Marketing Under the Microscope in Hawaii : What Makes Former NFL Coach John Madden Reek of ‘Beeriness’?

They came to discuss the latest in researching consumer attitudes and behaviors. Why, for instance, exuberant ex-NFL coach John Madden projects “beeriness” (a desirable personality trait to most beer consumers) while understated ex-NFL player Pat Summerall does not.

According to Stroh Brewery Co. marketing research group manager Ed Benfield, the elusive quality of beeriness (“it’s easy to recognize but difficult to describe”) is the reason you’ll find Madden performing in beer commercials and Summerall doing hardware store ads.

Serious Business

Notions such as beeriness are no joke among marketing researchers, who recently met here for the American Marketing Assn.’s 17th annual “Attitude Research Conference.” The attendees, many of them marketing and advertising pros from Fortune 500 firms, listened intently as speakers such as Benfield likened the probe of “the beery mind set” to the study of cultural behavior by anthropologists. Well actually, as Benfield added, “seat-of-the-pants anthropologists.”

So what is beeriness? And (more significantly to researchers) how do you measure it?

Seeking to test his listeners’ beeriness quotient, Benfield asked a series of silly questions: “Have you ever taken a rental car to Earl Scheib and had it painted purple? Are your favorite brands of pants Expandomatics? Do little pieces of foam rubber stick to your clothing when you get out of your car? Do you pronounce a word (such as Ralph) when you belch?”

And worse.

While he drew a lot of laughs with his quiz, Benfield was soberly establishing that beeriness is not exactly a quality that can be identified with a standard line of questioning. “Many aspects of consumer perceptions of a brand and product are simply not knowable,” he said. “Additionally, much of what is known is sometimes difficult to articulate. Beeriness, for example.

“So what’s often the case is that the collective knowledge about consumers’ perception of a product is not written down anywhere in a comprehensive form. It’s in bits and pieces, in this research report or that strategy statement. And what’s worse, since the most potentially salient aspects of the (research) model are often the most difficult to articulate, they aren’t written down at all.”

But that was only one of the problems that marketing researchers attending the conference pondered in the course of their three-day meeting.

They also considered the relative merits of conducting attitude or behavior research. In the former, researchers study why people are likely to buy certain things; in the latter, they survey who buys what--where, when and how.

And in the course of their presentations, the lecturers sometimes passed along recent findings in consumer opinion. For example, Tony Adams, Campbell Soup Co.’s director of market research and planning, revealed that one of his firm’s recent attitude studies showed major differences in food preferences among men and women.

Men are still much more likely than women to enjoy “ macho foods” such as beer, pork and beans, hot dogs, black pepper, steak sandwiches and submarine or hoagy sandwiches, he said. And, according to his research, men are also more likely to prefer “nostalgic foods” (root beer, corn flakes, apple pie, pudding and mashed potatoes) than women are.

On the other hand, women would rather consume what Adams called “trendy foods”: herb teas, croissants, quiches and Chinese food. To no one’s surprise, Adams noted that the top foods of children are ice cream, doughnuts, chocolate chip cookies and candy bars. But to some amazement, he also told the group that dill pickles are children’s second favorite vegetable after corn on the cob.

Attitudes and Opportunity

Why does Campbell Soup care so much about the changing food preferences of consumers, particularly in areas in which the firm has no apparent stake? As Adams put it, “We believe attitudes are what a lot of opportunities are made of.”

(To wit: Campbell acquired Vlasic Foods Inc., a manufacturer of pickle products, in 1978.)

The conference was attended by about 110 individuals mostly from the United States but it also drew a few participants from Australia.

Wherever they came from, however, they learned in no uncertain terms that one of the problems they may share is the practice of unwittingly marketing to people like themselves.

Arthur J. Kover, director of research for Cunningham & Walsh Inc., a Manhattan advertising agency, proposed to the audience that “we marketers wish to advertise and market to people we feel comfortable with, people like us: people who are educated, comfortable, successful, whether white or black.”

Kover is also an adjunct professor at New York University and when he was introduced as a “nutty professor type” and “the conscience and free spirit of New York,” he responded by saying his Hawaiian visit must then qualify him as “academia nut.”

But he, too, was most serious about what he considers a self-defeating trend in marketing: “I suggest that we ignore markets that are large and profitable because we feel uncomfortable about them.”

To illustrate his point, Kover cited several cases. In one, his firm studied the users of a health and beauty aid consumed chiefly by women over 35. The ad agency thought the brand might be “age-specific” and wanted to see who its younger consumers were. If they could find out exactly who these younger users were, Kover reasoned, they might reach more of them sooner.

