Focus Groups to Determine Brand Messaging

 

Often brand messaging can be more difficult than one might imagine, especially for larger organizations that offer a myriad of products or services that appeal to different customer groups. And functional benefits may not be the most powerful things to promote to stimulate purchase and especially repeat purchase and brand loyalty. Often, it is shared values and emotional, experiential or self-expressive benefits that have the most power to motivate purchase decisions.

So, if the objective is to determine the optimal brand positioning and messaging, especially succinct and powerful messaging, the focus groups should include a discussion of the following:

• Customer beliefs, attitudes, values, anxieties, hopes, fears, motivations and behaviors
• How purchase decisions are made
• What other product or services, if any, they considered in the purchase decision
• What the purchase experience was like
• What the product or service usage experience was like
• Asking them how they felt while using the brand's products or services
• Talking about the brand as if it were a person, identifying the adjectives that best define the brand
• Identifying what they believe the brand's values are
• Perceived relevance of the brand and its products or services
• The need that led to considering the brand
• Asking them to use only one word to describe the brand
• Asking them how they would sell the brand to someone who was unfamiliar with the brand
• Asking them what the most important things about the brand are to them

Another insightful question to ask would be, "What would the world miss most if the brand ceased to exist?"

Usually, you would want to talk with loyal customers, new customers and customers who have walked away from the brand after having purchased its products and services previously.

This will lead you to a potent motivating unique value proposition and messaging for the brand. 

Did you notice that I did not include questions about the product's or service's functions and features? While this might become part of the discussion, these are rarely the things that sell the brand. 

I wish you great success in gaining insight into customer's motivations for purchasing your brand's products and services.

Do you know how non-customers perceive your brand?

To be efficient in marketing spending, brands usually focus on their best customers first and then on their other customers. Typical objectives are to increase their customers' individual average transactions (IAT), spending and share of wallet. They often also want to increase customer loyalty. Less often, brands allocate marketing resources to communicating with potential customers, especially if one of their top objectives is to increase their base. Sales-driven organizations sometimes error on the side of bringing in new customers at the expense of constantly earning the loyalty of current customers, but this is an expensive proposition and one that is difficult to sustain in the long-run.

But I am increasingly witnessing this problem among brands. They know how to speak to their current customers well but they have not invested enough in understanding how to speak to non-customers. This is especially problematic if the non-customers are potential customers or if their current customer base is shrinking. These organizations become insular, only interacting with current customers and only understanding how current customers perceive them. Often, they only communicate through customer-specific channels and publications, failing to communicate or influence the brand narrative in other forums. Further, they do not invest in marketing research focused on non-customers who could become customers. Because of this, they really don't understand why those people have not become customers. 

I have found that some of the deepest insights come from non-customers and former customers. If you understand how they perceive your brand you can better position your brand to retain current customers and attract new ones. 

Don't make the mistake of understanding and communicating only with those who are closest to your brand. Don't become an organizational echo chamber. Much can be learned from understanding and communicating with those who are not part of your brand's family but who could be if you tried to better understand their concerns, needs and perceptions.

Thinking Like A Customer

In assessing marketing talent, there is one thing that sets hyper-successful marketers apart from everyone else - they can put themselves in their consumers' shoes and they do so all of the time. 

Designing a website? Who will use it? What are their needs? What will they be looking for? What will they notice first? What information do you want to convey to them? What do you want them to do? What language will they understand best? What is the optimal navigation path for them?

Writing copy for an email campaign? Who are you writing for? Where are they in the process of interacting with your brand? How do they feel about your brand? What do they need to know now? What will hold their attention? What do you want them to do? What next step do you want them to take?

Creating a television ad? To whom should this ad appeal? What state of mind will they be in when they are watching the ad? How familiar are they with your brand? How will you appeal to their values and their emotions? Do you know what their values are? How do you want them to respond to the ad? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do next?

Top marketers naturally think like this - not just once in awhile but all of the time. 

If you encounter a "marketer" who seldom considers the customer's perspective, don't hire him or her. If that person is a close friend, suggest that he or she might consider pursuing another career. This insight has to come naturally and it has to be active 24/7. 

I have encountered marketers who are good at graphic design or copywriting or social media but do not think in this way. At best they will be good tacticians if given enough direction. But they will never be great marketers. 

Do you want to be a great marketer? Think like your customers. Put yourself in their shoes.

