Aristotle said it first; neuroscience confirms it. To be effective, communications must work on an emotional and rational level. In fact, unless a message affects your customer emotionally, there is no way he or she can make a purchase decision. This is true no matter what you are selling: tractors, financial services, soda or cosmetics. Most marketers and agencies know this in their bones. The problem is that it’s hard to access emotions in either the strategy development or communications-testing phase.

 Lately we have done a lot of advertising testing work using Create/Debate groups, our version of focus groups. Both the marketers and agencies have found the process productive because:

• Participants have to capture their reactions in pictures, words and metaphors – which requires them to use their right and left brains.
• Participants have to stand up and present their ideas – and answer questions from other participants – which lets you see how strongly they believe in and defend their point of view
• Research participants are so engaged that their reactions naturally
  focus on major messaging and ideas, not details and personal preferences.
• It’s fun and takes less time overall.

 Based on these experiences, here are some tips you can use in your qualitative research to ensure your work is impacting your customers on both the emotional/intuitive and rationale/logical level.

1. Avoid left-brain only avenues of inquiry. Language is a left-brain form of communication. So if all you are doing in groups is talking, you are only tapping into one part of the brain.  You may also be picking up clues as to the person’s feelings and intentions via body language, tone and manner and that is helpful, of course. But there are tools (like collaging, drawing, music) that will help you tap into right brain insights more explicitly. That way, you will get deeper insights and your research participants will have more fun.

2. Whole brain thinking requires generating ideas (creative thinking) as well as evaluative/analytical thinking. Often in groups, we ask people what they think and why. It’s a great thing to do – but it only lets us in on part of the story, since their replies are mostly analytical in nature.

 Instead, ask them to create a response by brainstorming together and, in small teams, build a story that requires them to generate ideas – which makes the analytical phase that much more interesting.

If, for example, you are testing communications, let your groups see your work and then ask the smaller/sub teams to create collages that show how they feel about the work and what they will do as a result of it. The sheer act of working together and putting together a project that reflects their feelings helps them go beyond the obvious and dig deeper for how they truly feel and think.

 3. Presenting it to the rest of the group is the final piece of the puzzle. Ask the teams to present their ideas to the rest of the group and encourage the rest of the group to ask questions. It requires people to take a stand. And you can see for yourself how strong that stand is.

 This approach is designed to explicitly tap into the right brain (which works visually and metaphorically) as well as the left brain. It might sound a little “out there” but it results in deeper participant engagement, more authentic feedback and ultimately stronger creative work. Every time.

 Call us for references or more ideas about how you can dig deeper in your communication research projects.

Good marketing decisions are the result of intuition/feeling and reason. Think about the last time you were trying to make a complex business decision, like how to most effectively communicate your brand or even how to allocate your marketing dollars. You probably began with fact-finding. And you evaluated those facts carefully. But you probably didn’t make a decision to do something until it “felt” right. And sometimes you probably got lost in the facts and didn’t make a decision at all.

Feelings and intuition are important and most marketers know this in their bones. Yet, marketers and researchers tell us all the time that it is almost impossible to get people to talk about how they are feeling and how those feelings impact their behavior. More important, they tell us that emotions are an anathema in their organizations. One of our clients, a financial services organization, hired us on the basis of our ability to obtain emotional insights, and then told us that we couldn’t use the word “emotion” at meetings because the organization fundamentally believed that financial decision-making should be a totally rational process. A CPG client told us that they knew they needed emotional insights, but didn’t know how to do that systematically in their organization. A health care organization said, “if a recommendation can’t be presented with a spreadsheet, backed by numbers, our executives ignore it.”

If these barriers to decision-making exist in your organization, here are two simple ideas to help you get others to both recognize the value of the right brain thinking and start accessing the right brain more consistently and deliberately.

• Exercise your right brain more often. Our left brains are an over-used, bulked-up, dominant muscle. At all levels of education, from 1^st grade through graduate school, we have relied on our left/logical/analytical brains. We are good at and comfortable analysis. All that left-brain work has made us suspicious of our right/intuitive brain. But it’s never too late to start learning about the vital role emotions, intuition and creativity play in decision-making. Perhaps that could become the basis of a training program at your company. Perhaps some of your insights people could become advocates. Or make yourself an expert and an advocate on the subject. The first book to read is A Whole New Mind,  by the brilliant Daniel Pink. If you want on-going information and education, in small bites, sign up for our newsletter, “The Heartbeat of the Brand” at www.drumcirclec0.com.

