Lucid People does a lot of creative / comms qual. Some would say it’s our specialism, and we get lots of client feedback telling us how good we are at it, and how clear, strategic and practically useful our recommendations are.
Here are 8 things we’ve learned over the years about how to get creative / comms qual right, and how to get the most from it
1. Start early
We’re great believers in starting as early as possible, exploring creative territories / broad ideas, rather than waiting to ‘test’ almost-finished work. If you wait until later, the risk is that something vital has been missed in the hypotheses and internal thinking, and the creatives have busted a gut only to be turned away at the pass. Not good, from anyone’s perspective.
Exploring earlier directions / territories and broad creative ideas gives clarity that you’re in the best possible ballpark, valuable direction on how to maximise the impact of the ideas – and more confidence and freedom for creatives to then do what they do best, with less messing around in the detail.
2. Recruit carefully
Of course we want to know how people generally will respond to an idea or territory. But not everyone responds equally usefully. We need to ensure, as best as we can, that participants in comms research will be able to do the job required of them.
So we recruit with this in mind. Always ensuring that people are on spec for the target and sample criteria, we screen IN those who can see things from a description, enjoy discussing abstract ideas and are forthcoming about their feelings and screen OUT people who prefer logic to ideas, or find visualising challenging. This makes for comms qual that is much more productive.
3. Mimic reality
Whether researching early ideas or later stage executions – but especially the latter – clients are often tempted to share the idea first, and then the executions.
While this mirrors the internal process and may seem logical, comms is not about logic. It’s about impact, emotion and gut reaction. And we want to get a sense of how people will react at this level in the real world.
Albeit within the bounds of research, we need to mimic reality as much as we can, and we have a range of way to do this, that often subvert internal logic but fit better with how people experience ideas, taking the media plan into account and avoiding unhelpful priming.
4. Treat everything as stimulus
Crucially, whatever stage the work is at and even if it is quite far down the development path, we all know nothing is finished. These are still ideas we’re exploring so – the way we see it – everything in comms qual is stimulus.
We’re not ‘testing’ ads, but adding to our collective understanding of how ideas are likely to land, emotionally as well as rationally and the likely impact on the brand. This means holding responses to that stimulus lightly. It’s also why the quality of analysis matters so much.
5. Help people imagine it
A script can be a complex thing, with multiple layers – not always easy for the uninitiated to ‘get’. We therefore have to work hard to help participants imagine it easily, and as if it’s in a more finished form. Lucid People uses a range of imagination games and other techniques to help prepare people for this.
Another common issue is that scripts are prepared for internal consumption first, and for briefing a director later, so often include jargon and explanations that could prime responses. We therefore frequently suggest simplifying them to remove anything that might get in the way for consumers. I’ll be posting about how best to do this soon – so drop a note in the comments if you’d like me to send you a copy.
6. Keep it broad
As we’re exploring ideas in creative / comms research, it’s vital to keep things broad – especially, for example, when it comes to how something might eventually look or what music might be used.
We have a number of smart ways to do this on the principle that ‘more is more’, especially at early stages.
7. Use non-rational techniques to get to the emotion
We know from neuroscience that human decisions are primarily emotional, and this is especially true in the realm of creative ideas, advertising and other forms of communication. That’s why it’s vital to minimise the engagement of people’s brains and maximise their engagement at a heart and gut level.
Neuroscience (Damasio et al) also shows that we hold our emotions in our bodies and we need to MOVE to access them, so we have perfected techniques that use movement, combined with ‘clean questioning’, to get to people’s immediate emotional responses faster, and more truthfully. This makes for much deeper, more accurate and more useful responses, particularly when it comes to comms ideas.
8. Work with ‘insiders’
Last but not least, it helps if the qual insight team you work with have a genuine understanding of the creative process. From the inside. The Lucid People team have worked in strategy and account management at several creative agencies (BBH, TBWA\, Ogilvy and Euro RSCG) and also held senior marketing roles in which we managed the relationship and the process.
This means we ‘get’ the difference between strategy and idea, and between idea and execution.
Crucially, it means we understand how advertising works in reality, and whether consumer objections are actual issues or minor, ‘fixable’ executional things.
The fact that we know what it’s like to be in the shoes of many around the table means we understand what it’s like to manage the process from both a client AND agency point of view, so are better able to be practical and useful in our feedback.
In short, we ‘get’ comms, and do a better job of helping clients and agencies optimise it.
We’d love to tell you more about this, so if you’re interested, please email me at maddy@lucidpeople.com (or phone me on 07710 946493)
Maddy is Director of Lucid. She has been described as a ‘maestra’ with groups of people and is appreciated for her passion and commitment as well as the clarity of her strategic thinking, insight and expression. Maddy began her career in advertising at Ogilvy and BBH and then worked at the Arts Council, English National Opera, AEA consulting and Stimulating World Research before setting up Lucid.