What a Lamppost Uses a Drunk For.

A friend of mine told me that, though he received his law degree from Vandy, he had to do extra study at Harvard before he became a professor. I asked him why he had to go to Harvard and he explained that his bosses wanted to make sure that in a courtroom he could correctly identify who was the plaintiff and who was the defendant. So now you have your highbrow humor for the day. The appropriate reaction is a slight snicker.

My own education had its own gauntlet of sorts, though I imagine nowhere near as perilous as an LLM from Harvard Law. For me, it was two research classes required of all who studied psychology at the University of Georgia's very research orientated psychology program.

I took the first class, Research Design, in the summer, when I had quite possibly the sweetest living arrangement in town. I was a couple blocks from the building where I would be taking my one class for the summer, not paying for utilities and the cost...$50. No, that's not per month. That was the cost for the whole summer. And when you're saving that much money in rent, you have excess funds to spend on other college activities, like taking your best girl to the picture show and singing festive songs at the local orphanage. Yeah, right. We partied like the members of Motley Crue only wished they could.

The professor was one of those laid back PhD candidates who basically promised you'd get an A anyways, but please show up so his review board doesn't get suspicious. Despite our encouraged lackadaisical attitude, however, designing research was interesting. Between rising at the crack of noon and raucous summer bashes, we learned how to create studies, control variables and make comparisons. I wished my entire education would have gone just like that.

But then came the second class, Research Analysis. Our teacher was nice enough, although a bit strange. He was a PhD candidate who didn't really seem to like or be interested in people, an odd characteristic for a psychologist. The class was at dawn and by that time I had moved into a house miles away, meaning I had to fight the other twenty thousand students for the apparently 30 allocated parking spaces. And the class was horrible. With the analysis of research, all the energy and enjoyment of designing research was drained out into the nearby Oconee River. Instead of using research to investigate and solve problems, we now seemed to be finding ways to use research to create new problems, which solved very little. Except we could now point at the amazing complexity of the process we used to say nothing.

As I yearned for the summer days where we pontificated confounds and null hypotheses, I questioned why we were taught the process in two parts. It would seem more logical to teach the design and analysis of a research method, in addition to teaching a variety of methods, rather than break the process apart. Yes, to do that would have been logical. But to put windows in the psychology building with some regular pattern would have also been logical. Instead, the university asked professors if they wanted a window and if they said yes they got one. If they said no, no window and the resulting building looked like it was designed by 8 year-olds who just floated a keg of soda. Logic has nothing to do with it.

And so it often goes in the wild world of marketing research. The design of studies and the interpretation of results too often seem disjointed. And if that is not enough to question validity, many studies start out with no real defined subject, only to follow up the act with an ethereal interpretation designed to support a pre-existing notion. As the late, great David Ogilvy said, marketers often use research like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.

I routinely see studies designed to measure broad and barely defined aspects with a tiny population of participants with obvious confounds, such as an Internet survey to study people who don't use the Internet.

Now for the record, I have worked with some of the most fantastic researchers in the marketing business. Yet even with great research, I have seen managers cherry-pick the results and ignore a huge swath of important data. I have sat in the room and watched my friend Jim Nelems tell a company's leaders to their faces what the issues are, only to watch said leaders either try to discount the findings or ignore them altogether.

I am no research expert. But I am practical and I don't commission research unless I have questions I want answered. And when I do get data, I don't reengineer the questions to fit the results. In the studies I have been involved with, I have observed some amazing technique and skill and, while I could detail all the things I have liked, I think this subject is best addressed by the strongest lessons I learned. These few tidbits stand out to me either because they were not what I was expecting or because they fundamentally shaped the role I see for marketing research.

Better road map than treasure map.
One particularly terrible mistake marketers make is assuming research will predict the future. Sure, we test products and flavors and advertising and that gives us directions for where to put money, time and effort. But what research cannot do is control all the variables. In the lab, a consumer can tell you they prefer a flavor of cough drop. In the real world, you don't know how far the distance is from their house to the drug store that carries your cough drop. This is not to say the research is incorrect. You asked the consumers if they liked the flavor and they said, "Yes". There is a considerable difference, however, between liking the flavor and buying the product.

In my experience, research does a far better job of defining the problem rather than offering the solution. This notion should affect where marketers place the role of research. In at least a few efforts, I have observed marketers develop a product and then attempt to use research to affirm certain notions. Instead, well conducted marketing research should have informed the creation of the product to put it more in line with consumer preference. While some companies do this, the vast majority do not.


