Chapter 5 Projective and Elicitation Techniques

 This makes them particularly useful for uncovering honest information about topics that might be sensitive or embarrassing.  They are also useful for uncovering subtle differences in how consumers feel about products in categories where no obvious differences exist (such as our toilet paper example).  Because there are no right or wrong answers, researchers hope that participants will project their real feelings in their answers.  Deeply personal emotions are usually shared by human beings across the board (Hollander, 1988). o So if planners can tap into these emotions, they might be able to discover the types of insights that lead to successful advertising.  Elicitation devices   are similar to projective techniques: however, they aren't typically aimed at uncovering subconscious thoughts and feelings but, rather, work as "conversation starters" With virtually all projective techniques, the benefit is in the discussion that accompanies the use of the stimulus and not in the stimulus per se.  The stimulus itself usually serves mainly to help participants collect their thoughts and explain concepts or ideas (Krueger, 1998).  Given this aspect, projective techniques are useful in either one-on-one interviewing or group settings, and each context has its advantages and disadvantages (Bengston, 1982)  Individual interviews can elicit responses that are untainted by group or peer pressure, but they don't capitalize on the dynamic that group thinking allows: the generation of ideas sparked when one person responds in a way that stimulates the responses of other group members.  One-on-one interviews can yield more detailed information, but group interviews are better at uncovering a wider range of ideas.  Bengston (1982) also suggests that projective techniques work better in one-on-one interviews due to the ease of administering them and probing responses, as well as their appropriateness for getting at confidential information that a participant might be reluctant to divulge in a group setting.  Our feeling is that the pros and cons of using projective techniques and elicitation devices in one-on-one or group settings are largely determined by the phenomenon you're researching HISTORY OF PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES According to Rabin (1981), "The penchant of man for imposing his own ideas and interpretations upon unstructured stimuli was noted, and occasionally recorded, centuries ago" (p. 1) and was evident as early as the time of Leonardo da Vinci.  However, projective techniques are most often associated with the field of psychology, where their use can be traced back to the mid-1800s.

 Also, if your situation requires that you modify or invent your own technique, we strongly urge you to verify the results of your research by triangulating them with other methods until you feel confident that your approach is actually tapping into whatever it is you want to study.  We'll talk more about different approaches to triangulation that incorporate projective techniques at the end of this chapter Association In   association   techniques, participants are given a stimulus and are asked to respond with the first words, images, or thoughts that come to mind.  The actual response, the speed with which participants answer, and the frequency of a particular response may all be useful tools for understanding the consumer's relationship with a particular brand or product One of the most commonly known and oldest forms of association techniques used in marketing research is word association.  Word associations have been used by psychologists since the 1880s and have been linked with marketing since World War II.  In word associations, respondents are asked to respond with the first word that comes to mind after reading each word in a list or series of words (Donoghue, 2000; Stevens, Wrenn, Ruddick, & Sherwood. 1997) To veil your motive and not clue in participants to the actual brand or product being tested, the list often includes "neutral" words those having nothing to do with the brand (e.g.,   carrot, dog, pencil , etc.—and "key" words that are directly related to the brand (Kassarjian, 1974).  In the latter case, think of coffee as an example.  Key words for coffee might include   aroma, flavor, Folgers , and   brown .  If you go back to the toilet paper example we gave you at the beginning of this chapter, you might come up with a list that includes key words such as   angel, soft, clouds , and   white .  A related associative technique is brand personification. o This approach requires participants to associate a brand or product with a person or personality type. o Participants are given photographs of different people and are asked to select those that personify either the brand under consideration or its competitors (or, in some instances, both. o If photographs are not available, participants can draw the persons they think personify the different brands