• Use simple tools and exercises to help people access their right brains.  Using images and metaphor are a proven mechanism for accessing the right brain and giving people language that helps us them articulate their feelings and intuition on any given subject. Pictures help you cut to the chase on any given topic or question – quickly and easily. To see for yourself, experiment with using pictures more in focus groups first. For example, if you are testing advertising, ask people to pick from a picture pack the image that represents how the particular concept or idea makes them feel. Have them describe why they chose the picture, the feeling it elicits, and how it connects to the advertising. What people say will provide you with amazingly deep insights into the advertising and how it works.

• You can try the same process in an internal meeting when a group of people are debating a complex issue that has no easy answer. Once all the arguments are out on the table, bring out a pack of pictures and ask people to pick the picture that represents how they feel, bottom line, on the particular topic or decision to be made. You’ll be surprised and delighted how the process will help you make the final decision while creating good feelings amongst the meeting participants.

If you’d like a free pack of pictures to experiment with, please let me know at a.manning@drumcircleco.com and we’ll send you our ConnectDeck ™, a validated set of pictures we routinely use in our research projects. 

When you hang out in focus group facilities, you hear people laughing about how the main reason to go to focus groups is the food. They laugh about eating M&Ms as their hors’  d’oeurvres, followed by the ethnic food of the day. If you live on the wild side, there might even be wine.

So why all the laughing about food when the point is to listen to people talk about your brand? I think it’s because the process can be so painful – for the clients as well as the people participating in the groups. The clients sit in a small, dark room for way too many hours as the people participating in the research try to respond intelligently to questions that they might not even find relevant.. This assessment is somewhat harsh; at the same time, it embraces a fundamental truth. (Full disclosure: I have moderated somewhere close to 2000 focus groups and seen this up close and personal).

That’s what led us to explore how we might make focus groups more productive and more fun, for all parties. We put a lot of emphasis on the “fun” part because we know that a sense of fun makes people feel relaxed. And that sense of relaxation leads to more authenticity – from both the participants and the clients.

So in the spirit of that observation, here are five suggestions for improving your focus group experience and outcomes:

1)   Focus as much (if not more) on feelings as behavior. We are sentient beings. We make decisions emotionally as well as rationally. In fact, research suggests we are led by our emotions – not facts and reason. We feel first then we think.  And that means we have to create processes that elicit people’s true feelings on a topic. One thing we are always searching for is how people want to feel vs. how they do feel. This gap drives potent strategies. For example, we worked with an automotive service brand that strongly promoted price and convenience. We learned from our emotionally based research that people didn’t use the brand because the experience left them feeling stupid and taken advantage of (which is a category experience); they want to feel confident and in control. Understanding this emotional gap led us a marketing strategy that emphasized how we address service program attributes that make people feel confident and in control. An obvious approach, perhaps, but one that is not often used.

2)   Prepare participants for the experience they’ll have together. A prepared participant takes a stand, engages in deeper dialogue, is less superficial and swayed by others. Prepared participants explore your issue at home (where real decision-making takes place). We ask participants to do any number of activities before they come to talk with us; they might prepare collages, maintain diaries, visit stores and take pictures. In the groups, we begin by sharing the homework. As a result, participants can engage in more lively debate with others and you can observe significant similarities and differences that you know are less a product of group think and more a product of what is real. For a recent project relating to cell service providers, we ask participants to prepare collages that represent how they feel about their cell provider vs how they want to feel. Then, we they responded to various advertising campaigns, they could compare the campaign messaging to their ideal vs. current feelings. The result was a tremendously successful advertising campaign.