Research showed that the brand’s younger users were women who were not well educated, likely to be married with young children and working at clerical or unskilled jobs.

Consumption Patterns

“Their consumption patterns showed that much of their income was spent on the latest things: video disc players, convection ovens, home computers . . . They were heavily into debt,” Kover said.

“Sports has proven a key indicator in our work. These women attended some highly competitive, even violent sports (boxing, roller skating matches), but they participated in non-competitive sports (snowmobiling, distance running). Their ailments were those of pressure: nervous tension, constipation, (tiredness). The analysis showed a group caught between two worlds, home and work, but with little chance of conquering either.”

Kover indicated he was pleased with the analysis because it pointed to a group of women who are “rarely targeted and not often defined as (a marketing) target.” In short, he said, women who would love to have a little advertising aimed their way.

But the client who paid for the study was not thrilled with the results. As Kover recalled the angry response of the firm’s marketing director: “I don’t want to sell to people like that.”

As an antidote to such lost opportunities, Kover advocated improved perception for all concerned.

Gaining a Clearer Picture

“It means taking the effort to see what kinds of people actually go to supermarkets, buses, bars and gas stations,” he said, adding that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for advertising and marketing executives to work behind check-out counters or on car lots to gain clearer pictures of the consumers they wish to reach.

Venetia Hands, a senior vice president at Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, also encouraged conference participants to become more aware of the “effects marketing itself has had and is having on marketing.”

“We have trained consumers to make decisions for themselves,” she said, “and now we wonder why it is more difficult to influence them. We have bribed consumers so often to switch brands for a coupon here, a few cents off there, that we have totally undermined the concepts of ‘regular price’ and ‘fair value.’ ”

In addition, Hands claimed that marketing and advertising experts have created “formula solutions to advertising problems,” formulas such as celebrity endorsers that are now perceived by consumers as “jokes.”

“We have evolved into what the social anthropologists call a marketing culture. The average woman or man on the street probably knows more about marketing today than did the brand manager of yesteryear.”

The attitude and behavior researchers attending the conference also considered related work in other areas: jury selection, economics, public television, and more.

The listened, for example, to sport psychologist Jerry May of the University of Nevada at Reno tell of his work as the team psychologist for the U.S. Olympic ski team. May warned his audience of the destructiveness of such attitudes as “winning at all costs, all the time” and pointed out that the one internal motivator that consistently shows up in attitude surveys of world-class athletes is fun.

As May put it, “When they lose that attitude of fun, forget it.”

Distribution of Disease

Conference participants were also updated on attitude/behavior research in the field of social epidemiology. From Leonard Syme, a professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley, the researchers heard how attitudes and behaviors are showing up as factors in the distribution of disease.

Specifically, they were informed of Syme’s study of 17,000 Japanese: 8,000 of them living in Japan, 5,000 living in Honolulu and 4,000 living in San Francisco. Syme wanted to find out why the Japanese living in Japan have significantly lower incidences of coronary heart disease than Japanese living in Honolulu or San Francisco.

According to Syme’s research, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, even when dietary, smoking and blood pressure factors were the same for all three groups, there was still considerably more heart disease among Japanese living in San Francisco. (Japanese living in Honolulu experienced somewhat more heart disease than those living in Japan, who consistently had the least heart disease when all other factors were balanced. But as the Japanese in the study moved farther from Japan, their rate heart disease also progressively increased.)

“It was a first-class puzzle,” said Syme, who spent two years of his life trying to figure out an alternative explanation.

It was only after countless personal interviews with Japanese living in Japan that Syme felt he found the answer. Over and over again, he heard from Japan’s Japanese that the major difference between them and the Japanese living in other areas of the world is social support. As Syme told it, the Japanese in Japan keep the same friends for their entire lifetimes.

“Male friends in Japan go to school together. They take jobs in the same firms . . . They go on vacations together,” he said. “It was near unanimous among Japanese that lack of social connections was responsible for the high rate of coronary heart disease of people in industrialized nations.”

Syme, who is now studying hypertension among bus drivers in San Francisco, suggested to the marketing researchers their data gathering and evaluation problems were similar to those faced by social epidemiologists.

We now have lots of data that we do not completely understand, he observed.

But Syme had not come to play a dirge. Indeed, he wound up singing a little marketing research gospel: “In my view, we need theory--even bad theory--to guide us . . . when this fails, we need more data.”