One of my clients is working hard to build a brand around a particular product they offer, in a category that is reasonably undifferentiated. We know how customers choose to shop this category – in many ways it can be a highly pragmatic and unemotional decision.
However, we also know that if we can somehow address the emotional needs of customers (even in a rational category) we have the best chance of creating meaningful brand differentiation and drive customer choice. But how do you get customers to tell us what matters when they might not know it themselves?
We put our thinking caps on. While in-depth interviews are effective at exploring emotions and psychology behind decisions, we opted for focus groups. We wanted to test the social construct around emotional decision-making and we also had some ideas we needed to creatively explore.
But there was method in our madness. We designed clever in-group projective exercises that allowed private capture of the key emotional states that customers currently feel about this category, before exploring the ideal emotional states they would feel if everything was perfect. People told us they felt tired, annoyed and unhappy but wanted to feel energised, motivated and wise.
That in itself was only partially useful; it didn’t go far enough to explaining what my client could say or do to resolve the emotional need. So we probed extensively to get customers to tell us what they felt annoyed about. What was the source of this annoyance? And how could they feel motivated about this product? How might such a product motivate someone?
The outcomes have been fascinating, and while it’s still very much a ‘watch this space’ in terms of visible implementation, I found it an intriguing and stimulating way of showing the spaces that brands can and should operate in within that category.
This is the kind of work that keeps me excited about insights!
Z