Think Like The Customer

I was meeting with the marketing committee of a not-for-profit organization on whose board I sit earlier today. We were discussing a major report that we intend to release to the community. The report is on a rather technical subject - river quality - and we talked about crafting frequency asked questions (FAQ) to accompany the report and press release.

This made me think of something that all skilled marketers are able to do. That is, put themselves in the customer's shoes and think and act like the customer. This includes knowing what concerns are on the customers' minds, how they are likely to view and process different topics, where they go to get their information, what their preconceived notions are, who they are inclined to believe and what is most important to them.

So taking the FAQ document that would accompany a river quality report card as an example, here are some of the questions that I would imagine might be asked:

• Does this mean we can swim in the river without worrying?
• What impact will this have on beach openings?
• Can we eat fish that we caught from the river?
• Should we worry if we get a mouth full of water?
• Is the water potable, that is, is it ok for drinking?
• When did you measure the water quality?
• How often do you intend to measure it going forward? How often will we see updated report cards?
• What exactly are you measuring? 
• What are you not measuring that we should worry about?
• What is the biggest source of pollution?
• Who is the biggest polluter?
• Is there anything I can do to help clean up the river?
• How long will it be before the river is completely clean again?

I am not going to include the complete list of potential questions. But my point is that a marketer must always try to think like the customer. What is on his or her mind? What is he or she worried about? How will he or she react to this? If you were a water quality engineer or scientist you might have come up with a different set of FAQs, but would they have addressed the community's actual questions and concerns or would they have missed the mark?

I have noticed a similar thing in survey construction. A survey is not constructed with the respondent in mind if the most frequent answer to a list of possible responses is "other (please specify)." It means that the person who supplied the answer options really doesn't understand what is most important to the respondent. Sometimes the person who constructs the survey is so clueless that the list of options does not include anything that the respondent would choose. That becomes problematic because then the respondent has to pick something that he or she would not normally pick just to move ahead in the survey. 

As a marketer, you must understand your customer well enough to ask the right questions, create compelling messaging, place the marketing messages in the right media and get the customer to make an actual purchase. 

So, the bottom line is that you must think like the customer if you are to be successful as a marketer. And, while you may not be the target customer yourself, you must have done enough research and have enough empathy and insight to be able to walk in the customer's shoes anyway.

The Ten Most Important Things to Know About Your Customers

Most marketers agree that market research and customer insights are very important to brand management and marketing strategy. This begs the question, "What are the most important things a marketer needs to know about his or her brand's customers?"

Here is my list of the ten most important questions a marketer needs to answer about his or her customers through research:

1. What needs (functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive) are fulfilled by products or services in your brand's product or service category?
2. Which of those needs are met by all brands and which are met by only a few or no brands?
3. Which product/service functions or features are critical and which are optional?
4. Who shops the category?
5. How can the category's customers be segmented? Which segments promise the greatest potential for  your brand?
6. What are the customer's unmet needs within your brand's product or service category?
7. What are his or her frustrations within the category?
8. Who or what does your customer listen to (website, expert, friend, periodical, trade show, etc.) to make decisions in your brand's product or service category?
9. Where is he or she most likely to go (distribution channels and specific stores) to find products or services like yours?
10. How sensitive is he or she to prices within the category? What are his or her expected prices and what are the maximum prices he or she would be willing to pay?

Marketers Must Interact with Customers

We in the marketing community interact with each other a lot. We have our own language and our own issues. Advertising people move from agency to agency. And marketing people move from company to company. We attend the same conferences. And we are concerned about the same latest technologies and marketing techniques. 

This is reason enough to get out of our marketing "box" and spend some time with our customers. The other more important reason is so that we do not lose touch with the people to whom we are marketing.

Many companies require their marketing people to spend a few months to a year as salespeople before assuming marketing roles. Some companies require their marketers to monitor customer service calls several times a year. Some require marketing people to work on the front lines in customer facing positions at least a couple times a year. Other companies have required their marketing employees to role play the lives of some of their customers. Some research projects require anthropological research in which the marketer must observe customers as they purchase and use the brand's products. Harley-Davidson executives ride in HOG Rallies with their customers and then debrief what they saw and heard back at the office after the HOG rallies. One research technique for children and young adults is to ask them to take pictures of whatever they want in their lives for a period of time and then submit those pictures to the marketers to sort through and analyze. 

The point of all of this is to stay close to your customers and their lives so that you can understand and even anticipate their needs. This is an essential role of every successful marketer.

