Client Question: What Types Of Projects Can I Do With GutCheck?

Our September power user: Jake Taylor

Though many of GutCheck’s users tend to be larger companies with more than one employee, we also see start ups and entrepreneurs use the tool quite often. Jake Taylor is in the latter group, and he’s one of our favorite users. Jake tweets about his use, which we really appreciate seeing, but he also let us know some more details about the kind of work he was doing, and it was pretty interesting.

A graphic and web designer, Jake actually found out about gutcheck from a co-worker that had used it before. He began using the tool back in July, mainly “to vet out logo ideas for a new company’s branding and also to test alternatives for taglines to accompany the logo.” In addition, Jake has used the tool to test consumer adoption campaigns, narrowing down his respondents to the specific area that the campaign was going to be used in.

Jake said one of the benefits to using GutCheck was the discussion guide — because “having a list of questions in the same order every time kept the user feedback easy to track and made sure every user interview was conducted the same way.” Also, obviously the ability to push his logo and other media made the project do-able.

When we see the same users coming back for multiple projects, we notice! We love our loyal users and are always curious about their projects. Want to be a power user? Let us know how you’re using GutCheck or how can we make GutCheck work better for you. Leave us a comment below, let us know on Twitter, or drop us a message on our community page!

Our August power user profile: Mark Travel

Last month, we kicked off our series highlighting the users that make GutCheck work — users who teach us about the app and give us insight into how marketers, advertisers, creative groups and entrepreneurs make research happen. In August, we noticed Mark Travel did a lot of chatting in a very short period of time, and since we saw them pop up so much, we asked how they used the tool.

Like many of our first-time users the Mark Travel team used GutCheck paying as they went, just to make sure they were getting the results they needed before committing to purchasing chats in bulk. They needed quick feedback on some marcom work — including magazine and online advertising campaigns, a brand video, and a revised homepage. They used GutCheck not just because they thought it would be fast, but also because they had to screen out respondents based on age, income and certain travel behaviors using custom questions.

Lauren Schreiner, the director of Mark Travel’s research department, collaborated with the brand team to develop the chat guide. Though she had a guide entering the chat, Lauren told us she was “pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to pull in questions from the ‘question bank’ – or to slip in an unplanned probe to an unanticipated response.” This kind of on-the-fly editing to discussion guides is crucial to getting good feedback, and editing as you go is an easy way to continue to streamline your process and improve your results.

Since their first chat went well — with an engaged respondent and quality feedback — Mark Travel used Team Edition to conduct 15 additional sessions in 8 hours. Like our July power user, (r)evolution, Mark Travel’s moderators also communicated throughout the chat process, and adjusted their questions and guide as the chats progressed. They were able to deliver their topline report to the brand team the next day, providing direction for each of the materials included in the sessions.

Mark Travel really caught our attention for the volume of chats they were able to do in such a short time. As we saw them on the system again and again, it was really inspiring to see work done so quickly and so well. We’re looking forward to seeing how they use our tool in the future!

Want to be a power user? Let us know how you’re using GutCheck or how can we make GutCheck work better for you. Leave us a comment below, let us know on Twitter, or drop us a message on our community page!

Targeting markets by race: authenticity and transparency

A couple of months ago, Tim Peterson wrote about the problem of marketing to specific races — not just recruiting, but also making sure messages are not boiled down to the point of stereotyping. This feeds into the question of exploitation, including using cultural holidays and symbols to sell to a specific market.

This issue touches on a larger question — a question that involves ethnographers, sociologists, and market researchers alike. How do we, as researchers, work outside of our subjectivity?

Google “ethnography + subjectivity” or “ethnography + authenticity” and dozens of academic studies show up. How do we study cultures other than our own without “Othering” them?*

According to Peterson, “be transparent about it.” In other words, it’s ok to say “we’d like to increase our brand’s presence among Hispanics.” That’s what targeting by demographic and segment is all about, afterall. Tip-toeing around race makes it even more of an issue, whereas being upfront and acknowledging a person’s subjectivity lends a moderator credibility. I’d much rather know a company needed to know my opinion because they were interested in increasing visibility among white women in their 20s than have them sneakily tie in questions about the early 90s and how into Titanic I was in 1999. Right?

Additionally (and I’ve been campaigning for this since college [and by "campaigning" I mean "talking about how problematic it is to my coworkers"]), Peterson makes a great critique of the boxed identity problem. He writes:

“Use any consumer interaction with your brand to ask for demographic information but don’t use a drop-down that limits responses to “white,” “black,” Asian,” “Hispanic,” etc. Instead you should let the consumers fill in their own identities, be it Hispanic or Latino or South American or Ecuadorean or Californian. This will give you an idea of how consumers want you to perceive them, and with the right opt-ins, could give you peeks into the behavioral differences among Hispanics and Latinos and South Americans and Ecuadoreans and Californians as they relate to your brand.”

Bingo! Let people define their own subjectivities.** Ask people open-ended questions and dig deeper about where their interests come from. The question of race and ethnicity does not have to be touchy — we’re often just too scared to get it wrong to really focus on doing research right.

*For further reading on the concept of Othering, check out Edward Said’s Orientalism (a synopsis here) and bell hooks’ essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”

**For more on drop down menus and critical cultural analysis, please check out Lisa Nakamura’s “Menu-driven identities: making race happen online” in Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet (2002). It’s a great read.

Domino’s Pizza: Market Research Superfan

In my experience, market research isn’t always viewed as the most hot and exciting industry, and sometimes we take a back seat to our more attractive sibling: Advertising. So while most folks value the importance of understanding consumers’ attitudes and emotions toward their product or brand, the actual research doesn’t have quite the same wow factor as a beautifully constructed piece of creative.

But beginning last year, market research finally got its moment in the sun!

Domino’s Pizza launched a big-budget ad campaign that was mostly memorable for saying their own product tasted like crap. But what got me excited was how they learned that they had been pushing inferior pizza for all these years — good old-fashioned qualitative research. The TV spots featured focus group participants telling Dominos executives that their crust tasted “rubbery” and that the pizza was “low-quality and forgettable.” They quoted other unhappy critics saying the pizza was like “cardboard” with “processed cheese.”

While the campaign (created by our friends at Crispin Porter up in Boulder, CO) was pretty unorthodox, Domino’s credited the honest approach with doubling their profits in the quarter after it came out.

But Domino’s promotion of qualitative research didn’t stop with the initial campaign. Late last year they came out with yet another commercial starring a focus group, this time featuring participants talking about the lack of real cheese before being surprised to find themselves on the real-life dairy farm of one of Domino’s suppliers.

And if you’re still not convinced of the trend, just two months ago Domino’s came out with an ad featuring the chef behind their new chicken recipe. In the ad, CEO Jim Doyle shows us the delivery box for the chicken that has market research built right in! “It’s not great until our customers tell us it’s great,” he tells us.

(Quick aside – what kind of strange methodology have they invented here? Have garbagemen been enlisted to collect the results one greasy response at a time? How representative is pizza box sampling? So many questions…)

While most products that make it to market are tested against a target audience, I believe Domino’s is unique in highlighting this bit of sausage making in the ads themselves (pun intended). Perhaps they just hit on an advertising gimmick to help them stand out, or maybe some rouge researcher has infiltrated and overtaken the marketing department.

But one thing is clear: Domino’s Pizza loves them some market research.