are able to make business decisions on their behalf. 

The Value of Truly Knowing Your Consumer Target 

The value of building empathy for your consumer target is tremendous. Specifically, it can:  

• Eliminate personal bias from business decisions and keep the team focused on consumer-centric decision making 
• Create informed intuition that enables better, faster decisions  
• Take you beyond just understanding to actually anticipating consumer needs  
• Improve the quality of marketing communications, product innovation and renovation efforts 
• Unlock exceptional customer service 

Your Source for Expert Consumer Insights   

As you and your team learn more about your consumer, your marketing and innovation ideas will get more targeted at serving their needs, which will in turn, make them more successful. Ideally, you will be able to reach them at key moments of truth, physically or digitally with personalized content that improves the brand experience and loyalty. 

At SIVO, we are dedicated to helping our clients identify and understand their consumer target’s perceptions, needs, beliefs, and behaviors. We create learning plans that will help you gain valuable insights by applying the right approaches to identify your market segments, consumer target persona and to build consumer empathy for you and your team.

Contact us via our website form or email us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call! 

SIVO Interview with Mary McIlrath, Children and Family Market Research Expert

By Kerry Juhl

Recently, SIVO, Inc. was lucky enough to have Mary McIlrath join our expanding team.  Mary has amassed a wealth of experience in Children and Family market research.  She is a recognized expert in the generations space, having established a successful Generation Z and Generation Alpha research practice in her past role. She has taught MBA courses in Qualitative Research at the University of Wisconsin and Quantitative Research at the University of Illinois and lectured at Northwestern University. 

I recently sat down with Mary to discuss her experience with studying families and generational differences.   

Question: Mary, you have been studying families and generational differences for most of your career.  How did you become a subject matter expert on this topic?

Mary: I have always been fascinated by understanding generational differences and family dynamics.  I come from both industry and academic perspectives—it’s common for former academics to work in industry, but it’s rare birds like me who keep a foot in both disciplines over a career.  I’ve been able to harvest the best of both worlds.  For example, my academic experience instilled a mindset that respondents should benefit as much or more than the researcher.  This is particularly important when working with children and adolescents. Their needs come first; when they are met, the client also benefits. Industry experience has helped me be effective and efficient in conducting research. My dual expertise gives me a deep toolbox of constructs and methods to help my clients achieve their business objectives, with the well-being of the family at center stage. 

Question:  Mary, what does a typical U.S. family look like today?

Mary: It’s something in continuous flux. Sometimes it’s single-parent households. Sometimes it’s families with two dads. Sometimes it’s blended homes containing multiple generations.  What has gradually become less common is the Norman Rockwellian image of two opposite-gender people raising a gaggle of kids with traditional gender roles. For instance, in 1968, 85% of children under 18 yrs. old lived with two parents (regardless of marital status) but that number has dropped to 70% in 2020. About 25% of children live with a single parent in the household.* 

Question: How are manufacturers and marketers responding to the needs of today’s children and families? 

Mary: It’s a sea change from how brands thought about families in the early days of youth research in the 1980s and 1990s. Those who used to make simple toys, TV shows, or food and beverages for kids are now thinking of how to stay relevant with their offerings and communication in the Metaverse. They are thinking about what is to come in Augmented Reality (AR) since Pokemon Go flipped the script. They are brainstorming what Virtual Reality (VR) will look like. That’s no small task, especially since children’s sense of balance and depth are still developing and putting them outside 3D spaces risks hampering their natural brain development.  

Question: What is the latest regulatory environment for marketing and advertising to youth and families?

Mary: If you work on kid brands, it is critical to understand global ethics around marketing and advertising to children and families. Countries around the world have differing laws about when it is acceptable to advertise to young people. Those in the U.S. are the least restrictive because of industry self-established watchdogs like CARU (Children’s Advertising Review Unit). This organization does regular and thorough audits of marketing campaigns to children and calls out/suggests changes to anything that seems unfair.  

Question: How does this impact conducting market research with kids and families?

Mary:  In the U.S. it’s allowable to do research directly with children with a parent’s consent. It’s “cleaner” data coming straight from children rather than filtered through parents who mistakenly think they know what their kids truly want.  

Question: What are a few of your best practices for conducting market research with kids and families?

Mary: Here are a few tips from my experience:  

• Design: Online qualitative research is flourishing now with kids. Sending a “top secret” envelope of concepts or a box of items to unwrap in sequence during an interview, a.k.a., “unboxing”, keeps kids and parents engaged and sharpens their thinking about the items in front of them. Post-pandemic families are used to having Zoom calls, giving virtual room tours, and even running out of the room to gather “show and tell” of their own. Plus, we often get “bonus sibling” insights.
  
• Screening/Recruiting:   Use a battery of questions to set the child up for success for the given method—every child is a consumer and their opinions matter, but every tool doesn’t make them feel good or accomplished about the process when it’s over.
  
• The Guide/Questionnaire: Be visual in qualitative and quantitative research.  And, with in-person qualitative, use kinesthetics exercises to gather their opinions and perceptions (e.g., full-body voting, stretch breaks).
  
• Seating: Make sure you get assent from the child, even if it’s a simple verbal “yes” that they want to proceed. If they say no, gently excuse them. Everyone has a bad day sometimes or finds the environment scary!
  