New Brands Require Research

We are occasionally approached by entrepreneurs or smaller businesses to help them figure out their brand, product or business model strategies. We are working with one such brand now. In these situations, often the entrepreneur creates a company, product or brand around personal intuition and insight. But maybe that entrepreneur or company is stumped about how to grow the brand. They are not sure in what direction they need to move next to take the brand to the next level. 

Usually, this is because they do not understand what it is about the product or brand that most appeals to the customer. They are not sure of its primary benefit, its purchase triggers or what sort of person is buying it and for what reason. Sometimes, the product or brand is so innovative that it is difficult for them to even articulate what category it is in. This lack of understanding makes it difficult to decide how to tweak the product or brand to take it to the next level. It also makes it difficult to understand in what ways the brand can be most successfully extended to generate additional sales. Sometimes, they need to drive down costs to make the product viable in the long run but they don't know which features they can eliminate without harming sales. At other times, they may not know how to convert impulse sales into repeat purchases. Some worry that their products or brand are primarily selling as a novelty and they are not quite sure about how to guarantee a lasting revenue stream. Sometimes the brand and the product work very well together. At other times, they are sending conflicting messages.

All of these problems can be solved through customer research that leads to customer insight. One must begin with deep qualitative research to uncover purchase motivations, brand perceptions and an understanding of what needs the brand fulfills in people's lives. This should also uncover how the brand makes people feel, when they feel compelled to purchase the brand and what are some of the brand's purchase triggers. The quality of qualitative research moderators varies hugely. Some merely sit at the end of a focus group table and ask questions, while others have a very large box of tools to stimulate deep insight. The latter are often more expensive, but they are almost always worth the extra investment. A lot of valuable insights can be garnered through well thought through deep qualitative research. This can then lead to quantitative research design. The quantitative research might be an attitude and usage study, a customer benefit segmentation study, a brand equity study (if their is high enough brand awareness) or a study that leads to customer targeting and volumetric forecasting. 

Here are the questions that need to be asked:

• Who is buying our products or brand?
• Why are they buying our products or brand?
• What triggers them to buy our products or brand?
• What can we do to get them to repeat their purchase of our products or brand?
• Are our products and brand congruent with one another or are they working against each other?
• What are the most viable paths for extending our brand to generate incremental sales?
• What is the essence of our brand?
• What deep needs does the brand fulfill?
• What does it promise to its customers and potential customers?
• Who are our brand's most viable customers?
• What are our brand's most promising customer need segments?

Taking your brand to the next level might require deeper customer insight. Research to uncover that insight can have a huge payoff if designed and conducted properly. 

Brand Inundation/Depravation Testing

Do you want to better understand the benefits that your brand’s product or service delivers? Do you want to discover ways to increase use of your brand’s products and services? Try this: Identify a group of very light users and ask them to use your product or service as frequently as your heaviest users do for an extended period of time (at least through several usage cycles). Identify a group of heavy users and ask them to refrain from using your product or service for the same period of time. Ask the latter group to articulate what they used in lieu of your product or service to accomplish the same result. Ask both groups to keep a journal of their thoughts and feelings as they use or refrain from using your product or service. Follow up with in-depth, one-on-one interviews to better understand the role your brand’s products and services play in their lives. I guarantee you that this exercise will provide profound insight into the full potential for your brand’s products and services.

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition, available here.

Understanding the Customer

Brand naming, brand positioning, brand architecture, product design, package design, advertising campaigns - what do all of these and every other marketing component have in common? To be successful, they must be based on a deep understanding of the customer, including his beliefs, attitudes, values, hopes, fears, desires and needs.

I continue to be surprised by how many of our clients lack this customer insight. They create new brands and sub-brands without it. They name brands without it. The create tag lines without it. They design products without it. They create new packaging without it. And they even develop new advertising campaigns without it.

Every organization should have resources and processes/mechanisms to gain deep customer insight. This could be in the form of consumer managers, marketing research professionals, salesforce feedback mechanisms, customer co-creation processes or something else.

Related to this is the belief that "our brand is for everyone," giving the marketer a "pass" on creating more focused marketing messages and campaigns. "We can't say anything in particular because our brand appeals to such a large cross-section of people."

Central to brands are their focus and targeting. This is what makes them relevant and compelling. Take the time to get to know your customers so that you are able to focus all that you do for greatest advantage based on their particular beliefs, attitudes, values, hopes, fears, desires and needs.

I wish you every success with this.