DIY Research Recruiting

A big part of getting the information you need to make smart decisions about everything from messaging, to product positioning, branding, merchandising, pricing, etc can be attained if you can just get the right people to participate in your research. In this post, I’ll outline the key elements of DIY recruiting and how it has worked for me.

Why Do Recruiting Yourself?

First off, many small and medium sized business simply can’t afford to outsource recruiting. Plus, one of the benefits of doing recruiting yourself is that you can develop relationships with your research participants. Companies that have to move fast can get a huge advantage from working with a group of research participants who have already participated in previous studies. Of course, depending on your research, it’s not always possible to develop a group as a resource. That said, developing an internal competency around recruiting will save effort over time, and can be a resource for many areas of a business.

Pre-Requisites For Recruiting

There are some things that you’ll need to know before you start:

• Research Goals: It’s important to have clearly articulated research goals and objectives before you start any recruiting activities. This will not only tie your efforts to actionable results, it will ensure that you’ve recruiting relevant participants.
• Participant Segmentation: Having research goals in place will support participant segmentation. You can also use existing market segments, but it’s most useful to segment your participants on a behavioral basis. So, if you’re recruiting to test brand identities for a new beverage for kids you might want to segment retailers, end consumers (kids), and purchasing consumers (moms). If you’re on a tight budget focus on the segments that have the greatest potential for returns.
• The Screener: This is a document that will assist in screening potential candidates to participate in your research study. It will include information from the participant segmentation as well as:
  • Clear expectations for the participant – How long the commitment will be, when it will take place, etc.
  • Sample size – This can range widely by the research methodology you use. The point is to make sure that the sample is large enough to spot the trends that will serve as your design targets.
  • A demographic profile of ideal participants – Gender, age, income, family, etc.
  • Additional information that is relevant to your research – Do they use your product/service, how often, etc.
  • Background – Have they participated in such research before, do they work in the industry, etc. Depending on how your research is being conducted, this can be built into the study itself.
• Recruiting Schedule: This is a realistic time-line for your recruiting project. Depending on your research program you may have to make a significant number of phone calls, or send a large number of e-mails, to coordinate research participants, so leave plenty of time. It takes longer to do recruiting that you’d think. Also, you can count on a decent number of participants not-showing up or finishing your study, so plan accordingly.
• Project Management: Ideally, you’ll have a project manager of some sort to help coordinate your research program, manage the time-line, budget, and communication.
• Compensation: You may have to compensate people for their participation in your study, so make sure you account for this in your budgeting. If you’re on a tight budget it is possible to motivate people to participate with a chance to win a significant prize which costs less than compensating every participant. The single most important motivation is a chance to make a difference though!

Finding Participants

Obviously, if you’ve got a business up and running  you may not have to look any further than your list of current or past customers. If, however, you’re working on something new such as a business plan, or a new product or service, you’ll have to recruit from the wild. This is where things get creative. Here are a couple examples from my experience.

Back in 2005 when I was working with Adina For Life, a beverage company that makes sustainable, organic and Fair Trade beverages, I was involved in developing two test markets. At that time, we had an initial product line of juices with small production runs, which meant we could go out into the field to obtain data and incorporate findings into our next  run. But, how to get the data?

Some of the DIY options included in-house focus groups, online surveying for packaging and branding, and interviews with retailers. Though we ended up doing a variety of programs, the most significant was embedded into an in-store demo program that I’d set up. Since we were already in the stores, this was a great opportunity to interface directly with customers. We developed a research guide for our “juice ambassadors” who would conduct a sampling of a variety of flavors before collecting a short paper-based survey . Because we had two test markets on opposite coasts, and were selling primarily to independant stores that sold other organic products, we had a fairly controlled market segment based on a specific purchasing behavior. This saved us from collecting too much demographic information, and allowed us to focus on the flavors and packaging, while assessing regional preferences.

Several years later, I was conducting research for another food venture that exploring a mobile BBQ restaurant concept that would essentially sell BBQ out of a truck in major urban areas. The business did not exist yet so there were no customers to reach out to. The main DIY option that came up at first was to find other mobile restaurants and talk with their customers. Of course, there were no other mobile BBQ truck nearby so that approach had certain limits. Then I started exploring online; what I found was a ton of communities that were interested in BBQ, or dining out in general. I started participating in these groups and sharing a little bit about the project. I got an enormous response and soon had hundreds of participants taking a survey. I created trackable links for each community where I invited participants (Chow magazine, Craigslist, Yelp, etc) so I could track where they were coming from.

