Why are you like this?

Consumer research can sometimes be misleading if we don’t dig deep enough.

“Nobody likes the Holiday Program, and that’s why it didn’t sell.”

“Consumers don’t really want Disney anymore.”

“Men don’t shop this aisle.”

If you go into meetings unprepared, you’re gonna learn some strange - and incorrect - stuff.

The 3 items above are actual quotes from my last 15 years of Marketing. All three were made around programs that received record breaking sales and award-winning executions after deeper deliberation.

As Marketers, it can be so easy to just take a struggling program at face value. But, what research does for us is to tell us WHY something isn’t working, so we can make the easiest, least expensive, and most lucrative adjustment possible. It may turn out, that 90% of the work done was brilliant, and can be 100% stellar once the 10% that isn’t working is adjusted.

Here are three thinly veiled and non-proprietary examples from actual categories.

1. The display sucks. The program is bad. No one wants Christmas anymore.

   Well, cancelling Christmas seems a scrooge move to me - even if it’s not your scene. But, in one year of a usually dominant program at a large Mass retailer, that seemed to be just the case. Truckloads of displays carrying branded materials from a global partnership weren’t selling through in 1 out of 41 countries at one single retailer. (Granted, it was a large retailer!) In spite of the obvious proof to the contrary, the finger of blame came squarely around back to that global partnership as the cause. Of course - with deeper digging - the culprit was the mix of SKUs this retailer had demanded, not the products, themselves. One quick run of data from the country as a whole showed that the retailer had opted out of the most popular and fast-moving SKUs, leaving their displays empty on the options that drove larger baskets and incremental sales. Had the mix been evaluated and refined throughout the season, the program would have been a blockbuster, even at this retailer.

2. Evaluate, communicate, and craft the correct targets and goals.
   So many times, companies are seeking to bust through the noise at shelf with designs that drive “impulse purchase”. (This is the in-store version of a “viral video”.) They go all in on some exciting and loud property, color, or selection of products hoping to breathe fresh air into a category that seems stale. The problem is, that’s not how consumers buy in everyday essential categories. This is doubly true in a “stale” category. Consumers who are loyalists will likely always grab their preferred version of your product. Consumers in everyday retail tend to shop in auto-pilot for simplicity, and they stick to what they know works for them. In this case - as often happens - instead of understanding this dynamic, and promising incremental sales (and regular display support) building into lasting change over 1-3 years, the company promised a core change in consumer behavior at launch. While the product was able to drive additional sales, higher baskets, and new consumers at launch, the initiative was considered a let down when an incremental item couldn’t be a core essential. This could have been easily avoided with a little review of previous innovation case studies. When you launch something exciting, consumers may pick it up in addition to their regular product to try it out. They might even buy it once instead of their regular product, just to see if it’s any good. But, new innovations and designs need to be considered incremental in the first year of launch. They can add value to your category, and pull consumers from other brands; but they are unlikely to become a workhorse until consumers have been able to complete several buying cycles worth of reminders. And some incremental products and designs will always be just that. So, do your research on previous examples in other categories as well as yours, before you overpromise on a killer grab for new dollars and lose credibility in the process.

3. And last, but not least, the myth of the female shopper.
   Y’all, I have never once walked into a brand meeting in which the shopper was described as gender neutral, non-binary, or simply as a person. There is a myth that is still prevalent today that women hold the purse strings for family shopping and that they alone make decision for their household. Not only is this incorrect and bananas out of date; but it’s also correlated to a reporting bias that obscures the true consumer. Working on a brand that considered it’s consumer 80% female, we designed some very exciting and - some might say taboo - packaging with a famous women’s designer. Then, we were flummoxed to see that sales dropped by approximately 49%. Low and behold, a new study by Nielsen, our (then very new) social media followership, and data from our retailers showed that the new designs lacked one important factor: Male interest. And, you’ll never guess what the updated % of male shoppers in the category were? 49%! (i.e. NEARLY HALF.) Don’t take the information you have on file as the one source of truth and don’t discount global, local, and national trends’ effect on purchasing. Using outdated data can result in dropped sales; and - frankly - if outdated gender biases are driving your decisions, you are likely to find yourself in a dark place (in the red).

So, in order to ensure you don’t throw any babies out with the bathwater, follow the Steve Perry rule for voice:

Don’t stop believin’ in growth, innovation, and new designs.

You may want to consider, instead, asking the question of your creation, “But, WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?”