 After participants have completed the collages, you should have each team present its work and encourage feedback and participation from other members of the group (Krueger, 1998) A similar constructive technique used by planners involves the use of "bubble" drawings or cartoon tests.  Participants are provided with actual visuals or cartoons of people portrayed in situations of interest to the planner.  Participants are then asked to fill in the bubbles (much like the ones you see in cartoon strips) to indicate what a character is thinking, feeling, or saying in the portrayed situation (Donoghue, 2000).  These types of exercises are particularly useful when investigating in-store consumer behavior.  For example, if you wanted to know how college students decide among various brands of detergent, you could prepare a visual that shows a young college-aged woman and her roommate standing in the middle of the detergent aisle. o The image would show three thought bubbles to illustrate what each of the women is thinking, saying, and feeling What the planner is most interested in when using construction techniques is the process that participants go through in constructing meaning, rather than the end result that the process yields.  Understandably, these techniques require that planners either question participants continually as they complete the exercise or immediately on completion of the exercise so that none of the emotion the participant goes through while making the construction is lost Construction techniques work well in both focus groups and one-on-one interviews; however, the complexity of the task you are asking participants to perform will give you some idea of whether it's appropriate for your specific situation.  For example, asking a participant in a one-on-one interview to construct a collage is likely to eat up quite a bit of your interview time. o This same task in a group setting, however, is much more manageable and is a better use of your time Completion Completion techniques are comparable to word associations in that they tap into similar variables, but they are often considered a bit easier to work with because they better indicate a subject's attitudes and feelings and give good insight into a participant's need-value system (Kassarjian, 1974).  With completion techniques, participants are given incomplete sentences, stories, or conversations, or are presented with arguments, and then are asked to complete them.

 For example, to find out how teenagers feel about acne for its client Clearasil, D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles used a TAT. o After being shown a picture of a person who had a blemish, the teenagers were asked to describe the feelings of the person in the picture. o The agency found that to teenagers, pimples mean social isolation and being different. o As a result, the agency developed a campaign to let teens know that they could get back into life quickly if they used Clearasil. o According to a spokesperson for the agency, "We wouldn't have gotten that kind of information if we simply asked them to talk about acne and acne remedies" (Piirto, 1990, p. 33) As with most other projective techniques, the visual must be interesting enough to promote discussion but not so obvious as to give away the purpose of your research.  The visual also must be relevant to the participants.  By way of illustrating these last two points, Zikmund (1984) relates the story of a research project conducted on why men purchase chain saws.  A visual of a man looking at a large tree was used to explore buying motives among homeowners and weekend woodcutters.  The participants' initial reaction to the visual was that it wasn't a job for them but required the help of a professional.  In other words, they couldn't relate to the man with the problem, so they didn't consider sawing down the tree themselves as part of the solution.  Similarly, when deciding on the stimulus to use in a TAT, the planner should refrain from giving clues that indicate an obvious positive or negative predisposition to any elements of the visual "The House Where the Brand Lives" (or variations thereof) is another common expressive technique used by planners.  Planners may introduce a series of brands one by one and then ask the participant to describe the exterior of a house where each of the brands lives.  What style of house is it? Is it big? Small? Run-down? Well kept? Does it have a porch? How about a yard? What's in the yard?  Carrying it a little further, you can also ask the participants to describe the person who answers the door of the house, others who may live in the house, and what the individual rooms look like.  To get insight into media use habits, you might also inquire about the channels to which the TV is tuned, what magazine subscriptions the residents of the home have, to what station the radio in the kitchen is tuned, and so on.  This technique offers great insight into a brand's image among consumers and may suggest opportunities in the marketplace A beer example offers a good illustration of this.

