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Getting Deeper Insights into Multi-Cultural Markets
A Case Study in Context-rich Qualitative Research

In this era of globalization, finding and then making the most of opportunities in multi-cultural markets has become a permanent challenge for the modern marketer.   Culturally distinct, diverse consumers are here to stay, both in immigrant populations at home and in growing markets abroad.

Context-rich qualitative research, a powerful tool in any marketing situation, is essential in most multi-cultural research.  Because, properly applied, it empowers skillful researchers from any culture to achieve deep insights into any other region, country, or culture. 

Before looking at these principles, however, we first need to see the broader context of our topic, a pervasive cultural trend that complicates the design, gathering and effective use of market knowledge in modern cultures.  We first need to define the underlying problem that context-rich qualitative research solves:

Decontextualized Knowledge

Decontextualized knowledge is a communication dynamic that produces narrow, distorting knowledge of the marketplace, one that can complicate decision making risk rather than reduces it.  Decontextualized knowledge emphasizes studying effects at the expense of understanding underlying causes. 

Recall several years ago when New Coke drowned "Classic" Coke in 200,000 taste tests – all conducted blind.  Yet, when study findings were implemented and New Coke displaced “Classic Coke” on store shelves, consumers revolted.  Decontextualized knowledge was the source of this mistake: researchers and clients focused upon narrow effects (e.g. "In blind test tastes, which formulation is preferred?") at the expense of understanding consumer goals, expectations, and social, historical and cultural contexts.  Specifically, brand loyalty affects real consumers, a decisive fact that researchers excluded in their research design.

Key to understanding decontextualized knowledge begins with knowing it is just a few generations old. 

(Thomas, 1998).  The net effect was that common cultural experiences were once far more commonplace than they are today.  This dynamic also explains how older citizens in most cultures tend to have a breadth of knowledge, whereas younger citizens have a depth of knowledge. 

Indeed, from the age of cavemen through the worker bees of the industrial age, it was once clear how the new information related to everything else.  Within their small group, most were knowledge generalists and thereby could more easily proportion the meaning and importance of new information.

This ability to proportion makes a decisive difference in seeing how newer, often narrower facts such as market research relate to larger chunks of preexisting knowledge.  This ability to proportion resulted in a surer, more holistic grasp of knowledge.  Past generations may have had fewer facts, but they probably communicated and made better use of what they knew. 

Today, much of our modes of communication have grown far more non-interactive, characterized by voice mail and email.  When a (non-interactive) response finally comes to our questions sent by voice mail or email?  It routinely ignores our

first question, misunderstands another, and only partially answers a third.   Either that, or we listen to a stranger via long distance telephone say,  “Hmm... I have no idea! Never heard of it!  I’m not sure who would know…. But I'll connect you to Lana.  I'm not sure if she's in, but leave a voice mail because she might suggest someone who does know!”

The implications of all this?  To cope, most marketers have become knowledge specialists.  This sounds impressive, this sounds like progress, but it is something quite different: This is our best, maladaptive effort at bringing a little order out of the explosion of knowledge -- and resulting implosion of being able to proportion our narrow knowledge with the critical success factors of understanding the problems, experiences, and expectations of our target markets.

This is because, past, present or future, no knowledge is an island.  Indeed, the value of most (worthwhile) knowledge is its connection to preexisting knowledge, with what we sometimes vainly call “the bigger picture.”  This web of connections defines the meaning of new knowledge, often making it more impacting than the specific, new knowledge itself.  Yet, today, confronted and confused with rapid change and pressing deadlines, we charge ahead, collecting and applying our narrow facts.  That majorities of research studies seem characterized by narrow designs and context-poor knowledge doesn't change key facts: We often leave out context – a fundamental in creating and using knowledge.  And to paraphrase Andy Rooney, ignoring (or being unaware of) the fundamentals does not change the fundamentals.

So, in sum, modern researchers and business managers routinely paint their new acquired market knowledge on too small a canvas.  Overly narrow research study designs are the norm, focused mostly upon the marketer's world (too often, our features rather than benefits, our full and rushed discussion guides rather than the consumer's experience, our talking more than listening.  Which is to say, we sometimes focus on the signal we want to send rather than listening for the signal our target market receives. 

