Jon Chandler explores the three most sensitive issues confronting messaging research; meeting the needs of message development, ensuring messaging is capable of generating change, ensuring messaging delivers to the brand agenda.
Jon Chandler 
18 Nov, 2008
Towards Launch Minus One: Communication Strategy and Messaging Part 2
Last month we looked at some of the key needs from messaging research; finding the optimum message set, creating a brand storyline from this and finally ensuring these messages and storyline deliver the brand strategy and positioning.
This month we look at some of the more practical dimensions of messaging research. Specifically:
- How can we best meet the different needs of message development and message evaluation or testing.
- How can we ensure that we deliver messaging that is capable of generating change.
- How can we ensure that our messaging research delivers to the brand agenda and thereby helps us to deliver change.
These are not the only issues confronting messaging research, but they are three of the most sensitive.
Delivering to the Needs of Development versus Evaluation
There is no prescriptive recipe for how messaging research needs to be done in all instances, the best approach will vary according to situation. One of the key influencers here will be how far forward the overall message development process has progressed. In the earlier stages of message development programmes the key need is often for a mixture of generating potential messages and honing and refinement. In the later stages the key needs are often much more focussed around refining the precise expression of messaging to ensure these resonate the best they can with the target audience.
- In situations where the emphasis is upon message development, and particularly where there is much focussed on how messages are best expressed then working qualitatively in small groups may be more appropriate. Here respondents can debate and generate alternative possibilities and expressions. Such research is often a case of throwing a wide variety of possibilities at members of the target audience to see what responses these evoke. The key issue here can be avoiding outright rejection of the new and unfamiliar. A variety of research techniques can assist in presenting potential messages in ways that encourage more open and non-judgemental responses: the use of ‘focus boards’ to present information and the use non-rational response mechanisms such as emotional framing, brand twinning, mood boards or personification to elicit response. By contrast where we are less concerned about refining language and expression and more focussed upon ‘testing’ then one to one approaches are usually more appropriate. In the one to one situation external influences are not an issue in the way that they can be in group situations. The value of the individual interview here is often that it allows us to see just how different responses can be per se and further to evaluate how far these differ by customer segment or type. We can also often see here how messages may play differently because they are decoded or processed in different ways by different members of the audience. To reveal these differences in decoding or processing it is often valuable to employ mechanisms such as ‘Stream of Consciousness’ interviewing that allow the authentic ‘voice’ of the individual respondent to be heard undirected by the interviewer or the discussion guide.
Delivering Change
We have often observed that one of the key problems built into the very nature
of market research is its tendency to be backward looking. In the research
situation people tend to look back to their past experiences to make judgements
about the future. This tends to favour conservatism and be less favourable
to change, to the radical or the new. In messaging research this can mean that
responses can be more positive where messages are comfortable and familiar,
not where they are challenging and new.
This means that research needs to find ways of forcing its participants to respond to materials from a variety of different perspectives that push them beyond ‘do I like it?’ and ‘do I agree?’. Forcing this difference can be built into the way that Interview guides are structured or into tasks given to research participants. The key point is that we need to employ some form of Directed Multiple Response.
The principles of DMR are simple; people are forced to respond in a number of different ways and that these different ways take them in different directions. What DMR does is force responses to go beyond the obvious questions of ‘do I like it?’ to ask ‘is it new?’ ‘how far does it challenge me?’ and so on. Questioning and tasks can evaluate the impact and appeal of messages, more significantly they can measure originality, differentiation and challenge.
We can explore the potential power of messaging to provoke change more directly through some form of Future Market Scenario exercise:
- Future Market Scenarios; the power of messaging to provoke change can also be evaluated by exploring how and where it establishes points of difference against key competitors in some future market scenario. Here research participants identify what for them are the key rational and emotional dimensions of products in the future market place. The brands proposed messaging platform is then mapped across this to identify how and where messages are capable of creating real points of difference. As with applied Positioning, this kind of approach can be executed overtly in the form of some specific test, or more subtly through the way responses are probed.
Delivering the Positioning : Delivering the Brand
The theme of delivering change brings us back to positioning and strategy.
As we have seen previously the whole logic of developing brand positioning
and strategy is really about the development of a plan for encouraging change.
The development of positioning around some key customer insight really represents
the identification of an unfulfilled need. If insight research has identified
true needs and positioning research has identified how these can best be addressed,
then ‘testing’ messaging against positioning amounts to testing
its ability to encourage change.
Understanding how well our messaging and storyline can work to deliver the desired positioning is ultimately an analytic question. It is about judging what research outputs mean. However, a variety of research tools can serve as valuable mechanisms that can inform this judgement:
- Applied Positioning Tests; have been discussed in earlier Third Tuesday features, specifically as a mechanism for evaluating different positioning options. These involve creating a number of different patient scenarios and testing how far different positioning options ‘speak’ to these. This same kind of mechanism can also be employed to ‘test’ messaging and to see how well messaging delivers to positioning. This kind of approach can be executed overtly in the form of some specific test, or more subtly through the way responses are probed.
- ‘Storylining’; provides us with a further approach which can be used to evaluate how well or not messages come together to deliver the proposed positioning through the way in which the ‘story’ has been put together. Applied as a research technique this can involve research participants identifying how the components within a storyline contribute to the overall story. This means identifying what messages do on a blow by blow basis. This same approach can be applied by the research team at an analytic level, it involves the visualisation of what each messages contributes to the overall storyline … and within this, the stronger points, the weaker points and any potential ‘missing links’.
The point in all of this is that our focus moves away from a focus on what is likable and acceptable to a focus on what is newer and challenging. The fundamental point in all of this is that messaging needs to deliver strategy and needs to deliver change.
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