Chapter 4

Understand the Consumer's Mind-set

Start with the Big Picture

When you or your team meets to plan strategy, one of the first questions asked is: What's going on out there in our industry, and how is it affecting people? The textbook response is to undertake a business environment review, identify trends, extend them, and consider their impacts. Of course, while that type of work is necessary, important, and valuable, it's essentially descriptive and backward-looking—even when the deck gets spiced-up with short-term projections. As when driving a car, business should be steered forward by looking straight ahead, while continually adapting to the traffic, twists and turns, and weather.

Some years ago, I conducted a mammoth study for a global CPG company that tracked trends driving the food business in Europe and Asia. The results included demographics and appliance details like the varying sizes of freezers, microwave penetration, and food categories. Taken together, this data did a very good job relating market conditions and the ability to freeze or zap food. It also led to an important conclusion: The infrastructure for microwaveable food was emerging, providing several of the CPG firm's frozen-food brands with new global potential.

The ability to convert potential results into insightful guidance requires consumer-centered strategies and programs that are grounded in perceptive, timely consumer research. The consumer research available to draw upon for this food trends project was survey or focus group based. The research was not notable for what it told us, but for what it could not: customers’ concerns about the economy and budgeting; feelings on prices, taste, health, freshness, nutrition, or package size; indulgence, convenience, or mealtimes; what they plan to buy, how they will stock their freezers and use their microwaves; what trade-offs will be made; or if they will skip the hassle altogether and go out (but where, when, and why?). In other words, we lacked insights about their mind-sets that influenced their behavior (see Wind and Crook 2004, or Moskowitz and Goffman 2007, for authoritative treatments on this topic).

The strategy team could only make assumptions, an exercise of limited value, because they were often constrained by past experience, legacy thinking, and corporate mind-sets. None of these were up to the task of understanding, marketing, and advertising to a rapidly changing consumer. Revealing consumer mind-sets through social media listening does, as the winning plays and cases will show.

Winning Plays That Reveal Consumer Mind-sets

Our case analysis revealed the following five winning approaches to discover consumer mind-sets.

• Choose a specific area to explore that is relevant to your products and services; listen to the right people, and draw from appropriate sources. While some of these areas might be broad-based, with an aim to figure out a general direction—“How do people feel about the economy, and what are they doing about it?”—some are category-specific concerns, such as “What is the mind-set of the credit card holder in this challenging economy?” It goes on to understanding attitudes in terms of roles people perform, such as giving care or parenting, among many others. See Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of this listening research principle.
• At a minimum, research consumer mind-sets by trending words and phrases. Start by using free or low-cost tools with effective features like Google Insights for Search (see Chapter 2 and the Appendix), or investigate terms of interest. If you're equipped with robust listening tools that allow you to “roll up” phrases into clusters or topics, you can perform more detailed analysis. Choose words or phrases that reflect consumer language and are central to the area you're researching. Avoid using marketing-speak and jargon when considering words or labels; it's essential to capture the language and reality of your potential and current customers, not those of marketers and advertisers.
• Track and analyze conversations over time to reveal how consumer mind-sets are evolving. Pay attention to which elements are staying the same, which have come and gone, and which appear to cycle in and out. In the credit card category, several themes—like debt reduction—remained constant, while others—such as the concern over amount of credit card debt—appeared, exited, and then returned, reflecting consumers’ shifting emphasis (see “Mind-set of Credit Card Holders,” later in this chapter). Marketers and advertisers that track the ebb and flow of consumer mind-sets anticipate and respond quickly to change, and work to minimize their impacts by quickly adapting their strategy, tactics, and messaging. Companies further up the listening curve—like credit card issuers—should leverage their social media listening data to optimize products, features, and communications by combining with other types of research and analysis, such as trade-offs.
• Recognize that some consumer markets today are mosaics, composed of people facing shared situations, needs, and desired benefits that cross traditional definitions such as age, gender, geography, or income. The “sandwich situation” research, discussed elsewhere in this chapter, on the tensions of simultaneously caring for older parents and children shows that consumer insights and market opportunities were caregiver-oriented, not specific to a given generation. This highlights how we can use social media listening to find the commonalities among people, which can lead to nontraditional insights into customers' and prospects’ minds across a wide range of product and service categories (see “Explore Widely to Understand Consumers and Their Life's Context,” later in this chapter, and the essays in Chapter 20).
• Encourage all relevant departments or functions to draw upon social media listening research. Kraft's research, for its sales organization reviewed below, had actionable impacts across various units, including marketing, distribution, product development, Web and magazine content development, and in-store merchandising. Sharing results, demonstrating their value, and connecting them widely throughout an organization promote awareness and adoption of listening as a valuable enterprise capability. This shows that some companies are becoming true listening organizations centered around people.