Better fairy godmother then magic genie in a lamp.
The genie gives you three wishes and goes back in the lamp until the next wisher happens along. Similarly, plenty of marketers rub their researchers and ask a few questions only to stuff them back in the bottle. Research, however, can advise and inform on all phases of a product's life cycle. Research can flush out attributes most desired by the consumers. It can test positioning strategies and communications. Why put the genie back in the bottle when it can grant all these wishes as well:

Allows benchmarking and testing of strategies in development.
Strategy testing all along the consumer marketing spectrum.
Verifies that strategy from research is aligned and has not skewed.
The better idea is to use your research as a fairy godmother. She exists more like a counselor, helping to inform decisions and granting the occasional wish when needed. Just don't ask for the world and then ignore her advice. She might turn you into a pumpkin.


Doesn't always have to be in a room with one-way glass and lots of M&Ms.
The best researchers can pull data out of anywhere. They can read the b-roll from your corporate videos. They can make inferences from the distribution of your brand magazine. The can diagnose issues from past efforts. I have seen focus groups take place at a customer's house. I have sat in a restaurant and observed customers for an upcoming in-store promotion.

The belief that research must always look like research is a self-imposed restriction. While the controlled setting has its value, one should not eschew the whole other world that is out there.

In today's marketing world, boundaries are falling. Sales and marketing departments have not only signaled a cease-fire, they are beginning to work together. Finance and marketing are beginning to teach each other a common language. And so, the world of research should drop the curtain and begin to better integrate into the whole workings of an organization. Research is a primary window into the life of customers. For the customer-led firm, research is not just an expense or luxury. In fact, a lack of research can be a liability.

They still teach Research Design and Research Analysis separately at the University of Georgia, despite plenty of complaints. I told them that methods should be taught alongside data analysis. I think I made a decent case for connecting the means of getting and understanding data. I put all my concepts on a survey of the course.

A survey, I imagine, nobody ever read.

Rip Rah Rega.

I was the oldest ATO pledge at Georgia since the guy who came back from Vietnam and finished his pledgeship. Having worked a few years in Hotlanta as a photographer and camera slinger, I finally made the trek to Athens to finish my degree. The first semester was horrible. I didn’t know where anything was and I didn’t know anybody, but it wasn’t in the cute, “Isn’t college fun?” sort of way that freshmen stink of. No, for me it was just pathetic, and I knew that if I was going to enjoy my time in school, I would have to shed that jaded, artsy, I’ve-already-had-a-real-job crap and start making some friends.

Georgia rush is an experience unlike anything else. One house wouldn’t talk to anyone not on their list. Another house was full of creepy dorks who insisted that all of us would make great brothers. One house didn’t have a house, just a couch in the front of the yard where the house used to be. And yes, there was a dude passed out on it. Around midnight, my rush group got off the bus in front of the ATO house and the bus pulled off, leaving us in the dark. We started up the hill when the brothers yelled for us to stay at the bottom. Just then, a guy on a motorcycle burst through the front door and roared down the steps in a full wheelie. The rest of the brothers ran out onto the porch to the point that when the first ones got to the edge, the ones in the back started pushing so that people were falling off the porch into the bushes below. They then made us run up the steps and shoot a basket on the basketball court. We then watched a disgusting slideshow and took a tour of the renovated caboose, complete with bar and TV. The house was filthy in the way a river looks after a flood. It smelled like someone was cooking a stew of cigarettes, stale beer and dog fur. The interior design echoed the “expletives scratched on a wall”school of design and the brothers appeared to have each drank enough that night to kill a rugby team.

I knew I was home.

I love ATO, but that’s on purpose. People often like to tell me that they were on the newspaper or the fencing team and it was kinda like a fraternity. No offense to the fencers - it’s nothing like ATO was. At the school newspaper, the guy or gal who schmoozes their way to editor gets to boss people around and get away with it. ATO was more like communism. We had leaders, but mostly just because someone had to be responsible to pay the bills. I didn’t matter if you were the president, if you started being an ass, someone would haystraw your room or tie you to a tree and cover you with the leftovers from a freshly dressed deer.

There was a system and it made you loyal. While you were a pledge, you had to do demeaning things like clean the bathroom, race the house dog during his game of fetch and be a 24 hour chauffer. Before my class pledged, there was a creepy old dude who pulled his bed in the middle of a room and made the pledges watch him sleep. He threatened, “If I wake up and you’re not looking directly at me, you’ll take a bag of sugar up the stairs one granule at a time.”

