Subsequent to yesterday’s post about reader research, the black art of interpretation and the invention of the “hygiene factor”, I thought you might like to know that research companies have developed further species to explain the frankly inexplicable.
Should you, for instance, be deep into a research debrief session when the words “Old Spice” pop up on the power point, what you will be encountering is an attempt to explain away the anomaly of something that consumers actively say they dislike or disagree with but would miss if they were gone.
Examples of what we’re talking about here are Richard Littlejohn or Kelvin Mackenzie or, according to my research co. mole, “indeed any Sun/Mail columnist”.
To take this to the nth degree, I guess a good example would be when Julie Burchill was writing columns for the Guardian and saying stuff that so offended their liberal sensibilities that the readers refused to read her – even though, of course, they believed she had every right to say the things she said and that it was a good thing that the Guardian, by publishing her, was standing up for free speech!
Nuts? Most assuredly! Oh, and it’s called “Old Spice” because readers recognise the whiff of the feature without ever actually reading it.
A further iteration of the “hygiene factor” and perhaps the most insidious and, therefore, the most dangerous has come to be known as “look at me” content. This is explained away as stuff that people like to say they read or watch or whatever because they think it makes them look good when really they never actually do read or watch it. A good example of this, again according to my research co. mole, is Later With Jools Holland which has pitiful viewing figures but makes the BBC look good and is apparently some kind of prestigious name to drop by participants in research because they think it makes them look well-rounded as individuals.
So you see, what your audience are saying in research and what they mean are not always – in fact, in my darkest moments I fear, seldom – what they actually mean.
As I said, interpretation is one very dark art.
Log on tomorrow for further research group horrors.