The Research Path to Uncovering Consumers’ Deeper Thoughts

Market researchers ultimately want to understand what drives consumers’ thinking, feelings, actions and decision making. While there are countless techniques and methodologies for accomplishing this, in the field of qualitative research, there is one absolute truth – in order to understand what consumers think, you must understand how consumers think.

 

Many cognitive theories focus on an individual’s thoughts as the determinate of his or her emotions and behaviors. They work on the assumption that humans are logical and make choices that make the most sense to them. These theories help us decipher the intrinsic tie between thought and action.

Given its link to behavior, the importance of exposing thought processes in research clearly cannot be understated. However, uncovering the cognitive considerations that shape an opinion or decision in qualitative research isn’t always straightforward. People often struggle to articulate their thought processes and motivations, as much of that lies beneath the surface. Simply asking a battery of questions will not unlock what is truly driving their ideas and behaviors.

Applying the teachings of cognitive theories to a qualitative exercise makes it easier to ask the right questions at the right time based on how we all go through our thought process. By doing so, we create a path to a much richer explanation of the causal agents involved. Asking questions based in cognitive psychology can elicit more nuanced and honest responses because it draws from things that are relevant to the individual and works in unison with their natural train of thought. Questions that require consumers to think about what they first notice about an ad, or the things they associate with a brand, encourage them to delve into their deeper subconscious thinking to draw out what truly motivates their behaviors. Utilizing cognitive theories helps illuminate the consumer’s thought process, allowing researchers to move beyond surface discussion to get at the all-important “why”.

This paper highlights key inputs and factors that shape consumer behavior and describes the ways in which cognitive theories tell us more about consumers’ conscious and subconscious thoughts and perceptions. It also details a research technique shaped by cognitive psychology, and illustrates how using this approach can successfully help organizations better understand the purchase process.

 

The Five Steps: Examining the Purchase Process

It is important to understand that even seemingly simple decisions are in reality quite complex. Consumers’ reactions in the marketplace occur in context, which means they absorb any marketing experience within the framework of internal influences (memories, attitudes and self-identity) and external influences (culture, demographics or situational factors such as time and pressure). This then tells us that a consumer’s path to virtually any purchase occurs within the influence of these factors.

As illustrated in this diagram, examining how a consumer makes a purchase—let’s use the example of buying a car—the process is divided into five steps:

1. First, the consumer must recognize a need. For instance, their current car may not be in top running condition, or perhaps they have an “itch” for something new.
2. The second step is to seek information. The consumer may search the Internet for new models and their features, or may observe what their neighbors are driving.
3. The third step is to compare alternatives. During this step, the potential car buyer may compare specific cars online or go to a dealership.
4. The fourth step is to buy the car.
5. The fifth step is a post-purchase evaluation.

 

At each stage of this process, multiple factors come into play and influence what is chosen, when it is chosen, how satisfied the buyer is, and how he or she will approach future purchases. Qualitative research has long been a valuable tool in pinpointing these factors. But to get beyond simple identification, to get to why a consumer makes the choices they do, the researcher must move beyond traditional research approaches and uncover a consumers’ motives and attitude. Once this richer understanding is achieved, a marketer can conceive and implement programs and services that factor in the consumers’ buying process.

To obtain this level of insight, iModerate, a qualitative research company in Denver, Colorado, developed a proprietary approach called ThoughtPath™ that combines the power of traditional qualitative methods and cognitive psychology. Coupled with the firm’s anonymous, real-time, one-on-one online conversations, ThoughtPath capitalizes on three important cognitive paths to allow moderators to ask the right questions in the right sequence based on the cognitive steps each individual takes. The insight gleaned from this methodology allows marketers to better understand consumers’ relationship with their brand and more effectively communicate with their target audience.