But then, in the midst of the unpleasantness, the brothers would do something awesome. They paid for and sent my pledge class on camping trips. They would take us out, buy our drinks and introduce us to questionable women. They made efforts to find us dates and introduce us to their friends outside the fraternity. For every tough thing that we went through, there were two things that were really good. It not uncommon to hear of guys getting a little sad after pledgeship because they miss the attention and excitement.

My brothers and I learned how to foster loyalty. If the brothers ever gave us pledges a hard time it was because of some crap we did. If a brother had expressed an interest in a girl and another guy tried to move in, that other guy might expect to get mop water dumped on his head the next morning in the shower. And when brothers did things to help each other, we talked about it and told the guy that we appreciated him. Don’t think we got all weepy about it. Right after we told him we appreciated him, we shot a bottle rocket under his door and it exploded under his futon.

I am loyal to ATO. I believe in its creed and its brotherhood. Sure, I got pissed a few times, but I know I can count on my brothers and our bond is a lasting one.

It’s kinda like how I feel about REI. Okay, maybe that’s unfair. My fraternity is a group that helped me through an important part of my life. But I have known REI longer. I got into the outdoors in high school and REI was my source for equipment and information. I would go there whenever I could to get gear I had been saving for and comb the message boards for things outdoorsy in the ATL. Like ATO, REI had a plan to build my loyalty and while you may say they buy their friends, I protest that my loyalty is simply a repayment of their loyalty to me.

Brands make friends and sometimes those friends are loyal. Brands like Apple and Airstream have followings that rival any the bonds of Beach Weekend or White Tea Rose Ball. Brand devotees have Harley tattoos and Saturn homecomings. Brands that foster such loyalty can sometimes create loyalty that transcends mere support, in which case the followers take over and the company becomes like our chapter President who simply paid the bills. I can’t tell you all the secrets from ATO. But I will tell you the secret that many brands use to recruit their followers. Here’s the secret knock, passcode and handshake.

You’re like us. We’re like you.

I remember an interesting tactic we used when recruiting new members. We asked about particular interests, and paired the recruit with a guy with the same interests. I was a spreadhead so I got paired with groovy guy who wore overalls and carried a bongo drum. The message was clear. The other fraternities are a bunch of geeks in Polo shirts and ironed khakis. Come join us where you can have fun and be yourself, dude.

Brands have the same chance to celebrate their recruits’ individuality. Brands like Airstream, Trek and Subaru all have particular types of purchasers and when those people feel a stronger connection, their loyalty grows. The temptation is to broaden an appeal in order to capture a broader audience. This does not work. It is the equivalent of the fraternity who will let anyone in no matter what; ergo, membership is worth next to nothing.

You’re either with us or against us.

Fraternities are competitive. We fight over the sororities’ social calendars. We fight over recruits. And some times we just fight. Fraternities are not ambiguous about membership. Either you’re in or you’re not. Either you made a few sacrifices and sucked it up or you’re just hanging out at our party being awesome by mere proxy.

Membership has its privileges but it also has its costs. Brands with a strong following are not without commitment. A MacG5 is expensive. A VW may not be the car your Mom or spouse wanted you to buy. You may have to drive out of the way to get to the Fresh Market. The key is making membership in the brand worth it. Only then can there be a sense of pride in belonging.

Together we’re heavy.

I remember how excited we got when we maxed out our pledge classes. More members meant more opportunities for friends and the fraternity as a whole. It meant current and future strength of our brotherhood. It meant that we had successfully communicated what we stand for and that such a pitch was well received.

Brands are smart to appraise and connect the membership. Forums now connect car enthusiasts and Linux people and all the other thriving brand communities. For a brand to adequately develop a following, it has to show people where to go.

Nissan losing their following. Yup.

When brands lose the love for their brotherhoods and sisterhoods, they begin to dwindle. Nissan was once the mighty sports car and truck company who gave us the Z car and Pathfinder. Nissan once had passion. Today their design and communication is so watered down that the voice over in the TV commercial might as well been read from their annual repot. What exactly is “inspired design?” Isn’t all design inspired? And just because it is inspired, does that mean the inspiration was necessarily a good one? What if the car was inspired by a giraffe?

Thank you sir, may I have another?

Loyalty takes work but it is worth it. Brands that want loyal fans better be ready to take their licks, show some restraint and believe in the cause. Today’s consumers have plenty of choices in nearly every category. Today they’re looking for meaning and for something they can support. Give them a brand they can tattoo on their ankles. Give them a brand they’ll display proudly on a car, desk or wall. Give them a brand that they’ll shout out. As for me, well, here it goes.

Rip, Rah, Rega
Alpha Tau Omega
Hip, Rah, Hip, Rah
Three cheers for Alpha Tau
Rah, Rah, Rah, Hey!