United States: The Lifeboat Exercise For Marketing Executives*

The author compares the advantages of the qualitative forensic interview with qualitative market research techniques. Parallels and differences are shown, leading to the conclusion that marketing research has not exploited the power of the one-on-one forensic interview. For example, findings of creative market research techniques are not directly linked to the conclusions drawn from them. Without that direct linkage, the market research team is left to intuition, free association and guesswork about how to connect the findings to the decisions that must be made from them. Language in an interview is a better source for understanding a consumer’s decision making process. This is because projection within the context of the interview language is in context of the interview’s immediate frames of reference. Market researchers can improve effectiveness by learning that effectively formed questions and patterns of questioning reveal enormous amounts of projective and literal data to a properly trained interviewer.

* Reprinted from the journal Marketing Review, courtesy of Westburn Publishers, Ltd. Argyll, Scotland, UK

People who know me tell me I am a friendly sort of fellow. They also tell me I am incredibly hard-nosed when it comes to proving the results of marketing research. I don’t like woo-woo, voodoo or other "soft" kinds of qualitative research. I should also let you know that I am a card carrying Diplomate of the American College of Forensic Examiners and a licensed psychologist. Forensics teaches us to draw conclusions from objective evidence, and that is my approach to psychology, as you shall see.

I use forensic interview techniques in marketing research because they are better than creative projective techniques I see in common use. In fairness, there is a role for projective techniques, but it is not a well-played role when used in concept development, message development or positioning. You should know these things because I am going to offend a few of my colleagues by calling some of their projective techniques voodoo.

I am going to compare the advantages of my favorite tool, the qualitative forensic interview, with the qualitative market research interview, which is often combined with projective techniques. In the market research I do for my Fortune 100 clientele, I use the forensic model routinely to profile customer populations. The methods of forensic investigations have proven relevant to marketing research in that forensics is about capturing bad guys and market research is about capturing customers (presumably good guys). There are many parallels as well as some striking differences, and we can learn a lot by sharing some ideas about the two approaches to defining and predicting human behavior.

For instance, forensics focuses on gathering evidence. Projective techniques gather ideas. Forensic evidence connects directly to the actions taken in a case. Projective results are more suggestive and typically are only indirectly connected to the subsequent actions taken. Let’s characterize the kinds of results I often see with an oversimplified illustration.

If a projective technique tells me that an audience segment equates my product (e.g. a drug) with say, seedy Newark, New Jersey and my competitor’s drug with trendy Scottsdale, Arizona I have no actionable information to work with. There is an implicit ranking, perhaps, but no exact knowledge of the nature of my second place rank nor how to specifically change the audience preference. On the other hand, if my forensic interview questions tell me that the audience does not like main chemical feature of our product but would buy it instead of the competition if the dosing were doubled, such a finding tells me what is wrong and specifically what will change the segment’s preference to my brand. When such a useful finding is combined with other findings, a marketing campaign can be pursued with complete confidence in the persuasive platform.

In a real world example, a decade ago conventional wisdom in the pharmaceutical industry held that psychiatrists were people people and that patient happiness was the universal goal. It was a belief that was virtually universal. We worked on the drug Pamelor, an anti-depressant, and our client company, Sandoz, held that same belief. Our forensic evidence proved, in contrast, that psychiatrists felt they could not define patient happiness. Rather, their goal was to manage patient behavior, avoid suicides, and get a faster acting drug with less kick-in lag time so that they could avoid the 3 a.m. suicide call from a desperate patient. The entire belief system in this area was rearranged by this objective finding, and our client’s sales on a mature drug climbed very successfully to new levels of sales and success.

Forensic-type interviews produce this kind of hard, actionable data. If forensic investigations fail, the bad guys, like terrorists and murderous nut cases, get away and people may die. Marketing researchers don’t have to suffer such guilt at a blowing their research. No lives are at stake; jobs and money are lost. Seldom is anyone shot or taken hostage as a result of ineffective or faulty research.

