USING PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH (CD-ROM)

How to Use and Interpret Projective Techniques

A 2 Hour Training CD-ROM (Video) For Use
In Focus Groups And In-Depth Interviews

For decades, the marketing community has been aware that there are emotional and psychodynamic factors that drive brand selection and loyalty. Even in today's price-sensitive economy, the imagery attached to brands goes far beyond product attributes, functional benefits and price to sell products.

All products and brands develop personas in consumers' minds.

All products/brands project varying user images, which differ by audience. Members of one audience may buy a product because it makes them feel affluent. Members of another, which values thrift, buy a brand because it makes them feel like smart shoppers.

Taking this another step, consumers buy products with imagery that is either consistent with their positive view of themselves (“I’m sophisticated and therefore buy this type of wine to complete my image”) or which conveys a plausible aspirational model - something they would like to be and believe they could conceivably achieve (“I can be a real ladies’ man if I drive a sports car.”)

The essential component of Brand Character goes
far beyond advertising slogans and packaging.

In fact, we have discovered that the most powerful influencing factor in purchasing habits is the subtle, often-overlooked product/consumer relationship. A vital brand has a “relationship” with loyal users not unlike a healthy relationship between two people. People maintain ongoing affiliations as long as each person in a relationship feels as though the other contributes positively to his/her sense of self. Relationships fall apart when perceived negatives begin to outweigh the rewards of the association.

For example, being coupled with a successful friend casts a positive halo onto someone who values success.

If you want to build strong Brand Equity, you must
first understand the core values of the target market.

In marketing, we often talk about this as “laddering up to emotional end benefits." These are the unspoken consumer values that are the glue to brand loyalty because they validate the user's self perceptions.

But it’s not enough to know what emotional end benefits drive a category – to be truly effective at marketing we need to understand which concrete features and functional benefits of our brand (as well as the brand as a whole) ‘provide’ these feelings most strongly (more on this later), and which do so without simultaneously creating emotional anti-benefits (aversive feelings), and where is the competition in this emotional terrain?  If only!

Unfortunately, understanding this picture has very much been marketer’s ‘Holy Grail’

...long sought after as a treasured prize, but surrounded with a kind of religious mystique which defies logical pursuit. This is the case because there are MANY obstacles which prevent consumers from discussing with us their emotional reasons for purchase, and many that prevent us as researchers from perceiving when they do.

To begin to approach the Grail requires a thorough understanding not only of emotional benefits, but of the psychology of the consumer’s resistance to telling you about them (and even to becoming aware of them themselves).

The importance order of emotional benefits varies by product or service category.

For example while “feeling like an attractive person” might be an important value for most people, there are only certain product categories that can provide features that support that benefit. "Feeling Attractive" might be a significant motivating emotion for eye-wear, fashion, deodorant, or automobiles because each of these categories have features that are perceived as supporting attractiveness. However, it probably isn’t an important emotional benefit for personal computers, stock-brokerages, or long distance calling plans because there are no features that directly link to that feeling (Macintosh users excepted).

The specific order of importance of emotional benefits varies by category. The differing product/service features in each category are each capable of supporting a different set of feelings. You need to know which feelings your category supports, and which particular concrete features of your product are most closely associated with those feelings.

REASON #1: SOCIAL DESIRABILITY BIAS DISTORTS THE DATA

People are often frightened of being judged and will only say what they think is socially desirable. For example, some people are uncomfortable verbalizing the desire to feel attractive. To them, Feeling Attractive is something to be quietly pursued, not publicly acknowledged. This is particularly true for older women, many men, and those from Asian cultures. When someone of this ilk is asked for an emotional connection, they will tell you something more socially desirable like "it makes me feels practical" or "it makes me feel safe."

While social desirability bias is a small problem for 'Feeling Attractive," it is a much bigger problem with many other motivators like "Feeling Sexy," "Feeling Excited," "Has a Sense of Belonging," and "Feels in Control."

REASON #2: EMOTIONAL MOTIVATION OFTEN OCCURS 
BEYOND THE CONSUMER'S CONSCIOUS AWARENESS

The conscious experience of emotional benefits is usually vague. People have difficulty articulating their underlying motivations and even more trouble specifying how product features are related to these emotional benefits.