Regarding tactics, our cases revealed three that companies use, which we will detail:

• Search, to discover consumers’ mind-sets.
• Home in, to understand category mind-sets.
• Explore widely, to understand consumers and the context of their lives.

Search: Gateway to Discovering Consumers’ Mind-sets

Tapping into consumers’ minds can be as easy as studying trends in search terms, analyzing the words and phrases people punch into search boxes. In the United States alone, July 2010 saw more than 16 billion searches performed across the five core properties measured by audience research company comScore: Google sites, Yahoo! sites, Microsoft sites, Ask Network, and AOL LLC Network (comScore 2010).

Every word and phrase that anyone searches online is captured, put into a database, and can be made available for analysis and reporting. These are the unfiltered, everyday terms that motivate people to find any type of information, products, and services in just about every category. They are not the forced choices typical of conventional research designs, which often require people to describe their likes, agreements, hopes, fears, motives, and desires using language or numbers that are not their own.

Search queries are like verbatims from traditional research, except that they are ripe for analysis and potentially much richer. Although this is changing a bit as text analytics are applied to survey responses, open-ended questions in surveys have traditionally been underanalyzed, primarily because people, time, and expense are required to code them. Typically, a single person or small group would read these, draw some inferences, and add them to the report as “color.” Search engine listening, on the other hand, allows any person or company to analyze not merely a few hundred or thousand verbatim statements, but thousands upon thousands. This is possible with the aid of a Web browser and readily available tools, such as Google Trends and Google Insight for Search, both of which are free and have very capable features for basic tasks (see Chapter 2 for details).

During 2008–2009, when the dislocating forces of the great recession hit, every company wanted to know how consumers were reacting, setting them off on a mad dash to vacuum up whatever information was available. Inquiries into the Advertising Research Foundation's Knowledge Center skyrocketed. The available studies on “advertising and recession” explored changes in sales and market shares, companies that decreased or increased advertising, store brand impacts, and other business factors. But one important component was missing from all that: the consumer mind-set. What does a consumer think about and do during a recession?

We can begin to find the answer to this question by searching for the terms consumers use. We selected recession-relevant terms like “coupons,” “unemployment benefits,” “bankruptcy,” and “foreclosure,” and plugged them into Google Trends. Figure 4.1 compares indices of search volumes and news volumes for the terms in the top and bottom parts of the graph, respectively. Looking at them, it's clear to see that consumers and the media have different priorities. Though causal factors like foreclosure and bankruptcy of major companies drew relatively little consumer interest, we're all aware that they dominated media coverage. In stark contrast, consumers were concerned with ways to cope with the eroding economy and their worries about employment. The shock of the recession caused coupon and unemployment searches to rise sharply in mid to late 2008, and search activity has continued to remain higher.

Figure 4.1 Trends in “unemployment,” “coupons,” “foreclosure,” and “chapter 11” search volumes and news volumes reveal that people are concerned with their jobs and family budget, while the media is focused on unemployment and foreclosure to a lesser degree.

Source: ARF, Google Trends, August 28, 2010. Used with permission.

Search tells us that during times like these, the typical consumer mind-set comprises enduring concerns with economic uncertainty: fear of job losses, along with a strong desire to cope, save money, and continue to be able to afford the products and services they want and need.