When forensic experts and marketing experts choose research techniques, they have different criteria. Forensics have life and death at stake and they quickly utilize the "lifeboat" scenario. In the classic lifeboat scenario, anyone in the lifeboat who does not contribute to survival is tossed overboard to the sharks. Harsh, but effective. Market researchers don’t have life and death decisions, so their criteria are a bit more forgiving…for now, but, perhaps not forevermore.

The techniques of both professions, for learning about what makes people "tick" and "decide," are in the lifeboat all the time. Sooner or later, real life pressures cause changes. It doesn’t matter if the target audience segment is criminal or consumer, techniques of figuring out their motives have to work or, eventually, the techniques go over the side of the lifeboat. Just name your favorite technique and consider it always very, very close to the water and those cruising fins cutting through the surface waves.

There are several precedents illustrating how real-world pressures cause changes in psychological techniques. For instance, psychotherapists quickly tossed lots of techniques to the sharks when the health care providers refused to pay for self-serving voodoo. Today, you can actually shop around among therapists and get some quick and effective relief for personal problems. We can thank the wake-up call of managed care for that advancement.

The managed care criterion was "I gotta see it to believe it," and the therapists’ criterion was "Ya got believe it to see it," which resembles a belief in Santa Claus. Countless therapists were stung by the raging disbelief in their "iffy" methods. If any of you were reading the press at the time, the prevailing practitioners of some popular techniques of psychotherapy cried "foul" and predicted that untold damage would be done to psyches all over the country. It didn’t happen. People get better faster now–and without the woo-woo voodoo.

Another interesting precedent for change is that in 1900 Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published, and, about the same time, the Wright Brothers got off the ground. When people fell out of the sky and were killed, aviation took notice and mended its ways. Psychology did not mend its ways and stuck with arm-chair theory rather than practice. Since then we have landings on the moon and permanent space stations. But in the psychology of marketing research, marketers are still arguing over how meaningful it is to have people parade around a conference room pretending they are the personification of a box of corn flakes. Personally, I think that type of technique is barely afloat in ocean water and the sharks are closing in.

A third precedent for change is something missed by my colleagues: the spate of shareholder suits that punish companies for poor stock performance. What is going to happen when some sharp-eyed lawyer decides to sue a market research firm and its client company executives for being the cause of an unhappy failure in corporate performance via a shareholder lawsuit? In that scenario, many favorite but "iffy" techniques will be tossed over the side of the lifeboat in a very big hurry in spite of how familiar and comfortable those techniques may be. There is nothing like a lawsuit to wake people up to the smell of the coffee. It would seem that a field advances, at times, only when it must.

Now that I have really annoyed some of my colleagues, let’s go a bit further in comparing the ways of law enforcement interviews with the ways of marketing research of the qualitative kind. As a further comparison, we can point to the obvious fact that fashions in techniques come and go in marketing research. One year it will be quantitative, the next year it will be qualitative. Fashions in carpentry or in forensics don’t ebb and flow…because these folks know what they are doing. Their technology is more certain of itself. Fashions in technique don’t occur in a mature and effective technology. Market research techniques go in an out of fashion only because they can’t make a hard copy case for their methods. Score - Carpenters and Forensics: "1"; Market Researchers: "0."

Put simply, market research techniques come and go because the techniques aren’t delivering what researchers want, which is to be able to understand and predict consumer behavior. While this may be a rather transparent deduction, the underlying problem is apparently more difficult to see. For that deeper understanding we need to measure the researcher’s intent against the choice of technique to satisfy that intent.

The popularity of qualitative techniques, for example, derives from the obvious fact that qualitative techniques are psychological in nature. This fact contrasts sharply with quantitative methods, which quickly become sociological in nature. In colloquial terms, the difference in qualitative versus quantitative is between individual differences and group common-denominators. The insight that qualitative techniques are inherently psychological is well-founded. But in terms of popular techniques that try to execute that insight, the approaches to creative techniques are flawed, as I have described so far. From a psychometric perspective, the major difference in effective measurement criteria is found in psychology textbooks. That difference is labeled ipsative measures (qualitative) versus normative measures (quantitative).

