Tag Archives: market research

Three Market Research Lessons From Hacks

Last Thursday’s episode of the Max series Hacks, starring the incredible Jean Smart as comedian Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder as her writer/sidekick/frenemy Ava Daniels, hit different for me. After decades of toiling in Las Vegas and not getting the widespread love and recognition she deserves, Deborah Vance is named the first female host of her own late night talk show. The show gets off to a great start as viewers check out Late Night With Deborah Vance, with the first two episodes in the honeymoon period of initial sampling.

Hacks Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart

Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart from the Max series Hacks (Photo credit: Michael Mattes / Shutterstock.com)

An in-person focus group is quickly conducted, which is encouraging until two women mention they don’t like Deborah’s hair up. Then the network research guy comes to the staff meeting to let the team know the show is overperforming with men, as well as “middle-aged Black business owners, gay dads under 50, college-educated Singaporeans, and retired divorcees in the Great Lakes region.”

The bad news? 25- to 45-year-old women don’t like Deborah. The show has already fallen to fourth place, and this demo that’s highly appealing to the network is necessary for its advertising goals.

Ava’s response is to tell Deborah that data should be used as a tool, not their guiding principle. Deborah’s initial response is to change the show completely. Instead of a show built on the sarcastic, snarky, hilarious observations Deborah is known for, it morphs into one that shows her adding long hair extensions, a cooking segment (Deborah may not have personally cooked a meal in her life), and an attempt to get Kristen Bell on as a guest (who is very popular with the 25-45 Female target).

In Hacks, Kristen Bell tests well with 25- to 45-year-old women. (Photo credit: Tinseltown / Shutterstock.com)

Ultimately, at the end of the episode, the interpretation of research lands somewhere closer to the middle, where it should be. Ava was right in that research is a tool and should not have been used to fundamentally change Deborah. Deborah Vance doesn’t look any more in place hosting a cooking segment than Howard Stern looked in place hosting a Country show at WWWW/Detroit in 1981 as “Hopalong Howie.”

Kayla, one of Deborah and Ava’s talent agents, has a different interpretation of the research. She shows her partner, Jimmy, a viral TikTok video of “Dance Mom” who the show initially passes on featuring. At the end of the episode, Deborah brings on “Dance Mom,” who gets Deborah to dance with her, looks like she’s having a blast, and the audience goes crazy. The content is clearly appealing to the demo they seek, but it doesn’t feel like Deborah (who was seen dancing at a gay bar earlier in the episode) is off brand.

Can the show evolve? Will it work? We’ll see.

This fictional episode, with touches of my reality, is an important reminder that research without proper interpretation and insight is just numbers in a spreadsheet. Truly valuable and actionable research considers a wide spectrum of factors, from brand and talent to execution.

If truly conducted properly, the head of research would have explained what the research means and offered ideas. No changes would have been made until Deborah and Ava agreed on a clear, outlined strategy with specific steps.

But sometimes, in reality as in fiction, it’s easier said than done.

Here are three market research takeaways from Hacks:

  1. You can conduct research too soon. Go back and watch the first episodes of Seinfeld and you might be shocked it turned into one of the greatest shows in history. Like many shows, the characters and story needed time to develop.
  2. Great brands are a combination of art and science. My favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, went overboard on analytics a few years ago and few players got consistent playing time, constantly rotating them in based on statistics. That’s not fun for the players, the fans, or brand building. Trust the data, but also trust yourself to bring it to life. Smart brand managers also trust their gut. You can do both if it’s strategic.
  3. Be authentic. Our research shows the strongest personalities have clear brands that resonate with their audiences. Data can guide your strategy, but it should never change who you are.

Seismic Behavioral Changes and Your Brand

While millions of people around the world were temporarily or permanently losing their jobs and countless businesses had to close for good last year, my wife’s company was experiencing the largest growth curve in its history.

She works in e-commerce.

In the first quarter of 2020, Americans spent $154 billion on e-commerce, and this was a steadily growing figure. According to Statista, consumers spent $34 billion on goods online in Q1 in 2009. The number was growing consistently, almost like clockwork, by about $5 billion per quarter. That was, until the second quarter of 2020, when the figure jumped from $154 billion to $203 billion, a 31.8 percent increase. While the totals slightly receded as the pandemic continued, the first quarter of 2021 saw consumers spend a record $215 billion–a 40% increase year-over-year.

Statistic: Retail e-commerce sales in the United States from 1st quarter 2009 to 1st quarter 2021 (in million U.S. dollars) | Statista

One thing her company has not done since the pandemic began is re-opened the office.

“Behavioral change” is one of the underlying themes of the COVID-19 experience, and perhaps the understatement of the century.

We’ve tracked media usage patterns in our Plan Developer perceptual studies for some time, and that information alone is enough to make anyone in the entertainment industry dizzy. We are living in a golden age of entertainment. The audio and video streaming content options go on for what feels like forever. You can now consume entertainment on more devices than ever before. There is power in learning how consumer behavior is changing based on those evolving options.

What few saw coming was how profoundly the pandemic would alter behavior.

