Consumers and Big Apes

As I was saying…it's been a busy summer…and we had some fascinating international projects on … for example eaves dropping on Indian men talking about friendship and marriage, Croats about their finances, Russian women about their bodies… But judging by the reactions of YouTube, the marketing blogs and press and even the mainstream press, the most exciting project we were involved in was back in Blighty ie researching the Fallon/Cadbury Gorilla ad. It's the sort of thing nobody would expect to 'make it' through research - bold, genre breaking for chocolate, completely different for the brand. Don't the detractors of qual research tell us about the conservatism of group respondents, their lack of imagination etc? But hey, here's qual groups vindicated, with a bit of sensitive moderation group respondents were generally quite capable of appreciating Gorilla and its creative idea and imagining the ad as quirkily humorous, joyful and uplifting, brilliantly different, something that would be a talking point! Well, as far as I'm concerned there's a couple of learnings here…first of all, consumers can actually be more imaginative and happy to embrace the new than some people expect…but ad moderation needs to be sensitive and adapted to what you're actually researching. If you're looking at an idea that's approaching branded entertainment, it tends to help an awful lot to set the scene in a reasonably 'naturalistic' way - ie have consumers imagine they're in their living rooms, switching on the TV after work and then - 'this comes on your screen' rather than loading the dice and setting conventional expectations by telling them they're about to watch an ad. It's just a wee trick but it can really avoid over-rational disappointment at a lack of product information. At the same time it's worth appreciating that some folk are more literal-minded and conservative than others - some consumers need a campaign, an idea to seed - and to gain cultural buzz - before they start appreciating it. This can be partially addressed in the groups - by exposing different campaign elements, 'fake' PR coverage, by lightening the mood with projectives and creative games. Sometimes it also helps simply to counter overly literal posturing by asking whether they'd really take ads quite so seriously in real life… In the final instance though the onus is still on analysis and interpretation. This can mean that that we may downweight the reactions of more laggard and conservative respondents to ground-breaking ideas, considering that at least some of them are likely to catch on once the ad goes 'live' . There are no hard and fast rules as to how we do this or by how much - experience in ad research will tell us. And of course, an experienced client will know how much alienation his brand can and should take!