While much of this is human nature, the clinical term for the rest of it – for the overly narrow research studies -- is called construct validity bias.  It means that important stuff  -- the decision criteria of decision makers – isn’t sufficiently reckoned with or understood.  This is usually because we instead focus on the narrow facts of our marketing insider’s world (“Just ask them if they will buy it!”) at the expense of understanding the problems, experiences, and expectations of our target market.

Significantly, this emergence of decontextualized knowledge and resulting construct validity bias was so gradual and subtle that its far reaching implications are not well understood.  Television commercials smugly hail "generation d" and the digital age without any awareness of how our modern, non-interactive digital age fouls our capacity to create, communicate and use deeper knowledge of markets.  Most modern workers under retirement age have experienced so much decontextualized knowledge that seeing waves of isolated facts is daily routine.  It seems so normal, though its consequences and complications are anything but.
 

So, tellingly, we begin to complain about “information glut.”  Instead, we often mean something quite different.  Though knowledge has exploded during the past several generations (as have often legitimate complaints about market research offering a glut of facts rather than insight and wisdom), what we really mean is we cannot easily assimilate new knowledge. Much of it simply has nowhere to go because we struggle to connect new knowledge with our larger, preexisting knowledge base.  In turn, that is because many market research studies make too few connections between narrow new knowledge (i.e. the outcome of client directives like “Just ask them if they will buy it!”) and the far broader critical success factors that help us understand and proportion the importance of an new knowledge (i.e. an understanding of the problems, experiences, and expectations of our target market).
 

Simply, in this era of specialization, we shape our narrow facts and then those narrow facts shape us.  We have become captive in our narrow day-to-day lives of being knowledge specialists – so pervasively, so gradually that it all seems normal.  Significantly, the modern explosion of knowledge, as well as industrial, technological and social change, have not only altered the way we live and work but have also complicated how we create, communicate, and use information. 

Researchers and business managers can avoid decontextualized knowledge and its first cousin, construct validity bias.  But doing so requires broader, more context-rich study designs than are commonly used today.  Without this, researchers and business managers alike struggle to proportion the (true) meaning and importance of new information and how to relate it to gaining and sustaining competitive advantage.


Principles of Context-Rich Qualitative Research

Importantly, context-rich research methods can be applied to many research studies, particularly qualitative research.  Too, this is a prismatic approach that reaches across every stage of a research project, rather than a menu of random or ad hoc techniques. 

The techniques of context-rich research are a mix of innovation (adding what is missing) and overlooked fundamentals of creating and using market knowledge (restoring what is neglected). Characterized by insights that are highly actionable, diagnostic, and contextually rich, deeper knowledge research results are achieved with innovations in:

• Study design (to oversimplify, studies are structured with greater breadth and depth)
   
• Interviewing strategies (resulting in more reliable insights), and
   
• Analytics (that better preserve and then clarify the full complexity in which people actually make decisions). 

All of this is intended to reckon with the simple fact that most human decisions are complex and multidimensional.
 

Study design principles of context-rich research

Beginning with quick turnaround, exploratory individual depth interviews, identify hypotheses, possible problems, and test project assumptions.  It is particularly important that more time consuming and expensive studies, as multi-cultural studies often are, begin with sound study hypotheses.

Next, based on context-rich research principles and the practical findings from exploratory research, study designs must be structured to produce context-rich insights by overtly making them:

• Causal in nature, i.e., producing interpretive conclusions, not merely describing market characteristics. Context-rich research studies the “permanent things” (Templeton, 1995) -- the critical texture of the human experience so defined by experiences, expectations, aspirations, values, and fears. The crucial fact that these underlying attitudinal dynamics are far more stable over time compared with mere surface perceptions or preferences, makes them a more important focus of study. (Kennan, 1985).
   
• Iterative: Unlike most study designs, which tend to be a single stage, context-rich study designs are often iterative, where the same research budget is instead distributed across multiple stages of an unfolding project so as to follow an evolving product or service and its changing communication strategy. In this way, context-rich study designs more resemble a dynamic movie than a single, static photograph.
   
• Holistic in nature, countering the otherwise distorting human tendency to study a complex whole largely by dissecting each of its component parts.
   
