Specialised Techniques

An explanation of our research techniques

Quantitative Techniques

Throughout our history we have employed industry leading research techniques as well as developing our own bespoke tools to provide deeper and more effective insight. We've collated our definitions below so you have a quick reference guide. These are divided quite simply but not exclusively into techniques that are focused on uncovering emotional insights and those focused on the subconscious.
Throughout we use our expert, trained research and consulting team to uncover new insights through data analytics, one to one interview or focus group moderation.
Understanding Emotional and Subconscious Value
• What are the emotions and subconscious reactions that drive and destroy value in your business?
• What value could you generate from the emotions and subconscious reactions you evoke?
• What should you do to evoke these emotions and subconscious reactions?
• How can you get your customers to feel more loyal towards you?
• How do consumers use their emotions and subconscious response to make decisions about whether to buy from you or not?

Emotional Signature®

Answers the following types of question:

1. How much value can we obtain by manipulating our emotional experience?
2. What drives and destroys emotional engagement?’

The Emotional Signature derives the value of the emotions and the subconscious aspects of the Customer Experience, defining how you should improve your experience to evoke emotional value in your clients and consumers. This unique and revolutionary methodology is the subject of our book 'The DNA of Customer Experience: how emotions drive value'. We can benchmark your organization’s Emotional Experience and document the key areas you should address to build value-driving emotions into your experience.

Learn more about Emotional Signature ®

Emotional Segmentation

Answers the following types of question:

1. How do are segments differ in their level of emotional engagement?

2. What natural emotional segments are there?
Traditional segmentation is intended to classify customers in some meaningful way that allows the organization to better meet their needs and achieve greater levels of loyalty. The classic approaches includes classification systems based on geographic, demographic, and behavioural (i.e., usage) factors. All of these approaches have their advantages but they fundamentally miss the emotional engagement the customer has with the experience provider.

One particularly useful approach is emotional segmentation – a special type of psychographic segmentation. The benefit of emotional segmentation is that it enables experience designers to better and deliberately meet the subconscious emotional needs of customers.

So if you already have a segmentation methodology, consider whether emotionally these really are as differentiating as your assume or even if the experience you have created is resonating with the wrong audience! If you do not have a segmentation scheme, isn’t it best to segment based on how customers and clients feel?
Emotional Tracker® service: Measuring and Tracking Change

Answers the following types of question:

1. How can we track changes in customer emotions and subconscious reactions?
2. How can we measure the effects of Customer Experience in a pilot?

An easy to use tracking tool based on your Emotional Signature® result that tracks improvements in the level of your emotional engagement. As a follow-on to Emotional Signature, we can incorporate the core emotional elements into a longitudinal survey process to enable you to measure how you are performing,

Learn more about Emotional Segmentation

Emotional Audit for Six Sigma and LEAN

Answers the following types of question:

1. How will our cost cutting initiatives impact on how customers feel towards us?
2. Which aspects of our experience can be cut without impacting on our level of emotional engagement?

For some the credit crunch has led to a focus on cost. However, in the long and medium run, is this actually going to cost you money as you lose you market differentiators? In this service we embed Emotional Signature® processes to provide a critical audit function for any cost-cutting initiative. We provide you with the tools to understand how a cut would feel to your customer and client base.
Emotional Design

1. How should we redesign our customer experience?
2. What part of our experience is not working?

This service helps with the wholesale redesign of an experience, quantifying which new and better scenario(s) clients and consumers truly demand, and which changes are linked to business value. Within this service we also provide creative workshop approaches to help your internal stakeholders, clients and customers think 'out-of-the box'

Subconscious Communication Model

Uses Implicit Association Test and Transactional Analysis

Answers the following types of question:

1. ‘How impactful are subconscious attitudes that even consumers and clients may not be aware of on our brand and experience?’
2. ‘What network of associations do consumers and clients hold about our brand or experience, and what should we do about it?!’

Understanding a subconscious experience is a challenge when so much of research is based on 'explicit' rational measures. In our Subconscious Communication program we make this world of the subconscious real, demonstrating how clients and consumers have 'implicit and intuitive' feelings about you and your organization, sometimes in direct contradiction to traditional, more ‘rational-only’ surveys! For instance, a consumer may respond 'I am satisfied' but this masks their true implicit feelings of their unhappiness with you and/or the experiences they have with you (and your company). In this service we deep dive into subconscious response and assess how this relates to attitudes and brand value-critical behaviour. Critically we show you how your brand or experience is communicating to clients and consumers using techniques from IAT and Transactional Analysis.

