Rina Valeny and Jen Cassels continue the series on issues in qualitative research methodology. This month, we look at the importance of identifying unmet needs and the techniques we can utilise to uncover these, as well as some of the problems faced.
Rina Valeny 
18 Mar, 2008
Qualitative corner: Identifying Unmet Needs
One of the fundamental elements of any pre-launch market understanding research is to establish if a new brand can resolve any existing problems in the marketplace, by identifying or uncovering any unmet needs that customers may have. Achieving a full understanding of this critical success factor is essential, as it contributes to the overall assessment of how a new brand could be leveraged to maximise its market opportunity. To this end, careful methodological consideration needs to given to ensure that the insight gained about unmet needs is of the highest quality.
What we are looking to seek out is a range of different sets of needs, including:
- Rational needs (e.g. what do Physicians want or need when treating thrombosis in general?)
- Patient needs (e.g. what do Physicians need for their obese patients and what are their perceptions of their obese patients’ needs?)
- Resource needs (e.g. what are their organisational or resource needs when treating and managing schizophrenic patients?)
- Emotional needs (i.e. how would they like to feel about working in the therapy area of MS?)
So how do we achieve this in practice? At first it may appear to be a straight
forward process, as we could simply ask the question: “What are your
unmet needs as a sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis?” “What are your
current unmet needs when treating and managing endometriosis?” However,
asking customers to “list their unmet needs” rarely elicits a genuine
and, therefore, rich and insightful set of answers. When asked directly, customers
will often provide a set of needs that they have consciously thought about
and rationalised. Often respondents will also talk about their ‘ideal’ needs
or wants and these can sometimes be unrealistic or unachievable. Unmet needs
may be internalised at a deeper, (and often emotional) level and thus never
be consciously recognised or mentioned during research.
The lack of effectiveness of direct questioning necessitates the use of techniques that are more projective in nature, as these employ a building block approach from which the unmet needs (that customers perceive to be important but are not currently being delivered) can be discovered, deduced and discussed both within the research interview and also later on, during analysis.
Projective or enabling techniques which provide valuable insight into ‘true’ unmet needs include:
- Picture sorts
- Emotional framing
- Gaming techniques
Picture Sorts is an interesting technique which can be employed to understand
emotional or physiological unmet needs. Use of this technique would involve
asking each Physician to choose a selection of pictures that say something
about the needs that they or their patients have in a therapy area. The set
of pictures chosen would then used to explore need ‘themes’ and
to discuss how important these are and if they are being met effectively or
not.
Emotional framing is a very simple but highly effective technique.
Participants are shown a list of 100 or so emotional states (positive and negative)
and asked to pick out 7 to 10 different emotions that currently reflect how
they feel about a certain therapy area, for example hypertension or how they
feel about managing certain patient types, for example type 2 diabetic patients.
Patients can also be asked how they currently feel about living with a certain
condition. The emotions chosen are then examined in full, exploring what experiences/events
may have led to a participant to feel this way.
In order to truly understand unmet needs it is important to complete a second emotional framing exercise, this time with all positive emotions. Participants are asked to again choose 7 to 10 emotions that reflect how they would ‘ideally’ like to feel. By comparing and contrasting where a participant is today and where they want to be, we can more truly understand the extent of the unmet need.
This exercise can then help to more easily determine true functional needs because we can ask a participant what is required to meet their emotional needs, e.g. ‘what would need to happen to make you feel xxxx?’ Or ‘how would you get to xxx?’. What is essential in this exercise is to explore ‘why’ an emotion is chosen. Without this, the technique becomes somewhat redundant and tells us (and the client) very little.
Gaming
techniques are also valuable
in uncovering existent and latent customer needs. In essence, research participants
are asked to re-create different situations or decision process as if they
were a board game. For example, this could take the shape of a game of snakes
and ladders. Participants may be asked to think about the different considerations
when making a prescribing decision, what moves this decision forward (and taking
them up a ladder) or what holds this back (slipping down a snake). This ‘game
like’ idea allows people to think about the less obvious factors that
come into play when making a decision, as well as those decision influencers
which may be considered as trivial to the decision maker but may in fact provide
researchers with crucial insights into customer needs.
Once such enabling techniques have been employed, it is fundamental to analyse
the results appropriately, using the correct tools. Gap analysis is one such
tool which can be employed to determine the ‘size’ of the gap between
met and unmet needs. It can then be used to help identify the strategy or tactics
that need to be employed in order to close the gap and hence come closer to
meeting the unmet market need (e.g. through product improvement, product launch,
communication strategies).
Significance Analysis can also be used to map the relative importance of the various issues and unmet needs in a therapy area [from different customer perspectives]. Thus identifying a hierarchy of fulfilled and unfulfilled needs, for example:
It is therefore clear that when reviewing research proposals that include identifying unmet needs as a research objective, strong consideration needs to be given to how a research agency proposes to facilitate this process in practice. Being mindful of this can make the difference between generating an inadequate piece of work to receiving one that is comprehensive and truly insightful.
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