The graph in Figure 4.1 required just a few moments of thought to create and was available without cost. Listening to search conversations allows marketers and advertisers to garner clues quickly about consumers, which they can further explore. They're able to learn how their customers and prospects feel about money-saving tools, like coupons, to gain a richer understanding of likes, dislikes, and emotions—factors they can then consider when designing couponing strategies and programs.

Home In to Understand Category Mind-sets

Consumers hold many mind-sets, they can be specific to broad swaths of life—like parenting or health—or be more specific to a product category, like automobiles or electronics. Two cases, one concerning financial services, the other regarding food, reveal the ways social media listening aids in understanding these consumer mind-sets and the implications they have for marketing, advertising, and sales.

Mind-set of Credit Card Holders

Imagine running a financial institution today. You would want to know how to market to investors, depositors, credit card account holders, and policy holders. You would also need to know how to do this profitably in a climate of rock-bottom institutional confidence, people shaken by loss of, or who fear losing, their homes through foreclosure, and postponed retirement due to plummeting 401(k) values.

Despite the dreary economic climate, people and financial institutions still need one another, perhaps now more than ever, to work out the problems, market more effectively, and get back onto solid footing. Social media listening can help play a vital role in this process, as we will see in the following example.

One leading credit card issuer wanted to understand the significant topics people were talking about in order to respond with timely and relevant card features and new offerings to improve its brand's health and competitiveness. The company's three-pronged research program comprised conventional qualitative research, such as focus groups and ideation sessions, and quantitative work such as attitude and usage studies and trade-off (conjoint) analysis, and social media listening. In combination with the traditional research methods, it could explore the social media listening insights systematically to develop the optimal program.

The company's social media listening research partner, Collective Intellect, worked with the issuer to first define who it should listen to, and where. This crucial step focused on collecting conversations from relevant participants via blogs, online forums, and message boards. The vendor's text mining and analysis research revealed credit card consumers’ sentiment around the category, credit cards, and their providers—especially the issuer's own brand and customers. More than 650,000 posts were analyzed to identify conversation drivers, along with positive and negative themes. It's important to note that the analysis ran over a one-year period, enabling the card company to see how conversations and themes evolved over time. The issuer found that some stayed constant (such as rewards), and several cycled in or out (like credit card debt) in response to circumstances. Collective Intellect CEO Don Springer summarized the results (2009):

Even in times when consumers are concerned about their balances and changes in credit card terms, they still see benefits in using credit. Specifically, we learned that consumers spend more time sharing and talking about responsible spending, debt reduction, and incentives and rewards than they do “bashing” providers of credit.

The credit card issuer discovered that despite its distress regarding the economy and its own situation, people were generally engaged in sensible, practical discussion about what to do next. According to Springer, these insights

armed the client with the ability to emphasize traditional features that matter, like rewards, cash back, and travel, to build new product and feature offerings that gave consumers more control over their debt, including debt management options and services, and to tailor messaging to mitigate any negative sentiment and reinforce brand affinity around those benefits most relevant to their consumers.

The next case we examine shows how a similar research approach was used to understand a different group: food shoppers.

Mind-set of the Food Shopper

With economic recovery coming slowly, megabrand Kraft Foods knew that shoppers’ attitudes and behaviors were changing to meet current conditions, and sought to understand their new attitudes. The company's aim was “to inform the sales organization of the rapidly changing consumer mind-set in order for them to be agile in designing relevant merchandising and sales strategies with retailers.” But as we'll see shortly, it turned out to do much more.

The most important point here is the stance that Kraft took toward change. It wanted to be proactive, identify the emerging mind-set, and respond in ways that matched consumer outlooks and kept it ahead of, and differentiated from, the competition.

Kraft's social media listening research method resembled the approach described earlier: social media listening coupled with quantitative research that, when analyzed together, resulted in rich insights derived from conversations and their importance to their market. Kraft worked with vendor TNS Cymfony for social media listening, and Synovate for the survey research.

