Asia Pacific region - aprc-research

NARRATIVES
In praise of the humble potato
‘I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one’s own
vomit,’ says J. Enoch Powell. Luckily for most of us, writing and reading diaries – both our
own and those of others – is actually quite a pleasant experience. Namita Mediratta reports.
Namita Mediratta
Though many researchers have indeed
capitalised beautifully on the power of
the medium, one can still say it’s underexploited,
and seems to me a bit like the potato
of research; a versatile and humble option
which, given its merits, never quite seems to
get the appreciation it deserves.
Why does a diary work Well, fundamentally,
recording a diary is an intensely personal experience.
It’s almost like talking to one’s alter ego,
and thereby limiting filtration or sanitisation in
its responses to the researcher’s questions.
A diary is also very well contextualised in the
‘now’, painting the moment in the moods and
flavours of the instant, rather than looking at it
through the lens of distant recall or post facto
evaluation. Indeed Picasso had once called his
art a kind of ‘visual diary’, which seems like a
nice simile for the whole process of diarisation
– just in reverse.
The other thing I personally love about the diary
is its space for creativity – both on the part of
the consumer and on the part of the researcher.
Where else would one be able to put in pictures,
collages or free text for one study, and switch to a
much more structured approach in the next It’s
precisely this ability to be tailored that makes the
diary such a versatile instrument.
Here are some examples of what I like, pulled
out from papers, journals and work we’ve done
in the past, both quantitative and qualitative, and
the internet, which demonstrates the power of
this instrument.
A brand equity research study was actually
my first exposure to using a diary, and we used
it as a supplement to ‘regular’ consumer groups
in this study. The ‘spontaneous response’ argument
aside, sometimes it helps to give (at least
some respondents) a moment of introspection
before we bombard them with questions, and the
diary was our version of consumer homework.
We’d given these women an (identical) stack of
magazines, and a blank set of notebooks, along
with some thought-provoking assignments, instructing
them to select pictures which reminded
them of various brands within the category, their
relationships with these brands, how using these
brands made them feel and so on. In sum, much
of the regular stuff one would want to explore
in an equity brand study. What stood out for us
in this study was how enthusiastically (and creatively)
consumers expressed themselves, and
the richness of the responses. It was almost as
if the diary, coloured pens and magazines set the
respondents free to go back and explore their
inner worlds with an almost childlike pleasure.
We got passionate (or tepid) love letters to the
brand, collages that clearly demonstrated how
two brands, both premium, could speak in different
tones, moods and language (think Polo Club
pictures vs. the F1) and much more. Really rich,
textured output, and from a client perspective,
easy to hold up to the guys who develop ads to
say ‘See, this is what we mean!’
Since then we’ve used diaries extensively in
qualitative research to explore communication,
brand cues, moods, feelings and associations,
and they have never disappointed. Just when
we thought we’d done what we could with the
diary, we were faced with an interesting business
problem; how to evaluate consumer reactions
for a new category we wanted to enter.
Any researcher faced with this question knows
there’s really no point in asking consumers
what they think about something they’ve never
seen or used. At the same time, we did want
to get a more ‘real’ response, based on what
consumers were likely to go through when they
actually used the product.
So, the task was to get something that told
us what they felt ‘in the now’ rather than on the
spur of the moment (freshly exposed), or days
later in a reconvened group (when they may
not remember they’d had a hard time opening
the pack, for example). Here, a semi-structured
usage diary helped quite a bit. When people
told us they put on something and ‘massaged
it onto the scalp’ for example, we could easily
link it back to their subsequent dissatisfaction
with the product (that’s not how it was meant to
be used!). Similarly, when a 25-year-old wrote
about a little test she did to evaluate whether
the product worked, we could translate those
cues into communications almost immediately.
And when we did, guess what, the communication
worked really well!
From a quantitative perspective, usage diaries
have been used in social research forever. Typical
uses have included monitoring how people manage
time or money and monitoring media consumption,
all before the advanced measurement
options became available today. The ‘time-budget’
schedule, pioneered by Sorokin in the 1930s,
(Sorokin & Berger 1938) involved respondents
keeping a detailed log of how they allocated their
time during the day. Since then, diaries have been
used in transport planning studies, expenditure
monitoring studies and to set weights for the retail
price index in the UK.
Our exposure to quantitatively using diaries
came with the Unilever Social Mission on Oral
Care, where we were faced with the daunting task
of evaluating behaviour (and behaviour change) on
a ‘real’ and not a claimed basis. To make matters
worse, our target respondent was the bottom of
the pyramid consumer, with possibly low literacy.
High technology solutions did exist, but finally
22 Research News March 2011