Qualitative Techniques

Throughout our history we have employed industry leading research techniques as well as developing our own bespoke tools to provide deeper and more effective insight. We've collated our definitions below so you have a quick reference guide. These are divided quite simply but not exclusively into techniques that are focused on uncovering emotional insights and those focused on the subconscious.
Throughout we use our expert, trained research and consulting team to uncover new insights through data analytics, one to one interview or focus group moderation.
Understanding Emotional and Subconscious Value

• What are the emotions and subconscious reactions that drive and destroy value in your business?
• What value could you generate from the emotions and subconscious reactions you evoke?
• What should you do to evoke these emotions and subconscious reactions?
• How can you get your customers to feel more loyal towards you?
• How do consumers use their emotions and subconscious response to make decisions about whether to buy from you or not?

Repertory Grid

Answers the following types of question:

3. ‘What is our experience?’
4. ‘Is there an experience gap between what we as an organisation think our experience is and what our customers actually think it is?’
5. ‘How do we compare to our competitors in terms of experience?’
6. ‘Do we have a subconscious experience, if so, what is it?’

In this service, we extensively interview stakeholders and/or customers to understand exactly 'what is our full experience, rational-emotional- subconscious, anyway?'
With Rep Grid, we are really getting into the hidden sub-conscious world. We don’t provide a survey form, instead the method lets the interviewees respond to the experience in their own words; the role of the interviewer being to in extracting the various principles that lie behind these words. For instance, when we tried to understand the snacking experience for a brand of Smartie, the degree of ‘handbaginess’ came out as important i.e., its usable design.

Crowdsource meaning

Answers the following types of question:

1. ‘What are our clients and customers saying about us?’
2. ‘What trends do we see in the way people are speaking about us?’

Some of the ways we get to measure these messages is simply by photographing resonant experiences, noticing some of the ‘subconscious’ ways firms manipulate their image. But we also look at the messages delivered by the written word. Here we use sophisticated text mining tools to identify the most resonant key words from which we can focus our qualitative analysis of ‘affects’. An example of this is the way we looked at how Promoters and Detractors talk to each other through time.
Blogs and Twitter are interesting new sources to assess how your clients and customers are talking about you.

This enables you to capture trends before they go mainstream! In this way we are picking up and owning trends that are still not out yet.

Visual Projectives

Answers the following types of question:

1. ‘Do our clients or consumers have feelings that we are not even aware of?”
2. ‘Do we have a subconscious experience, if so, what is it?’

Sometimes we also use pictures in interviews, the respondent selecting an image that best reflects how they feel. This technique which falls under the title of ‘projectives’ is useful as in many instances it is easier to describe in pictures how you feel rather than through discussion. Similar techniques include projective questioning in the form of ‘if company X is an animal, what animal would that be’ and understanding how metaphors are used.

In our work we have used visual impressions to help interviewees describe their feelings towards an experience. For instance, when we map the customer journey we ask interviewees to discuss their journey through pictures. The advantage of this is that it pulls out subconscious feelings not accessible or muted by verbal description.

Visual impressions effectively open the mind to a different way of expressing an experience. As an example of this, in working with a construction company images of slickness, in a negative way, came through not previously apparent in the face to face interviews.

When you think about it, we understand not just verbally but through visual imagery; this gets to that, providing a unique and different insight.

Ethnography

Answers the following types of question:

1. What is our subconscious and emotional experience actually like as consumers experience it?

Customer observation provides a rich mine of 'real data' sometimes not accessible or muted by formalized interview settings. In this 'in the moment ' approach we observe the client and customer 'in action' to deliver key insights. This can also optionally involve the use of video and audio recordings.

Another useful technique is to use a select sample of your own customer and client base to act as 'recorders of their experience' using diary entry or video diaries.

Heartbeat monitor

Moving away from verbal responses to simply recording stress and relaxation points in your experience can provide invaluable data and insight into your customer experience. This has the advantage of recording instances, peaks and ends, and how these affect client and consumers in a way frequently not amenable to verbal response.