Both of the recruiting methods I used had the benefit of developing community around the brands conducting the research. I hope these examples are helpful and inspire you to get out there and start recruiting on your own. If you’ve got examples from your own experience, please share!

Three Steps To Brand Love

People seem to fall in love with brands for three reasons that work together:

1. Desire: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sums it up best; a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, which organizes basic needs such as food and shelter at the base of a pyramid and aspirational needs (self-actualization) at the top.*  No matter what level of the pyramid your product or service works on, it has to fullfil a need in order for people to fall in love with it. I actually think the word “desire” is more accurate than “need”, but either way a motivational force is essential because it’s pretty hard to make people fall in love if they don’t want to.
2. Trust: In the diagram below, the brand experience stairway illustrates how brands build trust through interactions and over time. I’ve written about this in my post Where Marketers Are Today, but the gist of it is that satisfying customers’ desires/needs/motivations repeatedly leads to beneficial behavioral patterns and ultimately to trust. Actually, you can even go beyond trust to loyalty, but the underlying idea is that people don’t fall in love without establishing a behavioral pattern.
3. Emotional Connection: First off, falling in love is not rational, does not obey economic theory, and is not simply based on a Pavlovian satisfaction of needs. Second, there are degrees of being in love, and you can fall out of love if you don’t acknowledge/appreciate the sentiment.  It’s really a cocktail of satisfaction, behavioral pattern, and disposition. In other words, you can do everything right and some people just won’t ever fall in love with you. It’s sad, I know, but there are lots of fish in the sea who will fall for your brand if you’ve got desire and trust. The trick to getting people to fall head over heals is to let them have what they love. Give them the brand.

*Chip Conley wrote an interesting book about how to apply Maslow’s hierarchy to business called Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Here’s a great video of him presenting on the topic:

Twitter Digest

• UNDERSTAND / FIX THE WORLD
  • Household Debt Vs. GDP – This chart tracks the relationship between household debt and gross domestic product. You’ll see two years when Americans’ debt becomes 100 percent of GDP — 1929 and 2007. Hmmm, why didn’t I notice that before?
  • This American Life, another great show explaining the economic crisis – this whole series is awesome.
    
  • How Bad is Tech Unemployment? – an interesting BusinessWeek article, but ouch!
  • Once Upon a School education is so broken, let’s fix it.
    
• MARKETING RELATED LINKS
  • The Yelp Tee: Almost More Brilliant Than Pizzeria Delfina’s Pizza – a brilliant response to poor Yelp ratings from 7×7
  • Coroflot’s 8th Annual Design Salary Survey Results – are you getting a fair wage?
    
  • Dan Roam at the Commonwealth Club – it’s all about getting visual
    
  • How Amazon Aims to Keep You Clicking – an article about customer service.
    
• YOUR LIFE, JUST EASIER
  • Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google – nice hack
• SOME FUN
  • Mobility VIP – a new game about the future
  • SOUL TV is now available online! Get your funk on baby!

Have a great weekend.

Turning The Megaphone Around

It’s all over the blogosphere, Skittles has rocked everyone’s world by putting down the megaphone and giving it to their customers. How did they do it?

Their home page is  the Wikipedia page about Skittles.
Their media page is a YouTube page.
Their friends page is a Facebook page.
Their chatter page is a feed of Twitter posts that include the world skittles.

They’ve demonstrated one of the key principles of Marketing 1.0 versus Marketing 2.0:

With Marketing 1.0 the company owns the brand and broadcasts it out to customers. With Marketing 2.0, customers own the brand and have lots of ways of communicating the company about what to do with it. Marketers have must put down the megaphone, and start working to translate,  interpret, and present what customers are saying inside their organizations. The tricky part, and it remains to be seen if Skittles can do this, is to return value to customers based on their input.

Do you think you’re any more likely to pick up skittles next time your’re at the corner market?

Marketing Should Be Fun

If you’re not having some fun, then you’re doing it wrong. I love marketers that recognize how the industry has gone astray and who can have a laugh about it. Here’s a perfect example. I love this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgcX0y1Nzhs

Next time you have a client ask you to make their logo bigger, send them here.