As a rule, consumers are pretty bad at uncovering what their motives were for buying any given thing (beyond “I wanted it” or “I needed a new one” or “it’s cool” or “I’m hungry and its yummy”). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be fair, that’s sometimes those glib answers are pretty much just the truth – they really were hungry, it really did taste nice. But where deeper truths do exist, it is often very hard to get people to articulate them, often because they aren’t really consciously aware of those truths. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marketers have devised different ways to try to get people digging deeper, most of which revolve around various forms of interview and focus group work. Some get very creative with this ( such as trying to get their consumers lying down and into relaxed and near-meditative moods), but we are going to stick to a more conventional approach<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are going to do a very basic form of a laddering interview. If you do some internet searches (or, even better, read a methodology textbook) you will find much more elaborate advice on how to do these, but we are going to keep it very simple here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Up-front warning: This exercise will sound very easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult to do well. It takes a very special type of consumer to actually enjoy being the subject of these interviews. Most of us don’t like being questioned about our motives – We often can’t think of good answers quickly, and because the questions sound so simple to answer, that can make us feel stupid, and so resentful (“who are you to make me feel awkward like this?”). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The art of doing these interviews well is partly about being insightful enough to help them explore their own answers, but also partly about having the emotional skills to make your partner feel supported and acknowledged, that you are working with them to uncover a hard thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you do it really well people can even report that it’s like being in therapy, as they discover things about themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is the short form. Longer explanations with more detail are below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bonus activity:<\/strong> Given the answers to the above questions, what kind of advertising messages might appeal to this person about buying this kind of product?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Step 1:<\/strong> You will need to find a partner. If you aren’t in an environment that lets you easily pair off with one, then you’ll need to track down a friend or family member with whom to try this at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Step 2: <\/strong>Pick a target item that they own. We suggest their mobile phone, but if they don’t have one, or someone bought it for them, or they won it as a prize (or whatever) then substitute something else. Items of clothing can work well, or jewellery, or some kind of event they attend such as concerts or sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Step 3 & 4:<\/strong> Level 1 insight: Surface reason why they bought this thing. The immediate answer you get to this question is often extremely glib, so you will likely need to use some little probe questions to help them isolate their motivation. These might include questions like: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another useful technique is actively listening to what they are saying (and what they are trying <\/strong>to say), and trying to rephrase back to them what you are hearing (“it sounds like you are saying X \/ If I’m hearing you right, maybe it is something like Y?”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steps 5 & 6:<\/strong> This is where we try to get to higher-level goals for their consumption choice. In the last step we identified the immediate goal they were trying to achieve, and that is a useful thing, but here we ask why why that goal matters? What other goal made them want to pursue that thing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Getting to this level can be even more difficult than the last one. Again, you want to try to help them with active listening and trying to repeat back what you are hearing, and using more probe questions such as: “It does thing X, but what if it did thing Y instead, would you miss X? What about your life would be different that X helps with?”. This is where your skills as an interviewer really pay off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steps 7 & 8:<\/strong> This is similar to the last one, except we want to get up to an even higher level of abstraction (in laddering interview speak we are trying to get to ‘values’ here, but really it’s just any kind of higher level goal). It’s even more of a challenge, but it’s mostly the same tactics to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bonus: Can you connect the value you find to our list of needs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Double bonus: Remember the bonus activity suggested above? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Given the answers to the above questions, what kind of advertising messages might appeal to this person about buying this kind of product?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Time to give that one a shot!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The problem As a rule, consumers are pretty bad at uncovering what their motives were for buying any given thing (beyond “I wanted it” or “I needed a new one” or “it’s cool” or “I’m hungry and its yummy”). To be fair, that’s sometimes those glib answers are pretty much just the truth – they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"chapter":[4],"exclude_from_index":[15],"class_list":["post-2103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","chapter-2-motivation","exclude_from_index-exclude-from-index"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2103"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3208,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions\/3208"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2103"},{"taxonomy":"chapter","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chapter?post=2103"},{"taxonomy":"exclude_from_index","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exclude_from_index?post=2103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Detailed explanations<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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Dad vacuum example: Why did he like the Dyson? Because vacuuming is hard physical work, and doesn't always pick up all the bits of crud that constantly find their way onto floors. He wanted something that made this work easier and got the floor fully clean. So the answer here is at the level of identifying what problem we are solving, and the features of the actual product that help meet that problem.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Dad vacuum example: Why do the goals identified above matter to him? Because cleaning is a hard slog that involves a weekly struggle just to get the house back to the state of livability it was in just a few days ago. The benefit here is (to some degree) to get relief from the endless grind of work.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Dad vacuum example: Why is it so important to escape the grind? That sounds like an obvious question, but sometimes we want<\/strong> to grind. When we go to the gym, it's to make give ourself some grind. On purpose! In this case though, it feels good that hard and important jobs can be done with a much more manageable level of physical effort. In fact, if you clean the house and don't feel so sore and tired maybe you appreciate it more. And that can feed your need for competence: feeling you can get hard things accomplished.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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