So after a slight diversion, it’s back to finish off my thoughts on advertising concept research.

I’ve talked about the importance of capturing un-considered responses and this is my main issue with researching advertising concepts online. There’s simply too much time for respondents to think.

Between the time you show them the advertising, and the time it takes to read and process the question, they’re going to have time to think. And then they’ll have (unlimited) time to craft their responses. And edit them. And polish them.

In effect, responses are likely to be sanitised beyond usefulness. They won’t give you any sense of whether, and/or how, the advertising is actually working or not.

Tools

There’s a whole raft of tools available for researchers that purport to enable online advertising concept research. These tools allow ‘participants’ to tag or mark up the stimulus, eg proposed copy, website etc.

I can see why this idea has appeal; within the co-creation paradigm, it scores a 9/10, right?

Yes, it does. A wonderful tool to use if you want to involve your geographically-dispersed design team. But you’ll struggle to get anything useful from your non-design-schooled research participants.

Why? Because the focus will be on the stimulus, not the concept.

The ‘design’ tweaks respondents make will be just that; design tweaks. And are they really going to do a better job than your design team?

Without an opportunity to explore respondents’ reasons for their tags and mark ups, red herrings are all you’ll be eating for dinner.

When people consume a piece (?) of advertising for the first time, they don’t typically sit down and analyse it 5 minutes later.

Thus, when you test a creative concept in focus groups or in-depth interviews, the last thing you want respondents to do is analyse it. In fact, one of the most important things to do in concept testing research is to make sure your research participants don’t think.

Instead, it’s initial impressions you want; that very first response.

Don’t want helpful; don’t want clever

Concept testing presents two interesting challenges for market researchers:

1. People are helpful

2. They don’t like to look stupid

People are helpful: When you ask people to take part in a research project, the basic understanding is that their ‘job’ is to help you. ‘Helping’ often (and in most cases, logically) takes the form of concentrating and thinking.

They don’t like to look stupid: Respondents (aka humans) also want to look clever, or at least not stupid, in front of the rest of the group or moderator.

These two factors can easily get in the way of capturing a valuable first response vs a ‘tainted’ intellectual one.

Following on from my last post…

To state the obvious, we don’t go into concept testing with finished ads. We go in with stimulus that (hopefully!) helps to describe the creative concept; maybe a script, a story-board, a mood board etc.

This is an important point; the stimulus is a description of the concept. For all intents and purposes, the description is not our focal point of inquiry; the concept is.

But while our focus is on the concept, it’s almost impossible to get responses that aren’t at least shaped by, if not entirely based on, the stimulus.

The problem arises when the researcher fails to identify, and disentangle, responses to the stimulus from responses to the actual idea. This means that negative responses to the stimulus are treated as negative responses to the concept.

The baby, the bathwater…all out the window.

Yes, a concept may need work. Indeed, it may need a total rethink. But if the researcher tries (and hangs) the wrong man, a concept with promise may never even see its day in court.

The relationship between research and (advertising) concept testing is an interesting one.

On the one hand, research can add tremendous value to the creative development process. It can help identify possible issues with a concept, and/or provide feedback to help strengthen and refine it.

On the other hand, there’s considerable scope for research to derail the process, and that’s what I’m concerned with here. The idea that research can kill a great advertising idea holds more than just a grain of truth.

How?

More often than not, it’s because the researcher simply didn’t understand the task at hand. And there are two key ways in which a researcher might not ‘get it’;

1.     They fail to distinguish between the creative idea vs the execution

2.     They ask people what they think

I’m going to look at these two problems over the next few posts. Stay tuned!

3 kinds of advertising research: researching the strategy vs the creative idea vs the execution.

3 words of wisdom: know the difference.