3)   As the client, be less prepared. This sounds like a heretical directive, but in the heresy lies real value. Less preparation gives you more opportunity to be surprised. Surprise leads to new insights, which we believe is the goal of any research (because why spend the money if you already know the answer.) Yes, it’s important to have an agenda, to know what you want feedback on. But going in with a series of very specific questions or multiple concepts that are different in minor ways means you only get answers to those questions – and not what’s really on the mind of your participants. Instead, we encourage clients to prepare stimulus that allow participants to “co-create” solutions.  For example, if you are in a concept development stage, deconstruct your concepts into small nuggets and present those nuggets to participants with a group of emotions you want to generate and pictures and let them construct the concept. In other words, you prepare the stimulus, participants put them together in a way that adds meaning and relevance to them. The emerging concepts will be less about you and more about your customers/potential customers, which is, after all, the goal of marketing.

4)   Use more activities, less discussion. Language comes from our left (rationalizing) brain. If you want to understand how people feel as well as how they think, you have to give them activities that unleash what’s in their right brains. That means activities based on images, drawing, even music, that allows them to express the more intuitive ideas and reactions that motivate behavior. It’s a pretty basic idea. And it works. In a recent workshop, we asked showed a piece of ethnography video a group of professionals. We asked one group to write their insights and the other group to draw their insights. The differences between the two were astonishing (yes, the drawings went deeper, faster.)

5)   Experiment, experiment, experiment. If new insights and ideas is your goal, then you have to keep yourself fresh and open. Doing things the same way, all or even most of the time, leads to the same results. If you are looking for new (and better), then try new approaches. If they fail, move on. If they work, congratulations on your courage and your new ideas!

The bottom line: a research event is a moment in time. A great new insight can drive business success. If it’s insights you are looking for, then try some of these ideas. If you want help with the process, call us!

Aww, that's just adorable. And not what we're talking about at all.

(Quite The Contrary, We’re Promoting Cold-Eyed Precision).

Over the past decade or so, scads of research has been conducted proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that advertising based on emotional content pulls better, converts better, sells better, sticks better and just slap performs better than advertising based solely on rational features and benefits. Just type “emotions in advertising” into a search engine (once you’ve finished reading this, of course) and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results (I just encountered a new “special report” on the subject and that’s what prompted me to write this).

Discarding the bottom 95% as general SEO gunk, you’ll still see a vast and deep array of information on this hot topic, all of which says pretty much the same two things:

1. Advertising built on emotional content outperforms advertising built on totally rational content in just about every way you can measure it.

2. As a marketer, you’re blowing it if you’re not building your marketing messages on a foundation of emotional appeal.

Unfortunately, very few of the books, reports, articles, commentaries, blogs and blurts that you’ll find in your search go on to explain just exactly what “emotional content” or “built on an emotional appeal” means.

“You want us to put puppies/kittens/babies in our ads? But we’re selling farm equipment/brokerage services/roofing nails!”

If you’re marketing pet food or baby clothes, then images of puppies, kittens and babies should probably have a significant role in your advertising. But, no, that’s not what we’re talking about when we at Drumcircle talk about emotions in advertising. What we’re talking about is using quantitative and qualitative research (our own, new, proprietary tools and techniques ) to gain an understanding of exactly what emotions motivate purchase decisions for your category, brand or product, and then using that insight to meticulously design advertising messages that will precisely tap those emotions.

Beyond emotion to Emotivation™

Most people who are up to date on the neuroscience of marketing accept the idea that peoples’ decisions are driven first by emotions and then post-rationalized with facts. A lot of people know this, but they’re not sure how to apply it to their own marketing challenges (this is especially true of marketers in “highly rational” business categories. A couple of years ago, a prospective client – a big financial services company – said to us “We’re going to hire you. But when you talk to our people outside the marketing team, please don’t talk about emotions. It just makes them tense”).

That’s one of the reasons we coined the term Emotivation; to draw a crystalline distinction between basic emotions (which can be sort of touchie-feelie, squishy and, frankly, a little scary) and the perceptual, intuitive forces that really motivate decisions and actions (which are, if you’re using our tools and techniques, clearly delineated, highly quantifiable and, when it comes to selling stuff, really, really useful).

At the risk of propagating more jargon, we call those perceptual, intuitive forces Emotivations.

Discovering and tapping Emotivations has helped Drumcircle’s clients, in both “rational “ categories (from farm equipment to pharmaceuticals) and more traditionally “emotional” ones (from soup to soda), to create more powerful, emotionally engaging advertising messages. And, so far, there’s not a puppy or a kittie in sight.

A client told me today that she liked working with me because I am smart. I said thank you. But the comment got me thinking.

