Inside Intent

American Demographics, March 1, 2004

DON'T SAY A WORD

More market researchers accept that asking consumers direct questions about what they like and what they may want may not be the best way to get meaningful answers. Barbara Bylenga, president of Outlaw Consulting in San Francisco, says consumers aren't always conscious of the reasons they respond in certain ways to products or trends. Bylenga and Samantha Forster, Outlaw's senior strategist, interview trendsetters to preview what may trickle down to the mainstream. "We interview people and listen to them with our 'third ear,'" she says. "No one specifically tells you, 'Next year, I'm wearing lower jeans.'"

BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group uses magnetic resonant imaging to map brainwave activity as consumers are asked questions about preferences. Marketers who understand how the human brain works can create messages and images that influence consumers' unconscious mind. "The better we understand how we think," says Justine Meaux, BrightHouse's research scientist and market strategist, "the better able companies are to develop products that are aligned to what we want."

Ultimately, isn't that the goal of market research: giving consumers what they want?

Rob Frasca

President, Affinnova

Affinnova was founded by Noubar Afeyan, a rock star in the biotech field. He was one of the guys who founded Celera Genomics, the first company to map the human genome. The premise for Affinnova is that product evolution is exactly as it is in nature, so why not use some of the technology available from biotech and use it to model products. Just as species evolve, products and marketing evolve as a result of natural selection of consumer preference. The leap happened about five years ago, when Noubar watched IBM's Deep Blue challenge Garry Kasparov, the world's chess champion at the time, to a game. IBM's programmers had consulted with chess experts to give the super computer the knowledge to make the best moves. Deep Blue's collective mind was trying to win. Noubar looked at that and saw the Internet as a way of getting the collective mind together in a cost-effective way. And he looked at evolution. You couldn't do this if didn't have the confluence of three things: high-power computers, cheap research through the Internet - the collective mind - and advances in genetics and genetic technology. They're all related. For the first time, we could pull them all together to facilitate evolution using consumer preference. We devised a system that allows people to evolve things online. In the beginning, we used this to evolve pictures of faces. We'd ask people their preferences to create a virtual model. We can use this evolutionary process to make better products, advertising and direct mail pieces for our clients, including P&G, Kraft, ConAgra, Timberland, and Johnson & Johnson. Unlike, most market research methods, which I classify as measurements, our system literally optimizes millions or hundreds of millions of design possibilities over the Internet in a matter of weeks. We do it with direct consumer input on all features and attributes of the product and our system literally facilitates that evolution. This is a very, very powerful tool for brand development. The applications of this technology are limitless.