REASON #3: THE CONSUMER'S SELF CONCEPT IS
THAT OF A COMPLETELY RATIONAL PURCHASER

Most consumers want to think of themselves as logical, rational buyers. The idea that feelings influence purchase threatens this perception. Consumers don't realize (or don't want to admit) that advertising images affect their purchase decisions. Indeed, most consumers want to believe that they purchase based solely upon rational facts such as price, value, taste and performance. Moreover, since consumers tend to deny that emotions (and the product imagery with which they are associated) affects their decisions, they can become anxious that their answers to direct image-related or emotionally-laden questions are a reflection of their personality. The result of all these dynamics is a relatively quiet respondent, who gives sensible, general, barely useful responses.

REASON #4: CONSUMERS FEAR ADVERTISERS’ MOTIVATIONS

Finally, some respondents are concerned that if strangers really knew what made them tick, we would take advantage of them and sell them things they did not really need.>

Despite these inherent difficulties, many market researchers (who are unaware of alternative approaches) attempt to ask direct questions to assess imagery in focus groups and in-depth interviews. However, a handful of qualitative market researchers have borrowed techniques from psychology called ”projectives” in order to obtain richer, more detailed descriptions of product imagery. (Note - see Dr. Sharon Livingston’s article on projective techniques for a more thorough treatment of the subject).

USING PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES TO ASSESS
EMOTIONAL DRIVERS IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

A technique is projective when it indirectly encourages the expression of psychologically motivating material (imagery) of which the respondent is otherwise unaware. Most projective techniques do this by presenting the question so that the consumer believes her response is part of a game which could not possibly reflect on her personality.

Projectives allow research participants to sit back, relax, and to view their responses as if they were watching a movie screen, unaware, for the moment, that they wrote the film and that they hold the projector.

Returning to the soda can example, instead of simply asking the respondent "If this soda can were a person, what kind of person might it be?" the moderator positions the question as an experience. She tells respondents they are about to engage in a fun exercise, uses some sort of relaxation technique, helps them imagine the soda can in their mind (as opposed to directly looking at it) and then says something like "Now imagine you see a hand reaching for the Diet Sunkist . . . what does the hand look like? Describe it in detail. Now, what about its owner? Their occupation? etc." (She continues to get a rich description of the image).

While on the surface, this question may seem quite similar to the more direct question asked above, there are some important differences in the way it was presented. The primary differences are (1) the degree of intellectualization required of the respondent, and (2) the emotional state the respondent is in when the question is posed.

A projective technique doesn't require intellectual reasoning. For example, the respondent is instructed to imagine a hand, then to imagine the rest of the person. Properly presented, projectives are experienced like a game -- like playing make-believe as a child.

This is markedly different from the direct, rational question "If this soda were a person, what type of person would it be?"

To answer that question, most respondents feel they need a rationale to support their conclusions, which severely restricts their ability to respond.

Projectives remove the need for rationale and make it much easier to elicit potent imagery which the respondent might not really understand (and therefore cannot rationalize).

The above technique is only one example. Executive Solutions, Inc. is noted for having developed and applied literally dozens of projective techniques to thousands of marketing projects for Fortune 100 companies.

How Much Does It Cost???

When we first introduced this video set in 2001, we offered it at $399.95.  (It was actually hard to put a price on something which we knew moderators could use to sell twenty thousand dollar projects, ... the knowledge within being worth literally millions to the brands which leveraged it - but we had to start somewhere, and frankly, people just won't pay a thousand dollars for a set of disks they watch in their computer, even when they acknowledge its value).  

But, while the value of the content on the disks remains VERY strong, the production quality is not really up to modern standards, so, in November 2003 we decided to cut the price in half (to $197).   On some occasions (usually during one of our drives to increase our newsletter membership -- we use the proceeds mostly for newsletter advertising), you will see the disks available as low as $97.

We ask please for your tolerance of the technical production (it's very viewable, the words are perfectly understandable, and the 2 hours of CONTENT is stellar) in exchange for this reduced pricing.

Limited Time Bonus - purchase now and you can download our 87 minute teleconference on projective techniques for free!

The above bonuses will always be included with the projective techniques CD.  But for a limited time, you can also download our 87 minute teleconference on projective techniques.  Hear questions from researchers from all over the world about how to integrate projective techniques into their work, in their country.  See the same slide images they saw.  Read the transcripts along with each slide.  (There is also an extra exercise demonstrated in this audio-file which is not present on the CD set).

Do you still have questions about this CD? If so, send a detailed email to info@ResearchOnResearch.com and someone will get back to you within 24 hours.

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