There are 60,000 employees of Salesforce, the cloud-based software company based in San Francisco. In an interview last week, CEO Marc Benioff said he expects 50 to 60 percent of his employees to work from home permanently moving forward, up from about 20 percent pre-COVID. “The past is gone,” Benioff said. “We’ve created a whole new world, a new digital future, and you can see it playing out today.”

In Raleigh, North Carolina, where Coleman Insights is based, traffic seems to have returned to much more typical levels. And yet, there are buildings that sit empty all over Research Triangle Park, the area’s technology hub and “Silicon Valley of the East.” A similar pattern may be playing out where you are.

Some things will return to the way they were pre-pandemic times. On June 20th, Foo Fighters will play the first 100% capacity concert at Madison Square Garden since March of 2020. But it is clear many other things are here to stay.

Your audio brand will be impacted, one way or another. It almost certainly already has.

That listener who used to get to the office by 8 and needed to drop off his daughter at daycare by 7:30? He listened to your radio station in the car every day from about 7:10 to the time he arrived at work at 7:45. His job was eliminated, and now he works from home. He wakes up at the time he used to leave for work.

That listener who used to work at a restaurant no longer does, because the restaurant didn’t make it through the pandemic. Now she delivers groceries for Instacart on her schedule, so her time in the car has completely changed. Oh, and she discovered podcasting a few months ago and is obsessed with Crime Junkie. So she starts and stops it every time she does a “shop.”

There’s that listener that forgot about your brand. Because she isn’t in the car as much, she just doesn’t think about radio stations. She doesn’t remember seeing any advertising for…well, any radio stations. But ask her for a TV recommendation, and she’ll gladly bullet point her favorites from the past year: “Ted Lasso,” “The Queen’s Gambit,” and “Schitt’s Creek.”

Two things come to mind regarding this behavioral change whirlwind we’re living in.

First, brands that understand how consumer behavior has impacted their brand and their competitors, more than ever, will thrive. And sure, we could always make the argument that brands who utilize consumer research and market themselves will have a competitive advantage. That’s always been true and always will be.

But it feels different this time. The behavioral changes we are experiencing as a society are seismic. You don’t have to just worry about how the competition will affect your brand, you need to worry about how life will affect it.

Which brings me to the second point, habitual behavior. If you’ve gone into a store without a mask for the first time in 15 months, it likely felt pretty strange. That’s because, while it felt odd and uncomfortable at first, it became a habit. At first you didn’t have a mask in your car and you kept forgetting it. Then you always had one in the car. Putting on a mask to go into a store became a subconscious behavior.

And that habitual subconscious behavior is what ultimately determines the success or failure of your brand. If, for example, I choose Spotify over Pandora, I don’t think very hard about it. I have drilled in perceptions, and I just choose it. Why am I more likely to click Netflix instead of Amazon Prime Video? It’s not because I dislike Amazon or Pandora, it’s that Spotify and Netflix have become a habit.

Building habitual behavior must be a central focal point of your strategic plan because you cannot stop the behavioral changes of your consumer. But the brands that have successfully made listening to their product a subconscious habit will be far more equipped to sustain the forceful winds of change.

 

How Amazon Uses Research for World Domination

“Hey let’s put that song in rotation, it sounds good on the air.”

“I think that morning show benchmark is really gaining traction. My wife and her friends love it.”

“The station is sounding too old. It’s probably time to start playing some newer music.”

Is this is how your radio station conducts research?

Radio is fighting daily battles within a never-ending war for top-of-mind awareness. This is no time to trust your request line or mother-in-law for market intelligence. Rolling the dice is not a sound strategy.

Amazon is often rightfully credited with coming up with innovative ideas. How Amazon evolves those ideas into big, successful initiatives is by utilizing market research.

When the company launched Amazon Prime, it offered unlimited two-day shipping for $79 per year. The price increased to $99 and now $119, but also includes added features like Amazon Music and Amazon Prime Video. How did Amazon navigate which features to focus on and which price points were viable?

Research.

Amazon doesn’t just use research to determine how to grow – it uses research to know when to quit.

Even Amazon fails sometimes, as with the Fire Phone, Amazon Local and Amazon Destinations. By using research to track customer perceptions and product/market fit, Amazon was able to mitigate further losses and shift resources into profitable segments.

Do you really know what’s working and what’s not working on your radio station? What if you’re running a feature that’s not compatible with the brand and you have no idea? What if the only measurement you have of your morning show is ratings and you don’t actually know if its familiarity and appeal are growing?

Rolling the dice is, as they say, a crapshoot.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos likes to say “We start with the customer and work backward.”

Are you truly focused on your customer?

Sure, you can gather the troops in a conference room and detail your target listener on a whiteboard. But wouldn’t it be nicer to actually know who your listeners are instead of guessing based on wobbly ratings? Wouldn’t it be helpful to know which ones have the best potential of converting to P1s?

You better believe Amazon knows all about its competitors, probably better than their competitors know themselves.

They’ve done their research.

How much do you know about your competition and its listeners?

Radio should constantly innovate with fresh, new ways of entertaining its consumers. By conducting research to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, you can focus on what works and feel confident your strategy is sound and optimized for success.

It sure beats rolling the dice.