3rd tier: context is important

As brands push further inland and seek to understand consumers in smaller cities, research techniques need to take into account consumers’ realities in order to get the most out of research.

We often hear how Chinese can sometimes struggle with ‘abstractions’ and ‘creative thinking’ in lower tier cities. Whilst this is to some extent true, thorough recruitment and using projective technique which take into account different mindsets are key to getting the most out of consumers in these new “research markets”.

Not “who” but “where”.
Chinese tend to evaluate brands based on the context in which they “live in” rather than viewing brands as stand-alone concepts that live in a vacuum. To this extent, Chinese consumers will form their opinions of brands based on where they are perceived to be used. The context in which brands are seen to live in inform peoples’ brand perception – sometimes more so than advertising.

Projectives need to be adapted to this mindset/reality:
Asking car buyers to tell us where they see this car parked and why rather than doing laddering exercise which tend to confuse.

Or asking whisky drinkers to describe the venue in which a brand is consumed rather than getting them to personify it.

By establishing the context in which a brand is perceived to be found and then understanding how consumers view this context creates a more fruitful discussion which lets the researcher understand the values/emotions associated with a brand.

Using consumers’ settings as a projective.
Consumers in 3^rd tier cities are not used to talk ‘marketing’.

Asking people to relate emotions to brands is an alien concept. To this end, and much in line with getting people to contextualize products, getting people to relate brands/product benefits to things they live with on a day-to-day basis is a more powerful way at getting to the bottom of how people may feel about things.

As an example, instead of asking consumers why/how tea gives them a warm feeling and what does this ‘warm feeling’ mean; asking people to think of an item at home that gives them a warm feeling similar to the one they are thinking about for tea makes it easier for consumers to verbalize their thought.

Interviewing not recruiting.
At the end of any recruitment process, adding a few questions which allows the recruiter to gauge how ‘creative’ a respondent will be is necessary. To this end, adding a question like, name 10 uses for a bottle of water that’s not a container for a liquid will help recruit consumers that will be more likely to ‘play around’ with marketing concept in groups.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 6:41 pm. It is filed under Advertising, Asia, China, Research and tagged with featured, research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.