As the world's second-largest food company, Kraft products line the pantries and cupboards of over 99 percent of American households (Engelbart and Mats 2010). In contrast to the credit card case, Kraft focused its research across all product types; it was not restricted to a specific category or customer. The company's social media study required a very broad definition of what to listen for, whom to listen to, and where to listen. The resulting research uncovered four key insights into the Kraft consumer's mind-set. It found that:

• Shoppers who change their behavior do not just drop new behaviors for old. Rather, they are on an “emotional journey,” traveling from denial to shock/guilt, to confidence, and, finally, to empowerment. It is a transforming experience through which they embrace the lessons they've learned along the way.
• Shoppers discussed meal planning most often. The research uncovered a number of concerns and coping behaviors such as: making lists and sticking to them; using a few basic ingredients across a number of meals; stockpiling, planning, and budgeting; cutting back on meat; and cooking in bulk and using leftovers for later meals.
• Shoppers experienced a resurgent interest in home gardens and seasonal eating as a way to save money and derive gratification from growing and eating their harvest, eat more healthfully, reduce their carbon footprint, and support local farmers' markets.
• Shoppers view coupons as more complex than just “buying for less.” Though many realized that economizing is important, and even has an emotional component, it is accompanied by a concern that coupons are for products that don't contribute to eating healthfully and work against their goals. Coupons also served the purpose of enabling people to donate to food pantries.

  Though this likely wasn't a thought one expected to hear at the outset, the link between coupon savings and charitable giving was very illuminating. One shopper described it as follows:

  Well, it's a sort of a money-saving way of donating food to food pantries in our areas that are in more need now with our poor economy. Whenever I stock up on buy one/get one canned or boxed items at the grocery store, the “free” one gets put aside to take to the local center.

These statements clearly exhibit consumers’ very textured and nuanced ways of looking at the world. The coupon insight shows that people weigh associated benefits and potential costs all together. It is not easy to glean that kind of richness from surveys, which usually consider and score attributes separately. Notice as well that these comments tie back to larger cultural trends, such as healthy eating, sustainability, and generosity. This reminds us that social media listening should not occur in a vacuum, but rather should be put into context in order to be meaningfully interpreted, or to challenge the conventional view about the trends.

Kraft was able to draw a number of crucial business implications from these mind-set insights. The study's authors, Larissa Mats (Kraft) and Christina Engelbart (Cymfony), discovered one important best practice: Tie implications to specific insights. Without that, insights are merely observations without business impact. To that end, Mats and Engelbart listed several implications for each insight. For our purposes, we will just take one example from each that reveals a range of recommendations across the “4Ps”—product, price, promotion, and place—that ultimately enabled Kraft to connect its sales strategies with their consumers' frame of mind.

After completing the study, Kraft initiated the following programs:

• Shopper's Emotional Journey: “Communications should focus on positive emotions—‘the light at the end of the tunnel.’”
• Meal Planning: Help consumers who are new to meal planning with the basics: design, shopping lists, and ideas for incorporating variety.
• Gardening and Seasonal Shopping: Partner with retailers to create merchandising displays that borrow themes from farmers’ markets and create community-supported agriculturelike boxes of complementary items in stores.
• Coupon Revival: As consumers continue to strive for healthy eating, suggest ways to create balanced meals with family favorites that are promoted.

The power of these insights and their applications was strengthened by placing them in a business framework nearly everyone understands and communicating them in a relevant way, for this reason. Kraft was able to utilize the social media listening work more widely throughout the organization, for a broader variety of purposes. The research was also used by distribution, marketing, and advertising units, and for Web site and magazine content, recipe development, and product innovation. Because they expanded beyond the original audience—the sales organization—Kraft researchers raised both awareness and adoption of social media listening research. In so doing, they demonstrated a fundamental property of listening: It is relevant and valuable throughout an organization, not just a single department or function.