 

The Three Paths of ThoughtPath: Perception, Experience, Identity

The Three Cognitive Paths that make up ThoughtPath (Perception, Experience, and Identity) are all represented in the “Influences” portion of the Decision Process diagram. As noted, internal influences include many factors personal to each consumer: perception, or how consumers see the world, is a key piece of this. External influences refer to consumers’ experiences within the world. After gaining an understanding of consumers’ perceptions and experiences, it is possible to learn how consumers view themselves. This “sense of self” or identity takes shape from how consumers view themselves currently, how they want to view themselves in the future, and how they want to be viewed by others. These three factors—Perception, Experience and Identity—are the foundation of ThoughPath. The remainder of this paper will discuss these theories and their application to qualitative research in greater depth.

 

Perception Path

Perception explains how individuals interpret raw stimuli by clarifying what consumers notice, and how they categorize and group stimuli to make an inference. These are the natural steps consumers take when processing anything, and both following and understanding each stage in the process is critical for researchers:

What brands are similar to my brand?” “How does the ad fit with my brand?” “Did you notice my ad?”

It all starts with Noticing, and to notice, individuals have to first attend to the stimuli. Consider the following example: While driving, have you ever found yourself devoting most of your attention to a conversation, but if the traffic gets too bad or if you have to look for a particular street, you might shift your focus more to your driving? Our attention processes are limited and we direct our resources to stimuli that we need to process. Just because the stimuli (e.g. an ad) exists in the environment (e.g. a billboard), it does not guarantee consumers will notice it. With this in mind, it is important to know what consumers pay attention to and when.

Categorizing stimuli may seem second nature to us, even to the point that we take our own categories for granted and think the categories that other people use seem strange. To one person, it may seem logical to refer to all automobiles as cars, even though many others consider trucks to be in their own category. Categorization is powerful because what something is (e.g. a car) determines what people expect of it (cars move people and things). Further, once the brain determines what kind of car it is, it can access even more specific information about what to expect from it.

When Grouping, consumers have certain ideas about whether a product fits with how they view a brand. For example, when the Prius came out, a consumer might have felt it fit well with what they already thought of Toyota because they viewed it as an innovative brand. This type of grouping can occur both consciously and subconsciously.

How a consumer notices, categorizes, and groups stimuli will shape the inferences they make. What consumers infer then goes a long way in determining whether or not they will purchase as inference is the last cognitive step before that decision. Without digging deeper to understand these aspects of perception, researchers are left to ask broad or categorical-type questioning. In the case of testing an ad, this can easily lead to an incorrect conclusion as consumers are not able to pinpoint what stands out to them and map it back to their world and corresponding associations.

 

Experience (phenomenology) Path

The experience path describes consumers’ experience from the first-person point of view. When a respondent focuses on their experiences—whether life experiences or those with a specific brand or product—a researcher is able to ascertain how that individual relates them to other experiences to make an inference. These events provide a contextual framework to make comparisons. Without this insight, researchers are susceptible to making incorrect assumptions about consumers’ attitudes. But if in questioning, researchers ground individuals in a specific experience, those individuals can more easily express detailed memories and opinions because the context is much more personal. Accomplishing this often requires that researchers walk the same path with the consumer. Using questions like allows researchers to follow an individual through a previous experience. This process reveals much more about the issue or stimuli in question than simply asking consumers what they think.

“Tell me about the last time you owned Brand A car.” “What do you remember?” “How did driving that car make you feel?”

 

Identity Path

The identity path recognizes a consumer’s sense of self and helps researchers understand who that person is. It gets to the notion of how a consumer perceives themself. In psychology, this is known as a self-schema. This is both a reflection of one’s self-consciousness and of the similarities and differences in between one’s self and others.

As social beings, we make comparisons to others. We compare our actual self to others as well as to an ideal self that we aspire to be. One study found that MBA students who were unsure of their future bought more professional clothing to bolster their ideal image. In comparison, confident students bought less because they thought of themselves already as a businessperson, an actual image.

This sort of self-perception influences consumers’ attitudes toward products and brands and their purchase behavior. For example, because many individuals express themselves in their brand choices, ads aimed at image-conscious consumers are more effective if they show pictures that are consistent with their target audiences’ self-concepts.

