One of the great things about working in NPD is that I am privileged to attend a great many research groups.
Now, granted, there is very little more rewarding or enjoyable than sitting down in a room listening to your readers/users discussing your brand, but there are odd occasions when the process can be… well, shall we say frustrating?
I vividly recall receiving a worried phone call early one morning from a member of Human Capital, one of the research companies we employ, stating quite categorically that a certain assistant editor who shall remain nameless must never, under any circumstances, ever attend any further research sessions as he had become apoplectic at the feedback and had virtually attacked a couple of participants down in Cardiff or somesuch who didn’t like some of the stuff he was doing in his magazine.
Personally that’s not my problem. I’ve never found criticism anything but constructive – they don’t like it, chuck it out! What on earth could be easier than that?
No, the frustrating bits for me have always been the occasions when you’re receiving mixed messages – not just between different members of a research group, but within the natural – and it seems to be unsolvable – contradictions inherent to the human psyche.
Take, for instance, the reasonably recent findings from a group of loyal Uncut readers. When asked about the magazine’s Film coverage, 10 out of 10 unanimously declared that they didn’t read it. But when it was suggested that perhaps the best policy would therefore be to drop it in favour of more music, they baulked. No, they said, it wouldn’t be Uncut without the Film.
And so, despite the fact that it never features heavily - if at all – on the cover of the magazine (newsagents grow confused, apparently, and don’t know where to put it, with music mags or film!) and they never read a single word of the 11 or so pages dedicated to it in the magazine, they would prefer the Film coverage to stay.
Even when it was pointed out to them that, with Uncut costing £4.30 (roughly 3.5 pence per page) they were spending about 38-and-a-half pence on something they never ever read, they were still convinced that Uncut wouldn’t be Uncut without the film.
There was something in the DNA of the title, they were suggesting, that meant Film had to be there; especially as other music magazines like Mojo didn’t feature film, which effectively meant they were able to deliver 11 more pages of music!
Now, you may think these readers crazy but trust me, this is not a phenomenon reserved for 50-year-old mature music fans who have scrambled their brains with too many reefers over the years.
I recall 11 year old readers of Shoot (RIP) telling us that, although they never read the results printed in the magazine (too out of date for a weekly, they got it all from the dailies), we were under no circumstances to drop the stats because… well, they’d always been there and anyway, other magazines like Match do them.
So, sometimes this seemingly illogical behaviour is defined by keeping something effectively useless to them that makes your brand different and sometimes it’s the very thing that makes it the same as everyone else.
Now, we have recently started to run our own research groups upon occasion – saves money, we’ve seen enough of how it works etc. – and the organisation and all that is dead easy. But the results are all in the interpretation - a black art if ever I saw one.
One of our research companies, in encountering the dilemma I have just described, tackled it by coining a phrase to make it sound more scientific. The “hygiene factor” they called it. So in debriefing groups of publishers, PDs, MDs and editors, when they came to this most baffling of reactions (“don’t read, must keep it”), they would cite the “hygiene factor” and advise whatever feature it was “stay put for now”.
Hmmm… I clearly recall being so near my wits’ end with this gobbledegook that I once declared to Andy Cowles, our Dev Director, that if we carry on this way, “all we’ll be bloody publishing is hygiene factors!”
Trouble is, I’m not entirely sure I was joking.