Explore Widely to Understand Consumers and the Context of Their Lives

Societal shifts, like juxtaposing an aging population with the maturing of the millennial generation, inevitably cause stresses and strains. They also generate new needs, while creating opportunities and raising challenges for marketers and advertisers. The result is certainly not a new, easily defined and segmented market; it's nowhere as neat and tidy as the current market (e.g., women 25–54 or men 18–34). Instead, some markets are taking on the less conventionally defined characteristics of mind-sets: unique outlooks that are drawn from shared life circumstances, priorities, and values.

It has become essential for marketers and advertisers looking for new growth from new markets and customers to understand these “mind-set markets.” Because the markets are defined primarily by commonalities among apparently dissimilar individuals, social media listening research can identify them by uncovering the conversational themes and topics uniting them. (If this idea interests you, John Zogby and Joe Plummer's piece on neo-tribes in Chapter 20 offers a related but slightly different take.)

Case in point: the “sandwich generation,” the group of middle-age people caring for both their elderly parents and for teens and children. This “generation” rose to prominence about a decade ago. Is it really a generation, as boomers or Gen X-ers are, or should these caregivers be understood differently and more fully in ways that represent new opportunities?

Insight community company Communispace decided to take a more penetrating look at these caregivers to understand their “lives, needs, and choices.” Its study of roughly 75 people employed a variety of research techniques. Participants engaged in activities like image galleries and collage projects designed to elicit perceptions, emotions, and inner feelings; they were also involved in various topical discussions and brainstorming sessions. Additionally, Communispace surveyed nearly 500 members across four of its private communities—financial services, health care, pharma, and travel—to identify advertising and marketing implications in these categories (Communispace 2009). Its key findings included:

• The sandwich generation is more of a “situation” than a quantifiable age group since members range from millennial 20-somethings through 60-something boomers, facing challenges that span all income groups and geographies. Among the millennials, 83 percent are already thinking about how they'll cope with their challenges.
• While participants admitted that it was often stressful, they also saw caregiving as being “central to one's moral identity.” They claimed that it satisfies many needs, including a personal source of pride, feeling thanked and appreciated in ways that children can't provide, and peace of mind in the knowledge that their parents are getting the best care possible.
• Sandwiched caregivers are “overwhelmingly” more likely to make sacrifices for their parents than for their children. These sacrifices might be giving them a spare room, moving closer to them even if it means their children will have to change schools, or buying a larger car to accommodate new needs like walkers or wheelchairs.
• These individuals want authentic messaging; realistic, reassuring, and empowering information that balances tradition and innovation. They found overly optimistic, sugar-coated messages and those engendering fear or anxiety to be “absolutely repellant.”
• New product and service needs were identified in categories like insurance (which enabled caregivers to put the entire family—children and their parents—on one policy), air travel, medical reminder services, and security.
• Last, study participants talked about product categories and brands not usually associated with eldercare. Some of these included personal care, speed scratch foods, mass merchandisers, beverages, household cleaning products, and even small indulgences like chocolate. These categories fulfill caregivers’ concerns about helping their charges become more comfortable and healthy in their homes, while making their own lives more pleasurable and satisfying.

This “sandwich situation” research not only takes us into the heads of caregivers; it goes on to highlight the applications of caregiver insights, like providing clear direction for commercial copy. By coupling insights with survey data, researchers were able to start the important task of establishing demand for both expected and nontraditional products and services meant to fulfill needs and deliver benefits for these “sandwiched” individuals.

Summary

Social media listening is helpful in detecting consumer mind-sets from conversations. They reflect the ways people look at the world, how and what they choose, and also influence their behavior. Of course, people hold a variety of mind-sets about countless topics. Companies that understand mind-sets relevant to their business are truly at an advantage. They put themselves in a better position to calibrate and adjust their marketing and advertising to their customers more quickly, and improve their chances of marketplace success. Companies should promote their listening results and implications, and leverage them throughout their organizations. Doing so builds awareness of listening, promotes adoption, and ultimately puts the customer at the center of the business.