I suppose I am smart enough. I got good grades in school. I graduated from college. I have two graduate degrees. I’ve been reasonably successful at work. That seems okay.

But some would say “who cares? You didn’t graduate from Harvard. In fact you didn’t even graduate from Yale, NYU or the current hot spot in the Northeast, Bowdoin. Nor did you go to law school, medical school or business school. And you haven’t made a fortune in hedge fund investing. Or even real estate. So you are not smart enough at all.”

And others would say “who cares because you are not street smart.” Take away my credit cards and dump me in a certain urban neighborhoods and I don’t think I would last long unless a cab came by to pick me up.

And forget about being smart enough to make it out of the deep, dark woods unscathed.

Some would say I am creatively smart – but many of those haven’t spent time nurturing their creative side. Side by side with a creative talent in any field, I am an untalented slob.

But I am smart enough – in fact very smart – in other ways. I am an unconventional thinker. I have a lot of curiosity. I listen hard and well. I try to find solutions that are different than the conventional wisdom, because I truly believe there is always room for innovation. I have an energy level that motivates people.

And sometimes that kind of smart is what it takes to spark – or at least support – positive change and growth in a community or organization.

So I would now say that I am a certain kind of smart. And so are you. We are all smart in our very individual ways. Our brains work in mysterious ways that are unique to us and reflect how we perceive, remember, and make decisions.

At Drumcircle, we talk a lot about how neuro-science has proven that decision-making is driven by initial, emotional, non-verbal perceptions – and not pure rationale thinking, as we believed in the past. But the point here is that there are different kinds of rationale thinking too. And as we go about making decisions in our daily lives, it makes sense to tap into different kinds of brains for insights. So we can take advantage of all the different types of smartness that are out there.

Is that an iPhone in your pocket or are you just happy to have me believe that it is?

There’s an article in the July 9th-15th 2011 issue of The Economist called The mystery of the Chinese consumer. It’s absolutely packed with fascinating facts. For example:

• Lily Li, a secretary living in Shanghai, uses Apple earphones for the cheap Chinese mobile phone in her pocket, so it appears to the outside world that she’s using an iPhone
• She drives to work, despite the fact that it takes four times longer than taking public transport, just to show off the fact that she owns a car.
• The middle-aged woman executive who drives a pristine new BMW circles the block for half an hour to avoid a 50-cent parking fee
• The same woman won’t invest much money on interior decoration, because only her family sees the inside of her home

At the risk of armchair quarterbacking (but, isn’t that the privilege of the blogger?), is any of the above surprising? Chinese people are emerging from a couple of generations of deprivation and conformity. Is it any wonder that they’re beginning to regard high-value consumer goods as badges of individual success?

Consumers and/or Culture. You have to understand both.

• Nestle is in talks to buy Hsu Fu Chi, China’s biggest confectioner, to acquire its “deep knowledge of Chinese consumers.”

Let’s take a minute to ponder the difference between understanding consumers (or, as we at Drumcircle prefer to put it, understanding people) and understanding the unique cultures in which people live, work, interact and consume.

Apparently, BMW translates into Chinese as "Bao Ma", which also means "treasured steed". The crew in Munich have got to love that.

• A globally successful cheese maker bombed in China because selling fermented dairy products to people who grew up eating fermented tofu is an uphill struggle.
• After a massive investment in China, a major USA-based home improvement retailer is shutting down and withdrawing because the concept of Do It Yourself is a nonstarter in a market where a vast horde of cheap labor stands by to paint, plumb, lay tile and hang sheetrock.

I’ll make the argument that the aforementioned challenges being faced by Western marketers in China are not due to a lack of understanding of Chinese consumers. They’re due to a lack of understanding of the culture in which those consumers are consuming. Cultures are unique. What drives peoples’ decisions about what brands to buy is not: all people are motivated by deep-seated emotions (what Drumcircle calls Emotivations). And when a culture has had those emotions bottled up and unsatisfied for over half a century, it’s not surprising that they’re gushing out everywhere now.

“Making others aware of my success is more important than having my success make me comfortable.”

Given where Chinese people are coming from, is it any wonder they’ve become “consumers on crack”? It may not be politically correct, but it’s humanly correct. As the song by Depeche Mode says (yeah, it was 1984 so I know I’m dating myself) People Are People long before they’re consumers.