To illustrate, a parent will often stand a youngster in a doorway and place a pencil mark on the door frame to measure the child’s height. Then weeks or months later the parent will add a new mark to show the new height. The ipsative frame of reference says: "This is how tall you are compared to yourself, last time." The normative frame of reference says: "This is how tall you are compared to other kids your age." Qualitative, ipsative measures, are the ones that creative techniques are trying to measure. They just do it badly because they have no ability to create a hard-linked baseline of effective comparison of facts. Ipsative techniques are the ones that matter in qualitative research because the goal is to compare what one has done with what one will do. As we’ve said, prediction of consumer behavior is the real goal, not boundless creativity.

What do marketing executives and FBI investigators have in common? They both want to know about human behavior. Both groups have a lot at stake. In forensics, perhaps, lives are at stake, in terms of a terrorist threat; in marketing, perhaps billions of dollars in a product launch. Where do the two entities part company? In the context of high stakes, the FBI will only use tools that work, while marketing research often uses tools that work poorly if at all.

In general, marketing research has not exploited the power of the interview to best advantage as has the FBI and other investigative agencies. The forensic interview as power tool has evolved to extraordinary reliability and validity in motivational profiling with the advent of the FBI profile. But marketing research still relies on antique tools such as projective techniques and the multiple-person focus group.

Most tools in the qualitative marketing research kit have some role to play. But no creative technique has the equivalent power inherent in the language-driven characteristics of the one-on-one interview in skilled hands. I realize that is a big statement. Nonetheless, when compared point for point, the state of the art FBI-type profile is light years ahead of the projective methods alone or when used in the multiple-person focus group.

The life and death pressures on law enforcement agencies, as happened in aviation, has pressured the forensic interview and its motivational profile to a very fine, scalpel-like edge. In marketing research, the tools are often more like a hatchet than a scalpel. Frequently, the intrinsic power of the interview, especially in focus groups, is lost when contaminated by the use of "projective techniques." Such techniques can be as mundane as leading questions and partially formed sentences to be completed by the interviewee. The fundamental problem here of course is the presumption of likely answers, which will provide artifacts of the technique, not real data.

A basic requirement of an effective interview in either the law enforcement or marketing research setting is that it produce information that is relevant to the real world problems faced by the marketing team or the forensics team. One needs powerful information that leads to a definitive conclusion for the task at hand. Any observer can immediately see that the group interview dilutes and contaminates the findings, which are consequently best gathered by the one-on-one interview. Among other compromising factors, social desirability produces strong and obvious bias in the findings, yet I see my colleagues ignore or rationalize this concern. Forensic profilers do not use group techniques. Marketers still believe they are getting something special with groups. They are kidding themselves. They might as well believe in the tooth fairy. Charlie Brown suggests one reason why.

Many popular creative techniques reduce the power of the information gathered and require a voodoo-like "leap of faith" to be able to use it. When is the last time you saw a powerful police agency use a "creative’ interview technique (except, may be on the X Files) such as collage, word association or personification? They do not use those techniques for a reason. There is no payoff!

Forensics has rejected "creative" techniques because they beat around the bush and do not go for the jugular of real actionable measures of motivation. Those forensic power interview techniques include conscious and unconscious, projective and literal characteristics of mind. The language of the interview is the most flexible and effective tool in the researchers kit, but is not widely recognized for its inherent advantages over projective techniques.

In short, projective techniques do not tell the intrinsic story of what makes the person or a market segment tick so that a prediction can be made that will hold water. "Creative techniques are about as relevant as a bag of fortune-cookie predictions. But people do the mental contortions needed so they can believe them," said retired FBI Special Agent in Charge, Robert VanArsdal to the author. A notable downside of creative techniques is that the findings are not directly linked to the conclusions drawn from them. Without that direct linkage, the market research team is left to intuition, free association and guesswork about how to connect the findings to the decisions that must be made from them.

Suppose an audience free-associates a large game animal with a brand name; how do you use that specific knowledge to find an effective positioning statement? The marketing team must do some free-associating of its own to connect the dots. They have as much chance of being wrong as being right.

