Observational Methods: Part 1

Although marketing researchers can acquire very useful information—the kinds of information that help managers make better decisions—by querying consumers either directly through conventional surveys or indirectly through projective research, the act of asking consumers to report what they’re thinking, or to report how they behaved previously or how they might behave in the future, can distort those reports relative to consumers’ true attitudes and either previous or possible future behavior. As an alternative, marketing researchers can use observational methods. The goal of this lecture is to discuss those observational methods and how they might be used to inform marketing managers’ decisions.

The issue broached by this cartoon is that people who know they are being observed will act differently than they would if they thought they weren’t being observed. Although this is a ludicrous example of primitive people trying to pretend that they are far more primitive than they are in fact, the underlying issue is disguised versus undisguised observation. From an ethical standpoint, it’s preferable to inform people that they are being observed. That way, they can be willing participants in the study. Alternatively, informing people that they are being observed will influence the behaviors they will exhibit.

Observation is not as straightforward as consumer self reports, as this quote from Sherlock Holmes hint: “You see, but you don’t observe.” Although we can see many things in people’s behaviors, we often don’t recognize what’s important and what’s trivial. Holmes was especially good (as are the lead characters in the detective television series Psych and Monk) at recognizing that the smallest detail may speak volumes in revealing a secret. There’s true art in understanding what should be observed.

What types of things do marketing researchers observe about consumers? Researchers can observe consumers’ physical actions. For example, researchers can observe how consumers in a department or grocery store move up and down the aisles, how long they examine shelves and displays, how many items they examine before making a selection, and whether or not they read packaging labels. Researchers can observe consumers’ verbal behaviors; for example, they could observe interactions between department store sales clerks and customers at check out. Researchers can observe expressive behaviors; non-verbal acts like hand waving and head scratching. Researchers can observe spatial relationships and locations; for example, the effect of store atmospherics (like lighting, spacing of merchandise displays) on customers’ behaviors. Researchers can observe changes over time (temporal patterns), such as how behaviors shifted within a sales encounter or across multiple sales encounters. Finally, researchers can observe people’s responses to either verbal recordings or pictorial records of things.

Here are more examples of what can be observed. For example, physical action means observing shoppers’ movements within a store. When I visit a grocery store, I tend to start in a certain aisle and work my way through the store, always essentially in the same path. I usually start with produce and finish with frozen products, like ice cream. There’s a repeatable way in

Page | 1 which I travel through a Sam’s Club store. Examining the movement of consumers through a store might help a store manager to organize the placement of products within the store. Researchers can observe verbal behaviors, such as statements made by airline travelers waiting in line. Queuing behavior—what people do while waiting to be served—provides useful information to marketers. Expressive behavior, facial expression, tone of voice, or any sort of body language, show that people’s words suggest one thing but their non-verbal behaviors suggest an entirely different thing.

In terms of spatial relations and locations, researchers might observe how close visitors at art museums stand to the paintings. Similarly, they might observe how close salespeople stand to customers as they complete a transaction or discuss the possibility of a purchase. In western cultures, people like their space; as a result, people conducting business tend to stay several feet from one another. In other cultures, people crowd very closely together. In Europe, for example, restaurant tables are placed closer to one another than in the U.S. (except possible in New York City) because people feel more comfortable being in what we’d call ‘each other’s space’. For temporal patterns, researchers might observe how long fast-food customers wait for food from the time they enter the restaurant. (It’s called fast food and customers are buying that convenience.) For physical objects, researchers might observe the brand names of items stored in consumers’ pantries. Such pantry audits suggest what people have in stock and therefore use. Finally, for verbal or pictorial records, consider the bar codes on product packages and the scanner data that local grocery stores or Sam’s Club collect. Matching a brand to a person and the degree to which a person routinely buys a brand can be observed.

What are the basic categories of observers in marketing? In many cases, the observer is a human being. Alternatively, the observer can be a mechanical device, such as a scanner or video recorder. Observers may be visible—in the sense that the person being observed knows he or she is being observed—or hidden. Hidden observation has ethical implications, which I’ll discuss in the lecture on marketing research ethics. Observation can be direct, in the sense that people are observed in their natural environment behaving naturally, or contrived, in the sense that researchers create an artificial environment that encourages or discourages people to behave in a certain way.

Here’s a silly example of how a human observer might disguise himself to be unobtrusive in a study of ice cream sales. I don’t recommend dressing as an ice cream sundae to unobtrusively observe people’s ice cream consumption at Baskin Robbins.

