Brilliant Reflections/Consumer Research Specialists

The Importance of Visual Communication

For smaller companies and for smaller brands within large company portfolios, the visual communication may well be the main method for communicating with the customer something about:

the brand
the products and services

In the fast moving consumer goods, I am increasingly coming across small companies who are spending an almost disproportionate amount of time, effort and money on getting this aspect right. If they can get the visual communication right so that the company/product image is noticed and appeals to the target market, they will get buy in. Their job is then to deliver on the promise – woe betide any of us who don’t do that with today’s fickle customer.

I have seen good products fail because of inadequate or inappropriate communication. Your product or service may be truly unique and meet the needs of a new niche market. However, you have to get initial buy in and trial. Without that, you don’t have a business and your visual communication of that product or service can be a major help or a hindrance.

Children – Too Difficult to Research?

Welcome to the wonderful challenging and often frustrating world of working with children!

Historically, market researchers often avoided research with very young children as “too difficult”. If a product was targeted to a range of ages, a common approach was to talk with older children only. However, the perceptions and tastes of young children are very different from their older siblings. With the growth in products aimed at very young children, we have learnt from those who have always worked with them.

Researchers at the television programme Sesame Street have always looked for new ways to work with pre-school children. They are the target market for the programme! These researchers showed that children as young as 18 months old were able to different “bad” and “good” using a two-point scale in which Oscar was “bad” and Big Bird was “good”. The ability of a child to attach ratings to something grows by leaps and bounds with age, even ratings of emotions like “love” (think hearts in a jar.) It is up to the researcher to look for ways to represent those concepts in a way which the child “gets”.

You need to meet them on their own ground, understanding where they are emotionally and cognitively. They are not mini-adults and one size does not fit all! If an age group is particularly important to your products, learn to work with them at their level, they will give you fantastic insights into your products! Trust me, you will have fun!

Welcome to the Wonderful, Tough World of Fragrance

We know that the fragrance of both personal care products and household products is extremely important in “selling” the product to consumers. Anecdotally, some believe that up to 80% of consumer acceptability for a product can be attributed to the appeal of the fragrance. Developers have been heard to say that it is easier to sell a poor shampoo with a highly acceptable fragrance than a technically good shampoo with a less acceptable fragrance.

So, getting the fragrance right is really important. Welcome to the tough, tough world of fragrance assessment by consumers. Why is it so tough? The sense of smell or aroma is
one of our most primitive senses in that it is hardwired into a relative primitive area of the brain. It is strongly associated with our memory. If you smell something which is strongly associated with a particular occasion (childhood summers at the beach, for example) it can evoke a strong sense of deja vu. We don’t just think “It reminds me of….”, rather we are instantaneously “back there” in that memory. When we smell a fragrance, we tend to “love” or “hate” it but we cannot always say why in words that a perfume or fragrance developer can use to refine it.

There is no equivalent to sweetness, sourness or bitterness which we might use in a consumer survey on a food product. Instead we rely on consumers telling us whether a fragrance is an appropriate strength (fragrance impact) and has the emotional qualities we want to portray in the product. Is it feminine? Is it natural? Is it fresh?

Personal care products with the widest usage in which this applies include toilet soap and body wash, shampoo and deodorants. Undoubtedly there are many more but these are the ones which spring to mind. Fragrance plays a major role in the acceptance of these products in which the appearance (colour etc.) may be the only other attribute on which acceptance is based. This naturally assumes a product which “does the job” (at least as far as the consumer is concerned.)

Why Snippets?

This is the place I put a whole lot of informal snippets of information – some connected to services, some not. They are personal views based on the consumers I have talked with and the ways in which they continue to surprise and amaze me.

I hope that you may enjoy some of the stories, learn from them and gain insights for your own companies and products.

You may not agree with me or you may feel that you would like more detail than these short pieces give. In either situation, don’t hesitate to contact me at reflections@brilliant.co.nz to discuss them further.