Page 200 - Marketing the Basics 2nd

192 Marketing: the Basics
techniques to gauge consumer familiarity towards a brand’s slogan. One example is to ask what furniture would be found in the Heineken living room? Or, in the Corona living room, what sport is on the television? Though we may not think about beer a lot the marketer researcher is trying to surface the sub-conscious thoughts and feeling they have about various beer brands. Children may be asked to finish a simple story or fill in a bubble in a cartoon with what the person is saying.
Catching the subject off-guard can yield interesting answers if the conclusions are restricted to the ‘isn’t this interesting?’ category. What we mean by that is too often marketers over-analyse data. It is as if they feel compelled to uncover new discoveries because they are conducting a scientific study. What they fail to remember is that in every scientific study you have to control the environment in order to replicate the results consistently. In the social sciences that’s very difficult to do, which means you have to cut out some details that you hope are not important. There are many examples of over-analysis. Perhaps the most famous involved Sigmund Freud and one of his students. One day Freud told his student that the night before he had dreamt about cigars. Nothing but cigars. Now, most of us would shrug our shoulders and say that’s nice, and start to inch our way to the door hoping to escape before he continues to tell the rest of his dull dream. However, to a student of the world’s most famous psychoanalyst, a dream about a cigar is explicit proof that the cigar is actually a metaphor for a repressed desire to engage in homosexuality. To which Freud remarked, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’.
oBseRvaTionaL MeTHoDs
Observational methods are techniques that (no surprise here) involve the researcher observing the subject in question in its natural setting. Observational methods are useful because researchers are pretty confident that their influence is nullified in the outcome of the study. One example is to go to a Manchester United football match in order to understand what the fans experience. The drawback is that since the researcher remains on the sidelines, they cannot replicate the outcome easily. Any photographer will tell