• Analysis: Kids have a positivity bias. They want to please and say what they think the researcher wants to hear. Filter what they say through a lens of reality.  Sometimes friend-pairs can help get to the truth.

SIVO is excited for Mary to join our team and strengthen our Children and Family market research capabilities. To learn about how kids and families interact with and think about your brand, please reach out to us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com. 

*source: 2020 Census Bureau's Current Population Survey 

By Ashton Walz

Are you new to Market Research? Or do you know someone who is new to market research? Many of us came out of business school with no more than one market research class under our belts so that means we had to learn the art and science of market research while on the job. But learning our craft while doing the job can be tricky because you're often "trying to safely fly the airplane while building it."  With this in mind, the SIVO team thought it would be great to share the basics of quantitative online survey design with the next generation of market researchers out there.  To our experienced clients and friends, please feel free to pass these nuggets on to someone new to our industry!

The Art of the Market Research Survey

An online survey for quantitative market research can be the key to gaining critical insight into your market, consumer, brand, product, or competition. Collecting this valuable data will lead to a better understanding of the market you operate in and your consumers’ preferences, opinions, behaviors, and needs. Leveraging the data and insights gathered from surveys, business teams can make informed decisions, shape their strategies, and refine their products or services. 

But collecting this data can be tricky.  If the survey is not designed well, organizations can be misled by inaccurate data.  Market researchers have a phrase for this…“Garbage in, garbage out.” No one wants to make bad decisions from bad information so here are 10 tips for writing a great market research survey. 

10 Tips for Great Online Surveys

Survey development requires both rigor and creativity. It takes experience and practice to get it right but there are some basic rules that will help you garner more accurate results:

1. Define Your Objectives

Clearly establish the purpose and objectives of your survey. Identify the specific information you want to gather and the decisions or actions that will be influenced by the survey results. This should be done first to give your survey questions purpose and direction. A best practice is to categorize your survey questions under each business objective so that when the data is collected, you know that you’ll have the answers you need.

2. Include an Introduction and Instructions

Provide a clear introduction at the beginning of the survey, explaining the purpose, importance, and estimated time for completion. Include instructions for navigating the survey and answering the questions.

3. Ensure Anonymity and Confidentiality

Assure respondents that their answers will remain confidential and anonymous. Avoid collecting personally identifiable information unless necessary for specific research purposes. Be transparent about how you will handle, store and share out the data. This allows the respondent to be comfortable and candid in their responses, which improves accuracy and depth of insight.

4. Avoid Leading or Biased Questions

Frame questions in a neutral manner to avoid biasing the respondents' answers. Use balanced language and avoid leading statements that could influence the respondents' opinions. A survey created with biased questions will ultimately be thrown out as the respondent’s answers are not representative of how they actually feel. An example of a leading question is, “Which product features do you find most useful?” This question assumes that consumers find the product useful when they might not find it useful at all.

5. Provide Response Options

Offer a variety of response options that cover the range of possible answers. Include options like "don't know" or "prefer not to answer" to account for respondents who may not have a specific answer or may be uncomfortable sharing certain information. In doing so, it becomes a lot easier to avoid bad data and get an accurate look at your consumer target’s preferences. 

6. Use Logical Flow and Organization

Organize your survey in a logical and coherent order. Start with easy, less intimidating questions to engage respondents and progressively move towards more specific or sensitive topics. By using this ‘funnel’ technique it helps prime the respondent to think more critically when the in-depth questions come up. This organization can also help the researcher to weed out any respondents that would not provide accurate or helpful information for the study. (e.g., if someone doesn’t buy carbonated water, don’t ask them what their favorite flavor is.)

7. Avoid Double-barreled questions

To ensure that your data is clear and insightful, be sure to avoid asking about two topics in a single question as it creates ambiguity in the data and leaves the analyst wondering how to interpret it. For instance, the question, “Please rate how well you like the lighting and atmosphere of this store?” leaves the analyst wondering if the respondent considered the lighting, the atmosphere or both when providing a rating.

8. Make it Interesting

A well-designed market research survey aims to uncover crucial information while simultaneously engaging with the target audience, to cultivate a sense of involvement. A mix of closed and open-ended question types can create a more interactive and enjoyable survey. Not only does it provide for an immersive experience but generally leaves the respondent feeling like they are being heard as they can freely express themselves through various types of questions.

9. Keep Survey Length under 15 minutes

In the same vein as making the survey interesting, survey length should be no longer than 15 minutes and ideally, 12 minutes or less. When respondents get fatigued, it can negatively impact their attention and diligence which impacts data accuracy. Long lengths also lead to incomplete surveys as respondents drop off.

10. Test Your Survey

Before launching the survey, conduct a pilot test with a small group of respondents to identify any confusing or problematic questions. Adjust based on their feedback to ensure clarity and relevance. This can prove to be extremely useful as there could be some things the survey designer didn’t catch that a respondent will.

Your Source for Expert Consumer Insights 

At SIVO, Inc., we dedicate ourselves to creating engaging and accurate quantitative market research surveys that help you better understand your market and consumers. We are experts in developing the appropriate questions and applying the right analytic techniques to deliver insights that meet your business objectives.  

Contact us via our website form or email us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call!