As an advertiser, I care deeply about what the consumer thinks. They see my ads. They buy my products. They pay the bills. However, if I want to see how advertising impacts the consumer’s decision to buy a product or more importantly tap into the reasons why they buy a product, I need to be careful not to draw wrong conclusions from survey responses.
Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, psychologist and market researcher who has worked on campaigns for Fortune 100 companies, suggests that the only effective way to understand what people mean is to actually ignore what consumers say. Rapaille explains that direct questions about interests and preferences are processed and answered in the cortex of the brain. This part of the brain is not responsible for instinct and emotion, factors that heavily influence purchasing. Answers are given to sound intelligent or to impress the questioner but don’t reveal the unconscious forces that precondition our feelings. This is why polls and surveys are so often misleading and useless. They simply reflect what people say, rather than what they mean.
Rapaille suggests performing lengthy, involved interviews to glean the “codes” from the customers. Unfortunately, as a university marketer, I have little time, energy, and resources to do exactly what Rapaille is suggesting. While it would be ideal to get students in situations where we can tap into their subconscious, you may need to gather research quickly and cheaply.
Instead, our university decided to add new types of questions on existing university perception surveys. These questions were geared to help students to think outside their cortexes. We asked our usual demographic and perception questions but also included open-ended questions similar to what Rapaille asks in his sessions. We asked questions that would get the students to remember what it was like to first experience our university. We asked them to describe their first and most recent memories of the university. The responses were enlightening.
We begin to see common themes in the students’ responses. In the likert scale responses, students found the reputation of our school to be most important. They considered the university’s values to be important. They strongly agreed with statements about convenience and academic rigor being important.
But then we got to the open-ended answers, a different story began to surface. Students talked about the supportive and helpful staff and faculty. Many brought up being very “nervous” and “anxious” and that things were “scary” before entering our program. Most importantly, because of the “encouragement”, the negative feelings melted away and students found themselves “put at ease”, “surprised”, and many reported being “excited”. This was all information we would have missed if we had only looked at the quantitative data. In fact, few of the factors that students reported as important in the likert scale questions were mentioned in the open-ended responses.
The stories that we began to see were very helpful and will be used in our upcoming advertising campaign. Yes, it is important to mention academic excellence. And if students are saying that your facilities are top-notch, I do not assume that they are lying, so it would be important to mention these features in ads and other marketing material. But I do think that if we focus too much on what they are saying, we can miss what they really mean. You will end up with ads that don’t resonate on a deeper level. And the deeper a student can connect with the universities brand through an ad, the more likely they will buy. (See this Ubrander article for an example of why you can’t always trust what the students say)