Donna runs the Insights Group for ThisCompany. She is new to the company and is bringing in a lot of new ideas and the hopes, dreams and energy that it takes to implement new ideas. It’s a hard challenge and there are built-in constraints:

• It’s a business-to-business company. They are always more risk averse.
• It’s in a business category that, by its nature, is conservative.
• The company has been around a long time, so “doing things the way we always have” is deep  in the organizational DNA.
• There is, in reality, only so much money to fund various projects.

We are working on a proposal that promotes a very different approach to developing a marketing strategy. We want to uncover the underlying Emotivations™    – or the emotions that are inevitably at the heart of any decision-making in the category. And it’s not an inexpensive project to complete.

Underlying fears and concerns are emerging, from the get-go. Even from the very people who are working on the proposal and have a deep and successful history with the organization. There are comments like: “This is business. No one has emotions.” “People won’t share this with us.” “We already know what’s important we just want to validate what we already know.” “This is too expensive.” “This takes too much time.”

I’m imagining that if you are on the side of wanting to bring a change in an organization, these are very familiar comments. The challenge is how to overcome these pre-dispositions that have been ingrained for many many years. One of our partners on the potential project is worried we may have to sacrifice “doing something” for “doing what we want/think is the best.” I’m thinking this tension between doing something new and doing things the same will be a constant tug-of-war and it’s unclear which “force” will win or lose and where compromises will be made.

Personally I respect and support Donna for her commitment to doing what she thinks is right even though it might raise the hackles of people around her. I want to share with her what I know about doing things differently and work with her to get to that new place. And I recognize the risk is greater for her than for me because, when you dig right down to the bottom of this tunnel, this organization pays her salary and that is a force that is hard to reckon with.

This story will play out over the next few weeks. It is a personal story, yet one that I know is played out in different ways, with different people, in different organizations, every day. Stay tuned to see what happens next.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t draw. My stick figures don’t look like figures at all. They barely look like sticks. My handwriting is illegible even to me. But drawing, I learned from Jon Pearson’s program at CPSI doesn’t have to meet conventional standards of “good” to be incredibly useful.  Jon is an engaging speaker and story-teller and has put together a program called “Draw Power” that demonstrates why we should all be drawing (err, scribbling) more.

Jon explains why we are all so sensitive about our poor drawing skills (it has something to do with being thwarted as children. Remember teachers who insisted we color in the lines and others who said things like “but that doesn’t look like ____________________. You fill in the blank of whatever you were trying to draw).

Jon says it doesn’t matter what other people think of our drawings. In fact, he encourages us to put pencil to paper and just let it go. Can’t make a decision about where to go for dinner tonight, put pencil to paper and start drawing. Obsessing about whether or not to get married or have kids, start drawing. Struggling with a decision that could make or break your business, start drawing.

Divide a paper into nine squares, and tell your story in drawing. Be quick. Don’t think. Don’t care. Just go with it. The end result can look like a 1 year old’s scribbles. It really doesn’t matter.

When you are finished drawing, come back and tell the story and see what you discover.

It’s a very powerful process. There were probably about 50 people in the room where he was presenting.  We all obediently did what he told us to do. And then we talked about the experience.

What we all discovered for ourselves is what Jon told us in the first place. It does not matter what the drawing looks like. It’s unlocking the visual, emotional, more metaphor-driven part of your brain to tell a story and then experiencing that “aha” moment that means we’ve uncovered a new insight.

It works.

For more information, drop us a line. Or go directly to the source: Jon Pearson. His website is: www.createlearning.com.

Improv sessions show up frequently at creativity events because a) they are very fun and b) they reflect the essence of creative thinking: “yes and”. The idea of “yes and” – building on others ideas without judgment – is a powerful concept and one that doesn’t get enough attention in the business world.

This CPSI session was led by Rick DiBiasio. Rick is a certified financial planner (i.e., someone who does the very serious job of managing other people’s money) and a passionate improv performer. You can check out his work at www.middleagedcrazy.com.

Rick led a great session with about 30 people from around the world (translate: a large group, some of whom spoke English as a second language – a definite challenge in a group of improv beginners.)