• Diagnostic in nature, to get at the underlying causes.  Specifically, if we understand why the market is receptive to something, we will have the insight to know how to further leverage our strengths. Conversely, if we understand why consumers are resistant, we have the insight to see how to mitigate it. And if we see why they are confused, we understand how to clarify their confusion. Simply said, if we know why, we see how. How to proceed to more impactfully present our ideas and implement our products, services, or programs. Getting to this point requires addressing a range of deeper questions, ranging from Marcus Aurelius (“What are the basic principles of its nature?””) to James Michener (“What is the (decision) criteria?”).
   
• Additionally, context-rich study designs are structured to produce greater breadth by studying two contexts that many research studies routinely miss -- the broader, external context, and the competitive context.
   
• Studying the competitive context involves understanding not just the absolute world of our client’s product, service or idea, but requires that we get in-sync with comparative decision-making processes that consumers actually use. Specifically, this means we broaden our market understanding to emphasize the comparative world of consumers (brand A or brand B?) rather than being held hostage to the absolute perspective (will they buy our brand – or not) of marketing insiders. Beyond getting in-sync with consumers, studying competitors as well as our own product or service means we also understand the category better by seeing what consumers like and dislike about the approaches used by competitors. Lastly, by also getting consumer feedback about competitors, we get more candid (and, thereby, far higher quality) data, because respondents are left blind to the identity of the study’s sponsor. Simply, if they know who is sponsoring the research, most research respondents are too polite to be completely candid. This candor gap explains, in part, the high failure rate of
   
• The other structural feature – studying the broader context-- exists to minimize the inevitable tendency of marketing insiders to create overly narrow studies. This pervasive problem, construct validity bias, is conquered by exploring a far fuller range of the target market’s decision criteria, value systems, and overall frame of reference than would otherwise be studied.
   
• In survey research, context-rich study designs yield more actionable outcomes because they are structured to yield reliable predictions. Ultimately, business managers do not care about market research techniques. All they really want to know is the consequences of choosing strategy A vs. strategy B (Deming, Polis). To accomplish that requires reliable predictions, not just safe, descriptive research. In turn, this matters because creating useful and reliable predictions demands that the researcher make deliberate, explicit choices during the study design stage.
   
• To blend qualitative insights with the projectability of survey research, we sometimes use hybrid designs of smaller, but randomly selected samplings.  Interviewing strategies in hybrid designs are heavily qualitative in nature, including projective techniques where appropriate.
   

Interviewing principles of context-rich research

Gathering context-rich insights is also based upon innovations in interviewing strategies, including these basic principles:

• Every question asked of respondents occurs as a social experience, not a research experience. This fact has important implications for researchers and clients: The need to meet respondents where they are at. The best question from a clinical point of view will fall flat unless respondents understand it and have the time to answer it.  Without rigorous pretesting, researchers cannot know what works.
   
• Further, context-rich research creates an environment where respondents are sufficiently motivated to move from a state of self-consciousness toward self awareness. (Templeton, 1995).
   Until this happens, until this level of motivation is created, respondents will continue to serve up the ubiquitous “reasonable sounding answer” so as to avoid the surprisingly hard work of understanding and then expressing their motivations, preferences and perceptions.
   
• In turn, this requires that researchers create a permissive environment, one safe for candor and for emotional (i.e., illogical, sometimes socially undesirable) answers – truthful answers.
   

Analytics and reporting principles of context-rich research

Gathering context-rich is largely accomplished by vigorous analytics and reporting, principally by:

• Incorporating more demanding methods that faithfully render the rich, complex ways that human beings actually make decisions and avoiding the traps of narrow study design, meet-us-where-we-are-at questionnaires, and analytic methods that break complex wholes into less meaningful parts.
   
• Using a reporting style that first sets the table by explaining the broader context (causes), and only then presents the specific answers (effects) that, by human nature, we seek at the beginning of a study. Detailed information is presented in highly organized, general-to-specific and user-friendly formatting that overcome the human tendency of clients to seek one-dimensional answers to complex, multidimensional market behaviors.
   
• Using faster, multi-stage reporting and strong, actionable recommendations.