 Before we moved on to the next brand, we would gently say, "Well, it looks like the majority of you think ____ should be about here on the line. Now let's talk about the next restaurant.” When the discussion of value wound down, we drew a vertical line down the middle of the value line.  We labeled this new line with endpoints of "a lot of variety" and "little variety."  Then we asked the students if the various brands should be moved up or down along that line.  Again, this sparked a lot of conversation, and subjects we didn't think about emerged.  For instance, Taco Bell—a restaurant with a pretty extensive menu—was perceived as having less variety than some of the other brands because, "sure, there's a lot of things, but they're all made with the same ingredients."  McDonald's fared the best on this dimension because it offered a lot of different options but it also served three meals, which to the students was an aspect of variety.  Wendy's, which has a more limited menu with fewer value-menu items, and doesn't serve breakfast, ranked at the bottom of the variety line So what is this one telling us? Lots of things.  McDonald's pretty much owns its quadrant and is perceived as a good-value restaurant with lots of variety.  This suggests that McDonald's strategy of the past few years of adding specialty coffees and menu items such as oatmeal seems to be working.  As the market leader, McDonald's would want to defend and continue with this position.  On the other end of the spectrum, Krystal is a brand perceived as a somewhat bad value with not so much variety (Krystal is open 24 hours, and our students seemed to think it was a good idea only at 3 a.m.). o One thing Krystal might try is to introduce new products that go beyond hamburgers. o It might also implement a communication strategy aimed at educating consumers about its 24-hour convenience and inexpensive menu items.  Burger King seems to have little "personality" relative to the dimensions of value and variety; it's neither good nor bad. o If Burger King does, indeed, have value and variety, all that might be in order is a retooling of its communication strategy to focus on aspects of the two dimensions, along with possible line extensions or new product introductions

 Participants tend to enjoy projective techniques, and they can inflect new energy into a focus group and lighten the mood of the research (Donoghue, 2000) Projective techniques are a good way to get truthful responses from participants, because participants often aren't sure what you're tying to measure and don't feel as though they are at risk of giving socially unacceptable answers.  And, even if they are aware of the general purpose of the research, they often aren't quite sure what aspects a planner is interested in.  Because the tasks that participants are called on to do are more free-form and unstructured than traditional research approaches, participants do not perceive their answers as right or wrong and can be easily encouraged to respond with a wide range of ideas (Donoghue, 2000).  Also, projective techniques require little in the way of literacy skills, which widens their scope beyond what might be included in a survey or measured via an experiment.  This lack of literacy requirements also makes some projective techniques particularly appropriate for children or other populations that are unable or unwilling to articulate their feelings using written words DATA ANALYSIS You might think it's your job to interpret data generated from projective techniques, but it's actually the job of the participants, with the help of your guidance (Krueger, 1998).  Nevertheless, ideas rarely come directly from consumers, so a planner needs to develop the skills to make connections that will uncover marketplace opportunities According to Donoghue (2000), there are two approaches to analyzing projective data.  The first is to approach the data quantitatively, whereby the planner classifies the content into categories that are given numerical values.  The specific categories can then be tabulated and used to evaluate a subject's responses or the frequency of responses by groups For example, let's say you're conducting research on coffee.  You might look over the answers participants gave on the projective tests you conducted and group the answers dealing with color or the visual aspects of coffee (e.g.. dark brown, cream colored, rich looking) into a category titled "Appearance."  Then, after categorizing all the participants' answers in this way, you might find that coffee's appearance was cited often by participants and conclude that appearance is important to consumers.  In and of itself, that finding isn't going to be important unless you know   why .  Although quantitative analysis of the answers may be useful in tasks such as uncovering the frequency of certain responses, looking at "top-of-the-mind" characteristics of a product, or tying to plot a conceptual map based on consumer opinions and attitudes, it often doesn't result in the types of insights planners tend to seek.

o She was also considered stable, well educated, and conservative (because her contraceptive method had been around awhile and was trusted) This example serves to drive home the importance of triangulation.  Three different ways of getting respondents to answer the question were used: traditional one-on-one interviewing and two projective techniques (expressive and choice ordering).  Separately, they all suggested the same thing about the participants views of contraception.  But taken together, the different approaches reinforced the patterns the researchers were seeing and also helped flesh out the answers better than if only one method had been used.  As with all data analysis, the key is to ty to see whether the patterns that emerge are valid that is, whether they're really answering what you're trying to answer and similar despite the different approaches.  It's kind of like not putting all your eggs in one basket