In a contrived observation, researchers create an artificial environment. That environment is created for one purpose only: to test a hypothesis. For example, a contrived observation would entail an experiment in which people are first shown several ads for soft drinks and then given an opportunity to select a soft drink for consumption. If a large number of people selected one soft drink more frequently than the others, it could be assumed that selection was related to a preference inspired by the different ads.

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Here’s an example of a somewhat different contrived observation; more like a secret shopper. In this case, a person pretends to be a bank customer, enters that bank, tries to interact with the employees of that bank in some meaningful fashion, and then reports on that interaction. This slide show the report this faux customer—a human observer—made of that experience.

It’s helpful for human observers if researchers provide them with a structured report form; that way, the human observer knows what to concentrate on observing. Clearly, researchers want observers to look for behaviors that are relevant to the research problem.

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One type of observation that has no ethical implications, because it doesn’t require the observation of people and their behaviors, is the observation of physical objects. In this case, what’s observed is how those objects change over time. What’s observed is physical trace evidence. For example, if we wanted to understand how people use books, we might look at the wear and tear on a book. This is a type of unobtrusive measures because we’re not affecting the thing we are trying to observe. For example, a museum director might want to identify the most and least popular displays. If one room is not especially popular, then the exhibit housed in that room can be removed and replaced with something that might be more popular. After all, most museum directors are responsive to patrons’ preferences. One way to assess which exhibits are more or less popular is to administer exit interviews to museum patrons; either person-to-person interviews or self-administered questionnaires to be completed before leaving the museum or returned later via snail mail. Such interviews or questionnaires would be very obtrusive. Handing someone a questionnaire upon exiting the museum is unlikely to result in a carefully considered and completed interview. Instead, most people are likely to trash such questionnaires. The research problem is to identify the most or least popular exhibits. Given this particular problem, it’s unnecessary to bother museum patrons for that information, and not bothering patrons would be a big plus. How could the most and least popular exhibits be inferred without bothering people? It’s simple. People, like slugs, leave behind a trail of dirt; fingerprint smudges on glass, scuff marks and candy wrappers on floors. All that’s needed, at the end of the day, is to determine which rooms are cleaner and which rooms are dirtier. The rooms with more fingerprints and candy wrappers house the more popular exhibits and the cleaner rooms house the less popular exhibits. Such evidence provides a more direct and less obtrusive way to acquire the information the museum director needs to refine the mix of the exhibits.

Garbology studies provide another type of unobtrusive measure. Suppose we’re interested in people’s consumption behaviors relative to fast foods or alcohol. We could ask them in a survey, but their answers may be colored by social desirability biases. If we ask people what they drink and they believe that they drink to excess, then they may not fully report how much they consume. If we’re interested in the consumption of convenience foods by lower-income households, and respondents recognize that such foods are both more expensive and less nutritious, then they may be less willing to fully disclose their consumption. As opposed to asking them directly and triggering social desirability biases, we could instead sift through their garbage because anything left on someone’s curb is public domain. If we want to infer lower- income households’ convenience food consumption or households’ alcohol consumption, then

Page | 3 we could comb through those households’ trash systematically and count either the empty packages or the empty alcohol bottles.

Although the aesthetics of this slide leaves something to be desired, it does summarize another unobtrusive study. Let’s assume that marketers are interested in understanding more about the way innovations diffuse through populations. Diffusion can be motivated by the promotional efforts of product producers and/or consumer word-of-mouth. Which of those influences is more important? In a study conducted many years ago (the 1950s), a researcher examined the diffusion of window air conditioning units to assess whether or not neighbors influenced their neighbors to purchase or not purchase a unit for their respective homes. Specifically, that researcher took aerial photographs of Philadelphia neighborhoods and look at the pattern of households that owned and didn’t own such units. As the pattern of X’s on the slide suggests, where an X indicates a house with a window air conditioner and a blank indicates a household without such units, the pattern isn’t random. A house with a window air conditioner is more likely adjacent to houses with window air conditions. This pattern suggests that people who see their neighbors have installed a window air conditioner are likely to buy and install one as well, which implies that other people were the dominant influence in this purchase decision. It could just be imitative, but as this is a Philadelphia neighborhood, it’s not unreasonable to assume that people would ask their neighbors about a window air conditioner they bought. Therefore, based on the observation that the pattern of households with and without units was not random, the researcher inferred that word-of-mouth was a relatively more important component of the diffusion process than promotional efforts. Had that researcher asked people directly whether or not they were more influenced by what their neighbor said or what they might have seen in a television or newspaper ad, it’s unlikely the responses would have truly reflected the underlying mechanism that inspired or failed to inspire the purchase of a window air conditioning unit.

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