How Deep-Dive Consumer Research Defined an Emerging Market and Helped to Create a Brand

Design Management Review, Summer 2004 by O'Connor, Bill

There it was, displayed in a spread in the Christie's catalogue of distinguished residences and estates: a bunker-like, low-rise, meandering manor, the centerpiece of an expansive and beautiful Pacific oceanfront property. What was most breathtaking about the house, aside from the vista, was its $17 million asking price. It was an architectural-kit house, with some Mediterranean bolted on to some Arts & Crafts, and all of it architecturally duct-taped to a basic California ranch style. The interiors were also a mishmash of misplaced whimsy and disintegrated style.

While its asking price gave this TuscanStickley-Chateau-Little-House-on-the-Prairie leader-of-the-pack status, its visual style of conspicuous affluence and blender architecture was common to many of the other very-high-pricepoint properties Christie's was flogging in its glossy catalogue.

How could anyone, I asked our client, able to afford this-do this? "Taste is a matter of taste," he replied, "and we believe that the market has begun to turn away from these kinds of architectural expressions. People who can afford these homes are now looking for architectural integrity in the design of their homes and furnishings. They want their architects and designers to teach them, to open their minds and their eyes."

So, while taste may be a matter of taste, there is certainly a web of historical conventions, values, and cultural meanings that contribute to an informed sense of style. Residential interior designers and architects live and work in this space. They act as arbiters of taste. The assignment we were about to get was to learn who these arbiters are. How do they manage the process and work with their clients, the people building high-end custom homes? Who were these clients, anyway? What values did they embrace that informed their choices and motivated their decisions? What kinds of advice and collaboration did they seek from the designer?

At the end of 2001, when this assignment was in its formative phase, there had been plenty of architectural criticism written about these look-at-me lairs. Empirical research and anecdotal evidence suggested signs of a renaissance. The very small market of those who could afford to build or remodel such homes did not want to be stigmalized as money-come-lately's, their homes criticized as tasteless monuments to recent affluence.

Our client, a large global marketer of hardware and fixtures, believed that a product whose designs expressed these newly rediscovered and ascendant architectural styles could be served up as a brand rich with information and the opportunity for personal discovery. The client wanted to catch this emerging market at the bottom and ride it, wavelike, to the crest of a successful and enduring business with "first-in" prestige and authority.

Science teaches us that humans are more alike than different, with the primary differentiator being culture. Understanding the nuances of human experience, across a continuum, deeply informs strategy for brands, products, services, and environments.

The brand team at Source/Inc. worked with Michael Eckersley and Andy Schechterman to plan a study that would do more than define the target in marketing terms. At this point, there was no market definable by the classic marketing metrics. The primary audience happened to be select interior designers managing high-end residential projects-a fairly exclusive group, to be sure. But we also needed to find other likely targets-people who were constructing or remodeling high-price-point homes. It was important for the entire team to experience their ruminations, collaborations, and conversations with their interior designers in order to build a brand meaning and a brand story that could be part of those conversations.

Getting these answers required a deep dive of discovery for us all: client team, research team, and creative team alike. (See figures 1 and 2.) Wisdom gleaned from the research surprised and inspired subsequent work to an unforeseen degree. For instance, the target of primary interest actually turned out to be a hybrid, which we characterized in the "relationship continuum" existing between an archetypal interior designer/arbiter (Carole) and an archetypal high-end residential client (Leslie). (See figures 3 and 4.) This relationship is key in terms of who influences the specification of furniture, wall coverings, hardware, and so forth, not to mention the general theme or stylistic direction the project takes. Understanding these dynamics of control, and how they play out to varying degrees from client to client and from designer to designer, yielded a complex, yet strangely simplifying and authentic picture of the customer-a refreshingly nonsuperficial, evidence-based familiarity unavailable before.

From the mass of user data collected and processed, 70 touch points were validated by the team and mapped across various dimensions. Some meaningful patterns emerged from the touch-point data, illustrating key underlying themes that were discovered in the client-designer relationship of Carol and Leslie. One pattern was named Realization; it captured some common aspects of the manifestation of a lifelong dream that a home-building project can represent for financially successful people. Another resonant theme came to be known as Search (Find), and it represents the demanding experience of managing a complicated project from beginning to end, through a search-space of seemingly countless options and decisionssome big and many small.