United States: The Marketer’s Tool Kit: Small, Medium and Large

Just as in the story of the three bears, marketing tools come in three sizes: small, medium and large. Size matters. For instance, no one would deliberately use the Hubble Telescope to search for bacteria.

SPSS and its quantitative cousins offer us profiles of population demographics and market segments at the large, macro scale. Marketers have a good time crunching numbers on a vast scale these days. In the opposite vein, we would use the small, micro scale tools of psychographics to measure the inner workings of the customer’s motives and decision-making strategies. Historically, qualitative tools have been less satisfying because of their "softness" than those of the quantitative realm of hard numbers.

Our clients tell us that they are often skeptical of the objectivity of findings from focus groups and related psychographic tools. Until recently, clients had good reason for that skepticism. The main reason is not obvious to a casual onlooker: the qualitative tools commonly used to profile motivation have been finding data at the meso (medium) level. The confusion happens because many marketers mistakenly believe they have been reaching the micro level of customer motives and decision-making. They have not.

Qualitative tools and their results have been, honestly, uninspired—until a key event happened in the sixties. Our reason for celebration is that linguist Noam Chomsky discovered "Transformational Grammar." Believe me, you do not want to read Chomsky in the original, unless you need to cure your insomnia. But eventually, his discovery caught up to us in terms of very enlightened marketing tools that allow us to read customer minds at the micro-level.

Figuring out how to use his discovery has lead to the latest tools that actually can see behind the eyeballs at the conscious and unconscious levels of customer decision-making. This has turbo charged qualitative analysis of customer motivation and decision-making. The result: persuasive ads that really, really persuade.

For instance, if you ask a well-designed question of a person and you analyze the answer in terms of what the person said, you are working at the medium, meso level; i.e., the face validity level of data. More or less the idea is: "What they say is what you get." The problem is, you are stuck with figuring out what that meso-level statement means in motivational terms. Suppose the individual says:

• "I want leather seats on my next SUV."

That is meso level content about a product feature. But at the micro level, "behind the eyeballs," it is not!

The real persuasive action occurs at the micro level of cognitive processing. At the micro level is where you get an answer to the question:

• "What will make them want our SUV instead of any other?"

The micro level accesses the level of cognitive operation that goes on behind the eyeballs – the invisible level that historically has been as slippery as a greased doorknob. Suppose, in response to a question, the potential customer tells us:

• "I want an SUV that gives me a high view of the road and responsive handling."

The meso-level content of that kind of customer statement can be interpreted in a number of ways. That is the bad part of meso-level analysis of motivation. The interpretations might be right or wrong. One researcher thinks it means responsiveness, another researcher thinks it means control, and another thinks it means power. These are interpretations of underlying motives. An interpretation is not a guarantee—it is a guess.

With the micro-level tools of psycholinguistics (i.e., transformational grammar), the researcher can only get the right answer about the real motives—not an interpretation, not a guess. Meso-level statements, when analyzed with micro tools, give us a definitive micro-level answer to the motives deep behind the content of the answer.

We need to ask questions that give us meso-level data because any meso-level answer has at least a dozen imbedded rational-emotional elements of transformational grammar. Those elements decode into accurate persuasive prescriptions for messages, imagery, ad concepts, positioning statements or ad copy. Of course, a complete interview would elicit answers to dozens of questions to get a complete Motivational Microanalysis ^TM.

Unconscious rational-emotive reasons tend to drive the motivational meaning behind interviewee responses. The aspiring SUV owner might unconsciously associate the vehicle or some specific feature with a need, an image or a feeling. Motivational Microanalysis ^TM reveals all the conscious and unconscious aspects as well as the rational and the emotional aspects with certainty. Using rock-solid psycholinguistic, micro-level data guarantees that the persuasive profile is on target.

When a researcher can turn up unconscious patterns in motivational profiles on demand, the tool is doing what marketers really want. This is a trick of the trade that is akin to catching lightning in a bottle. And we now have these tools! That ability allows us to capture customer decision strategies in an effective and persuasive way—even when customers cannot articulate the information on their own.

Obviously, we want to know the things about our customers that will help us change their minds. That way we know what to say to inspire them to want to buy more of our stuff. These new tools, developed over the last three decades, have given us the ability to read minds and to change minds with an ease that would make the previous generation of marketers green with envy.

We want to reach inside the customer’s mind to get the answers we need. The tools of choice are those that have been developed out of the "transformative" ability of psycholinguistics to read customer minds with an unprecedented level of skill and depth.

Consider that certain focus group researchers and other kinds of qualitative-psychographic researchers sell themselves short with the old tools. That is, they are prone to do three things that are now out of date with today’s new technology:

• to take the meso content of answers at face value and stop there;
• or worse, to interpret the answers according to a subjective scorecard—guessing;
• or worst of all, to project their own mind set onto the customer’s mind set.

Like an iceberg, there is a hidden layer of motivation out of sight of the untrained eye. That hidden micro-layer of motive at the level of "transformational grammar" is where the qualitative, motivational and decision-making action resides. By gathering this depth information with new psycholinguistic techniques, the marketer gains a significant advantage. The result documents the fail-safe leverage points that will change customer preferences toward the marketer’s products and services.

By using the new psychological tools and going beyond superficial meso-level statements, a research analyst can wring much more powerful data from an answer. When this kind of qualitative power is matched up to savvy quantitative work, a marketer has an unbeatable combination.

For example: we would know that among people motivated in a particular manner, the ad copy/concept must reflect the language patterns in the customers’ patterns of "transformational grammar." Any answer or statement given by a customer will contain at least a dozen relevant elements for an analyst to capture and transform into persuasive material. Transformational grammar literally tells us the terms and words and phrases and images that will provide leverage to change brand preference, or any other change of mind the researcher has in mind.

In parallel to medical diagnosis and prescription, decoding provides a diagnosis of the mind set and recoding provides the prescription for the mind set to act as persuasive ad copy.

Some of the ingredients to the transformational decoding-recoding process are:

• Capture the subject’s concept of their context (i.e., how they perceive the situation)
• Capture the verbatim statements of the subjects—paraphrasing wrecks the data
• Decode the answers using the tools of transformational grammar—stable and objective methods to diagnose the mind set at conscious and unconscious levels
• Recode the answers in terms of ad copy, concepts, positioning statements and messaging materials to prescribe the changes to the mind set
• Connect the results to the marketing strategy and quantitative analysis
• Launch the advertising campaign and sales efforts

Many of our clients are relieved to find out that their skepticism about psychographic and focus group subjectivity was well founded. Now they know why the old fashioned, even antique, focus group approach can end up resembling an emotional encounter group rather than a tool that provides hard-copy results.

Instead, knowledgeable analysts prefer a psycholinguistic power tool that lays out in specific, micro-level, actionable detail, the entire story that will motivate the audience segment to buy. In the land of qualitative research, a new sheriff’s in town, and the name of the game is "transformational grammar."

Sommer Consulting has been the leading organization in using this extremely effective combination of quantitative and qualitative power tools in marketing. Now marketers have objective, hard copy findings about conscious and unconscious details of motivation and emotion to combine with quantitative demographic work in one package.

Marketers have always needed tools to get inside the mind of the customer. Now we have those new tools. The new tool kit is based on that thirty-five-year-old "transformational grammar" discovery by Chomsky. The discovery took a while to be translated into research tools, but it is now the most powerful qualitative tool kit available to market researchers. The ideal combination of quantitative and qualitative horsepower has been achieved. And the happy result is that more customers are captured to insure a healthy bottom line.