We should keep in mind that forensic agencies like the FBI use interview techniques to discover the motives of many individuals who fall under their jurisdiction. These are very intent organizations, and they do not easily succumb to "woo woo" methods of investigation. They have developed their techniques with an intent to be able to see cause-effect relationships and to be able to take effective action based on the predictions of the findings.

Law enforcement organizations do not like guesswork. They want to know what is real. They want to see the mental mechanism of action behind the behavior. In the case of the 1993 New York World Trade center bombing, the demographics of computer records and vehicle identification narrowed the search area. In marketing terms, this is equivalent to defining a market segment. Once captured, in such a situation, bad guys are interviewed, the results of which lead to the arrest of co-conspirators. In the case of a serial killer, the profile, based on sophisticated technology, leads the investigators to capture the suspect.

Technologically, the forensic profile is the equivalent of the concept development, message testing and positioning statements in a marketing campaign. The idea in marketing is to capture the mind of the audience segment in question. When all of parts of the forensic profiling and segmenting are assembled, the prosecutor uses the information to launch a court-room campaign to sell a conviction (his product) to the audience of jurors. This scenario is equivalent to the marketing campaign of a product launch.

These are not chance comparisons between forensics and marketing research. The common denominator of these different applications is the understanding of human nature in a given situation. The key question for either profession is: "How do we know, with confidence, what will work?"

Forensic organizations want to know the mind of the interviewee in actionable terms. They do not care, for instance, if a person creatively compares a low priced car to a house without indoor plumbing. They want to know what will make that person act in a certain way in a situation where a choice is at issue. Consider the fact that they do not use questionnaires. They do not use projective techniques such as Myers Briggs typecasting or personification or collages or assemble-some-toys methods or any other related imaginative projective techniques. They want to find facts that allow them to connect the psychological processes of the interviewee’s decision making logic so they can predict behavior and take action directly related to the task at hand.

Forensic agencies use the interview as a major tool to achieve these goals. Properly used, the power interview works as well in marketing efforts. A very simple test of your own position is this: When you want to get to know a new acquaintance, their likes and dislikes, do you use dialog or do you use projective techniques to figure them out? I rest my case. Projective techniques do not save time or improve accuracy; they simply send researchers on a detour away from the real action.

The FBI’s well-known behavioral science unit, portrayed (with much Hollywood spin) in the movies Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal are designed to predict and capture suspects. Marketing a billion dollar product introduction is no less serious an affair when success and failure are at issue for the client. Why would a marketer use a lesser technique if one didn’t have to? The answer seems to be a lack of up-to-date information about the state of the art and confusion about how to know what works.

The reason that investigating agencies are so hard nosed is simple. Those "creative" interview techniques produce information that is beside the point in reading what is really going on in the mind of the interviewee and taking effective action on that information. Creative techniques introduce a large ingredient of guesswork to the process. A police agency has to act on its data, so it must be "hard data of the interview kind." If they were to use a "creative technique" they would earn derision and laughter from their peers. Guesswork will get an FBI agent assigned to the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific in a hurry.

If profilers could not act on their data, many acts of violence or terrorism could not be prevented, nor could as many "bad guys’ get caught. If it were not for those hard nosed techniques, a lot of us would not sleep as soundly as we do. Interviews are a basic source of valid "hard data" used to take action. Agencies do not take leaps of faith based on fuzzy ideas with little or no linkage to "hard copy reality."

Granted, focus groups are really useful for testing packaging designs and other visually or "hands-on" dependent situations. Aside from applications of that kind, a high quality interview will produce more relevant information for client decision making than any "creative" process. A high quality interview does not ignore the cause-effect linkage and predictive relationships of the issues at hand.

Let’s illustrate the inherent power of questioning techniques. I ask you the reader this now familiar question: "Can you not think of a pink elephant?" As soon as I ask the question, it creates a mental vacuum which your mind reflexively fills with an image. That is power. You have control of the interview that moment in time, and if you are skillful you will keep that kind of control during a complete interview.

The interview is itself, of course, a projective technique. This is a hugely under-appreciated fact. One needs to know how control the projective aspects of such use. A well-trained interviewer knows that there is a "projective dimension" in the language used on both sides of an interview. In its simplest form, a vaguely worded question will lead the interviewee to project personal meaning into the question and respond in terms of that projection.

