What Do We Do in People’s Subconscious?
I ask myself the question in the title from time to time. The reason for this is that in addition to the information that will be very useful for us in people’s subconscious, we also encounter very private and personal information. But we have no other choice. In traditional research, when we ask people directly what they want, what they think, they are either not very aware of it or (worse still) they lie.
Kahneman and Tversky’s nearly revolutionary Thinking Fast and Slow, he states that two systems are effective in our decisions. He puts forward a hypothesis that we make most of our decisions (90%) with System 1, which we describe as subconscious. I don’t think this is an argument anyone can easily argue against. That’s good to know, a lot of experts in marketing activities care about it. The question is, how are we going to do this when our research is still mostly pulling data from System 2? The expectation of influencing people’s subconscious with the data you obtain at the conscious level is limited to feelings, luck and individual abilities. However, like everything else, there is a math to it.
Use of Traditional Research
What can you hear about shampoo usage habits from a focus group study today? As a chocolate brand, what do you encounter that your competitors are not aware of? What kind of insight will help you customize your product beyond competitors and even develop new product ideas?
Many of the methods we use for qualitative research provide us with very superficial data. Moreover, the effect of the situation created specifically for the research from time to time is controversial. How can you pretend to be yourself when you have someone watching over you? Or, how openly do you express how you feel and what you think when you are in a studio, in a room with mirrors, with 5-6 people you do not know next to you?
We all know the answer to these questions. I’m not condescending to focus group research. I do not find it technically wrong, as some claim. When it comes to the manipulation of data, sometimes it even makes sense if we are aware of it. None of us live alone in nature.
Traditional research is still very practical in areas we have little or no knowledge of. Moreover, it is risk-free as an economic and quality standard. However, it is insufficient when it comes to innovation and differentiation.
How Do We Reach the Subconscious?
In the presentation of a research we conducted, a senior executive made the following sentence: “We have been doing this research for years, we have never heard of such a thing about the X brand (the largest and dominant brand in the market).” So I replied, “Because you haven’t gotten this deep before.”
It was very instructive research for us. Now, let me give some examples of subliminal data we have obtained in some research and strategic decisions based on it.
- One of the participants’ sentences summed up the information we found about a brand in the mother-baby market very well. “If the brand X was a person, it would be my mother-in-law; maybe she’s saying very true things but I don’t like the way she says it”. This was related to the feeling of inadequacy we observed subconsciously about mothers. The competitor brand was unwittingly making mothers feel more inadequate with what they did and said. The perfect mother image and high pricing power caused this.< /li>
For this reason, we have developed a strategy for the brand that keeps the communication tone equal to the mother, unlike its competitors.
- In a study we conducted in the restaurant–cafe industry, we discovered that older waiters have a negative impact on male guests. The old waiters were having a secret conflict with the men who came to the place with their lover. It was damaging the dominance that men wanted to establish.
For this reason, we have brought an age limit to the waiters. We started to recruit employees who would accept the dominance of the guest.
- We broke taboos again in our research for a school brand. We observed results that overturned the “everyone thinks their child is perfect” memory. Parents do not see their children as perfect. He just believed, wanted to believe, that there was one thing perfect inside of them. However, they were crushed under the guilt and responsibility of not being able to reveal it. The only issue was someone to share it with.
In the communication strategy that I developed for the brand, we chose an individual-oriented tone. We created a strategy to discover personal competencies and turn them into success.