What Do Consumers Want? Whatever You Do, Don’t Just Ask

Gerald Zaltman wanted to know about pantyhose. How women feel about pantyhose. What makes them buy pantyhose.

Another researcher might just ask. But Zaltman, a sociologist at the Harvard Business School working for clients such as Du Pont, used his own patented research method. He calls it a “semiotic analysis.”

“I use a lot of visual imagery,” he explained. “People bring in pictures. We look at the sensory metaphors they use to represent what they think . . . and develop this set of procedures to help people express hidden thoughts, thoughts they didn’t know they had.”

The women he recruited spent several hours tearing out magazine pictures, drawing, taking photographs of anything--except pantyhose--that symbolized their feelings about pantyhose. One woman brought in a picture of a cookie cutter, expressing, Zaltman believes, a resentment that men designers expect all women to wear the same kind of hosiery. Another brought in a picture of a woman in a bathtub expressing, he figured, how steamy the things are to wear.

While previous research showed that women have a love-hate relationship with hosiery, Zaltman declared proudly, “Our research showed a like-hate relationship. There’s a very big difference.”

Zaltman labors at the postmodern fringe of “nontraditional market research”--a growing approach that uses behavioral scientists to analyze what certain groups of people want and are willing to pay for. The researchers say they are turning to qualitative research because it is becoming harder to quantify consumer behavior. When they find consumers to survey, they are unsure whether they ought to trust what they say.

Straddling the seemingly disparate worlds of commerce and culture, these sociologists, anthropologists and social psychologists have a unique vantage point from which to observe how Americans think and behave. Beyond pantyhose, they have produced insights, both profound and picayune, on our relationships to everything from diamonds to toy action figures.

They have found, for instance, that younger people like soft drinks for breakfast. Boomers are starting to think like slackers. Motorists prefer dimly lit gas stations. And that for many people, consuming has replaced religion.

Social scientists are not new to marketing research. One of the most famous, a Viennese Freudian named Ernest Dichter, figured out in 1939 that men were attracted into Plymouth showrooms by convertibles, which they thought of as their mistress. But he observed they ended up buying sedans, which they thought of as their wife.

Needless to say, times have changed. Last year, cultural anthropologists hired by the Detroit advertising firm Campbell-Ewald concluded that the reason Chevrolet’s customers were so loyal to their sport utility vehicles was that they thought of them as a “shield against a hostile world.”

The anthropologists had actually moved in with the car owners, sometimes for days, to observe them and analyze their relationship with their cars. As the anthropologists reported, sitting high above the road in a four-wheel drive “gave those drivers an additional sense of security. They were more in charge of their own destiny,” said senior vice president Mark O. Benner. Using that intelligence, the firm created a tag line to market the 1996 Chevy Blazer: “It’s nice to know it’s there.”

One reason qualitative research has become popular is that it’s less expensive than the traditional large-scale telephone surveys and focus groups, said media columnist Randall Rothenberg, author of “Where the Suckers Moon” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.) “People aren’t home, they can’t go door-to-door. It’s hard to do telephone surveys, the refusal rates are going up, people don’t want to be disturbed. Mall intercepts, those have problems,” he said.

Even if they do get respondents, there’s no sure way to know how much of what people say reflects what they actually do, said Jeff DeJoseph, an executive with J. Walter Thompson. Equally important, he said, the sheer number of products and media messages has made it difficult for advertisers to sell a product rationally on its own merits.

“The only thing left is to understand the culture and where people are fitting in these days,” he said.

His firm hired a team of behavioral scientists to study the thinking patterns of managers. They concluded that baby boomers are increasingly adopting Generation X-type attitudes.

“The structures the previous generation relied upon, for example if you worked hard, you get promoted, no longer apply. They believe you’ve got to create your own system or be a system beater. . . . These are people who believe they have to make their own way in virtually everything,” DeJoseph said.

Knowing this, he said client DeBeers can adjust its advertising message to suggest that, “Giving a diamond is more of an act of self-expression than a cultural imperative, which is traditionally what it has always been.”

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Sociologists and anthropologists are particularly valuable in global markets where they can evaluate social systems and beliefs, unlike psychologists, who are concerned only with inner motivations, said Christine Wright-Isak, a sociologist on staff with Young & Rubicam advertisers in New York. “A sociologist will ask the question, ‘Do people in China use pillows?’ where a psychologist would tend to ask, ‘What kind of pillows do they like?’ or ‘What motivates them to use pillows?’ ”

She said she has been studying the cultural habits of young Americans for clients.

“A big one is they don’t often start the day with a hot beverage. They often start with a soft drink. The WWII folks drink coffee. It’s almost a reflex in this culture. The younger generation drinks coffee, but not like their parents--brewed in a pot percolated at home. They go to coffee bars. There’s a social component.”

She also studies the two-income family, which, she tells her clients, has precious little time to comparison shop. Therefore, she says, they have to rely on brand names. “They’ll pay to avoid spending time doing that if they want to spend that precious time family building or relationship building. Or finding a new relationship,” she said.

Many of the behavioral scientists conduct their research by videotaping and interviewing consumers in their homes, their cars or where they shop.

Ewan Duncan, a project manager with the Doblin Group of Chicago, said his client Amoco was puzzled when customers who had complained that the gas stations were too dark still complained after lights were turned up “bright enough to do brain surgery.” Using a technique called video ethnography, the researchers hung cameras in the gas stations and analyzed thousands of hours of tapes with a computer process that allows them to catalog patterns of behavior.

“We looked and found that people kept looking over their shoulder to see what was lurking behind them in the darkness beyond the gas station. By turning up the light even more, the increased contrast made it even worse. When we redesigned the station, we had far more reflected light so there wasn’t this great contrast,” Duncan said.

They also came up with a digital display on the gas nozzle because they saw people contorting themselves to read the pump display as they pumped. They proposed hand washes after they saw people searching around for something to do with the nasty gas smell on their hands.

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Some behavioral scientists are more comfortable than others using their training to serve businesses dedicated to the bottom line. But as academic jobs dried up in the 1970s and ‘80s, they began drifting into the private sector. “There are a lot of advantages moving into the private sector, not least of which is salary,” said Cynthia Costella, a staff sociologist with the American Sociological Assn. in Washington, D.C.

But she said that 80% of sociologists still remain in academia, where they can be assured that the only purpose their research will serve is more research.

Some say they face serious ethical dilemmas in business consulting--particularly when the targeted market segment is young children.

Glendale social psychologist Dan Acuff, a former teacher who is now president of Youth Market Systems, said he recently received a call from an advertising agency whose client had learned that inner-city children love toy action figures. The agent wanted Acuff to help target those children more effectively.

“We said absolutely not. We’re not going to help you sell more action figures, toys with guns, to inner-city youth,” Acuff said. “The key question is the ethical question. Just because we have something kids want, do we give it to them?”

In the end, Rothenberg said it’s unclear whether any particular research methods actually work. “When the economy’s growing,” he said, “they all work. When we’re in a recession, nothing works.”