While consumers generally possess a well-developed, cognitive self-schema, an individual’s self-schema may not always accurately reflect how they are identified by others. For example, a person who believes she is friendly may in reality come across as brash or abrasive. But, whether accurate or not, consumers generally have a clear idea about who they believe they are and, importantly for researchers, are likely to attend to and retrieve information that is congruent with their cognitive self-schema.

 

Putting it in Practice: Using ThoughtPath to Understand the Purchase Process

As previously mentioned, iModerate utilizes these cognitive paths to delve deeper into the consumer’s decision-making process in order to map their mindset and get at their emotional motivators. The insights that follow help marketers know if they are hitting the mark.

Continuing with our earlier example of the car-buying process, iModerate utilizes a combination of these paths in a customized sequence to gain insight into consumers’ psyche at each of the five key steps in decision making the process.

To illustrate this in greater detail, we’ll focus on one of the steps: Comparing Alternatives.

Marketers often seek to understand how people compare alternatives when they buy a car. The key in this is gaining a clear picture of which vehicle types and brands are in a consumer’s consideration set. For example, an individual might be trying to decide which type of automobile to purchase, such as a sedan, SUV, or truck, or they may be addressing the narrower question of which specific brands to consider. To aid in uncovering the products and brands in a consumer’s consideration set, iModerate employs ThoughtPath to inform which questions, in what sequence will be asked. In this specific case, a blend of Perception, Experience and Identity would be utilized in a carefully calibrated order to get the whole picture.

The conversation would begin with Experience, with the moderator asking a question such as, “When deciding which kinds of automobiles (SUV, car, truck, etc) to consider, please explain the process you went through.” Grounding consumers in their experience makes it easier for them to express detailed memories and opinions because it feels more personal to them. Once that door is opened, follow up questions would ensue aimed at understanding why those types of vehicles were considered, as well as which brands they were thinking about purchasing. When this initial, general exploration of the brands considered is completed, further exploration would focus on Perception.

A grouping based question such as, “What do you see as some of the biggest differences between the brands in your consideration set?” would help illustrate the different boxes the brands inhabit in the consumers’ mind, while a question such as, “What kind of person would drive/own a BRAND car?” would give a pure and unbiased picture of who the consumer infers to be “right” for the brand. With that vivid inference in mind, Identity can then be employed. By asking, “In what ways are you similar to or different from this person?” the moderator would gain a truer sense of whether the brand fits with this individual’s self-schema. Follow up questions would then tap into their emotions to get a stronger understanding of the consumer’s relationship with the brand: “How would you feel about yourself if you were to buy/drive a BRAND car?” (Identity).

In this instance, progressing in the one-on-one conversations methodically from Experience to Perception to Identity helps the consumer remember the details of their experience and get into the right “headspace” to share unbiased perceptions of brands and what they mean to them. By the end of the conversation, the consumer will have drawn a clear, detailed map of the emotional and practical sides of their consideration process. By looking at many of these conversations in the aggregate, it is then possible to analyze and tell the story of a particular consumer segment.

 

Combining Cognitive Paths Reveals Greater Insight

Consumers view each marketing encounter through a lens of internal and external influences that impact them throughout their decision-making process. Because consumers don’t always understand—or even think about—their own behavior, digging deeper into each step of their decision process is critical to garnering the most meaningful insights. Think about it. If someone asked you about how you got to work today, you more than likely you would miss a step or two. Was your trip like any other day? Did you notice the dog on the street corner? Did you, after smelling someone’s coffee, head to the break room? Did you remember that you stopped to talk with a co-worker before making it to your office? Effective qualitative research recognizes that you might not initially verbalize all of your actions, and that you might not always be able to express why you respond, act or make the inferences you do.

Using an approach like ThoughtPath fills those crucial gaps by applying cognitive theories to help structure questions in a specific way, one that exposes the unspoken consumers’ decision making process and gets to the motivations, whether functional and utilitarian, or psychological and emotional. The approach results in a clearer understanding of the influential context behind a consumer’s decision, and ultimately how they relate to a brand.

 

This content was provided by iModerate Research Technologies. Visit their website at www.imoderate.com.