First Rick reviewed the fundamental rules of improv, which struck me as good rules for business.

1. Improv is a team sport. You will look good only if you make your partner look good.
2. Don’t try too hard. Be yourself and stay in the flow. The harder you try to be funny, the less funny you will be. Funny comes out by itself. Just stick to your character and stick to the story. And avoid weird connections and dirty references.
3. Accept your partner’s offer. Always. Denial is the number one reason a scene goes bad.
4. Don’t ask your partner open ended questions. That puts all the burden on your partner.
5. Remember it’s about story-telling.

Then we set to work. The first exercise was just pairing off, having a partner make an offer, and then accepting the offer. (Anne: “let’s go to the beach.” Partner “yes”). This was a simple illustration of rule number 3 and great fun. Think about it: whatever you say, your partner says “yes”.

In the second exercise, we got in a circle and had to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. The trick: we could only contribute one word. The warning: sometimes your contribution to the story will be the boring but necessary words like “the” and “and”. This is where things got tricky. Despite clarity around the rules of improv, some people couldn’t resist adding weird, disconnected or dirty details. And these additions always threw the story off.

The third exercise was amazing. Two people were given characters and told to start a scene. (Yes, this was a bit threatening and yet it worked beautifully). After a minute or two Rick would yell stop. The players would freeze. The next player, who had his/her back to the audience, turned around, tapped one of the players on the shoulder, assumed his/her position, and by virtue of the body position took the scene in a different direction. Each person dramatically changed the story. Watching the twists and turns people took was funny. And it was a vivid demonstration of what happens when we just stay in the moment and go with the flow.

Improv sessions are definitely lessons in life. Ninety minutes of improv demonstrate clearly that stories will work out better if the story teller is relaxed and just playing out the scene as it comes. Don’t try too hard. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Go with the flow and stay in the moment. Ideas to live by, for sure.

I’ve been reading Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, The Battle For The Soul of American Business by Bob Lutz, the frequently retired and re-hired super-senior executive of numerous automakers. I’m a Lutz fan (I have been since I read Guts way back in 2001 or so). But not everybody is. Car Guys feels self-serving in places and, heaven knows, Mr. Lutz does relish the words “I”, “me” and “mine” quite a lot. To call “Maximum Bob” an iconoclast is to call the Three Gorges Dam a sink stopper.

General Motors At The Brink of Irrelevance

I recommend the book because it’s a crystal clear examination of how a once massively-successful marketer, in this case, General Motors, can slowly, inexorably drift from a culture of creativity and innovation into one of predictability and process and what a wrenching thing it is to bring such a company back from the brink of irrelevance.

The point Lutz makes (repeatedly) about what happened to Mighty GM (and, by extension, American business in the broad sense) is that, before the reckoning came, they had a lot of people responsible for innovation but no one accountable for it. “Creatives” breathed rarefied air in “Concept Studios”, where they filled the walls with sticky notes embodying “out of the box” notions like a fully voice-controlled car (they built a prototype, Lutz test drove it and killed it). At the other end of the spectrum, “VLE’s” (Vehicle Line Executives) were held rigidly accountable for scheduling and budgets, but not for understanding what the car-consuming public really wanted. GM existed as a polarity. There were two bubbles and the twain seldom met.

And that brings me to my central question: How do we make organizations accountable for innovation and creativity? How do we make it a line item?

I’ve been to CPSI And I Am Changed

I’m pondering all this because I just got back from a week at a creativity conference in Atlanta where I was surrounded by several hundred people, many of whom had titles like “VP of Innovation” and “New Product Development Director”. They came from Fortune 1000 companies. They came from global brands. They came from the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Korea, Nigeria, Chile and Finland. They work in categories as diverse as consumer electronics, breakfast foods, cast iron valves, beauty, finance and missile defense systems.

These are smart, creative and important people who are responsible for budgets and other peoples’ careers. And I’m willing to bet that none has bottom-line profitability accountability in their companies (this is not for one second to diminish their importance to the operation, the fact they their roles exist is a good sign).

The World Needs Lutzness

Goodness knows, I don’t have an answer for this, but until some marketer somewhere finds a way to assign a line-item value to creativity, we’d better hope there are more Lutz-like individuals out there to shake things up from time to time.