For instance: "Do you have a cup I can borrow for the coffee break?" The interviewee will make a mental picture of a cup that is unique to his or her own experience. That mental image is a projection resulting from the ambiguous stimulus of the word "cup." Further probing can obtain a detailed description of that mental image and then put it to use.

This simple coffee cup illustration seems obvious, but the use of the principles involved in interviews can help reveal a great deal of powerful information. When effectively framed and sequenced, interview questions will produce clear definitive answers to research questions. Political pollsters intuitively acknowledge this projective aspect in opinion surveys. An uninformed political opinion is simply a projection of one’s wishes onto the candidates.

The subjective image of the coffee cup and the subjective opinion in a political poll are both projections. This projective aspect of language is as basic to the interview as gravity is to an architect—it must be factored into professional interviews. Rarely is this done in marketing research; primarily, because few people know how to do it.

The characteristic of projecting one’s subjective experience onto vague stimuli is an inherent and basic "meaning making" phenomena of human psychology. As Trafimow, Silverman, Fan and Law (1997) observe, in language such a phenomenon is inherent, and this can be used to good effect in the hands of well-trained interviewers. By avoiding "out-of-context" creative devices, the advantage is clear. The use of the projective aspect of language in the controlled setting of an interview keeps the findings coherent and integrated. One gets the real story, not echoes and artifacts of a technique. It also keeps all interviewee responses within the context of the larger decision profile being produced for an audience segment.

There is both explicit and implicit content in language that is much more productive of the secrets inside the mind than are "creative" techniques. Effectively formed questions and patterns of questioning can reveal enormous amounts of projective and literal data to a properly trained interviewer–not to mention both conscious and unconscious aspects of the audience segment.

Language in an interview is a better source of meaningful projection than what is obtained with the popular marketing research methods in current use. This is because projection within the context of the interview language has the advantage of being in context of the immediate frames of reference within which the interview is arranged. People project within an interview using language, as opposed to what happens within the contexts of soft projective techniques. This projection is easy to identify, if one is trained, and it is also easy to see its relevance to the entire story within the interviewee’s mind. Information is not artificially fragmented from the context by inefficient conventional techniques based on looser and less productive criteria. The degree of projection in an interview, useful or not, is controlled by the well-trained interviewer.

So in sum, there is a strong case for marketing researchers to review their tool kit to find better techniques and produce a better result for their clients. Forensic interviews and qualitative market research interviews share some common concerns and techniques. There are a number of lessons for marketers to learn from their forensic cousins. The forensic approach is better suited to finding psychological pressure points for persuasion than are conventional projective methods. The forensic interview beckons the marketing researcher to learn a few tricks to obtain better results.

Trafimow, D., Silverman, E. S., Fan, R. M., & Law, J. S. (1997). The effects of language and priming on the relative accessibility of the private self and collective self. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 28, 107-123.

"Joseph Yeager. Founder of the market research company Linguis-Techs, Inc., now renamed Sommer Consulting Inc., Joseph Yeager, Ph.D., continues to expand the envelope of persuasion and influence technologies. Joseph began his career as a psychologist specializing in issues related to effecting changes in human performance while he was serving as an executive with Fortune 500 companies. He has published in noted management and professional journals and has written numerous books on human behaviour and business. Before starting his own firm in 1974, he served as a senior executive in the airline, psychological testing and pharmaceutical industries.

Sommer's technology, methods and practices reflect Joseph's background as a results-focused business executive using psychology as a means of obtaining individual and corporate performance gains. His approaches have been used in mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations, turnarounds and venture capital settings. The company has pursued all effective technologies useful for understanding the mind of the customer. His state-of-the-art methods serve a wide range of clients and situations.

Unique among other research organizations, Sommer technology uncovers the powerful unconscious and emotional aspects of customer rationales. Generally, customers are unable to articulate these aspects of their decision making, but due to Sommer's specialized know-how, this insight is routinely available to Sommer's clients."