Editor’s note: Jeanette Hodgson is global head of qualitative strategy at marketing research firm Kantar Health, London. Steve Hales is head of Firefly U.K., Kantar Millward Brown.

Laughter can lower your blood pressure, reduce your stress levels, increase your flexibility and boost your immune function. It can also trigger the release of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers, and produce an overall sense of well-being.

The pervasive power of laughter goes beyond its physical benefits. Studies have shown laughter is a social emotion that breaks the ice, achieves closeness and forms bonds. It demonstrates agreement and alignment and dampens anxiety, tension, frustration and anger.

Unlike humor, which is culturally dependent, laughter is a nonverbal, universal communicator. Of the six universal emotions, it has been shown to be the most easily recognizable across cultures as an indicator of happiness.

Qualitative marketing researchers want to reveal elusive, subliminal drivers to behavior. Researchers have experimented and adapted a variety of approaches inspired by psychology and behavioral science. Despite some success in this area, approaches available to researchers usually require an element of rationalization by the respondent either in the elicitation or in the post-analysis phase. As a result, we find ourselves asking overly contrived questions, expecting people to respond enthusiastically to very dry stimulus. We shouldn’t be surprised when their answers are not enlightening or fail to provide new understanding.

These limitations prompted us to explore how we could use emotion to elicit emotion. For people to be fully immersed in what they feel, we must create a setting where they feel able to lower their guard so they can more readily exhibit instinctive thoughts and feelings without an engaged, cognitive filter. Qualitative researchers can create this lower-stress, engaging atmosphere through the creative influence of improvisational comedy.

Opening doors with improv 

“During improv, the brain deactivates the area involved in self-censoring, while cranking up the region linked with self-expression.” -- Charles Limb, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Laughter in a safe environment can open the doors to personal disclosure and express instinctive response in a way that may even surprise your respondents. Let’s look at how laughter can assist in health care research.

Despite numerous studies showing the multidimensional value of humor in cancer care or other serious illnesses, some still see it as socially unacceptable. While care needs to be exercised, experience shows that even in the context of illness and marketing research a degree of light relief can play an invaluable role in establishing rapport, reducing stress and building trust. It is also rare to encounter anyone with an illness who does not have an overriding desire to feel normal, accepted and understood – to feel as if they are not alone.

The stimulus of improvisational comedy can create an environment where qualitative researchers can enable people to connect with themselves and others and respond to what they are seeing and hearing on an emotional level. This enables researchers to probe deeper into feelings without the associated trappings of traditional qualitative research.

Creating a safe environment 

One way this safe environment can be achieved is by using improv performers to act out scenes relating to a specific aspect of the subject matter and then examine with the research participants what they connected with in these scenes. Doing this exercise over a period of a couple of hours enables researchers to build rapport between improv performers and participants and explore areas in increasing depth and focus.

The success we see working with improv actors resides in the creation of a safe environment in which people feel free to express their thoughts and emotions, often with highly personal characterizations. The atmosphere the actors create is highly stimulating and emotive, encouraging people to respond in emotional ways. Improv triggers their funny bone; it’s immediately clear what makes them laugh but what we really need to understand is what it is about them and their lives that created the empathy from which this response is generated. To do this, we ask them to tell us stories about their own lives prompted by the improvisation that they have just seen.

Using improv as a qualitative researcher provides a powerful platform that:

  • enables consumers to rapidly engage at a deeply emotional level on any subject matter;
  • leads to personal stories and emotional territories that, in turn, can stimulate brand and communication development; and
  • rapidly delivers holistic results and next steps because actions are built around the real-time use of a multidisciplinary team with all agendas addressed concurrently.

Translating insights into brand strategy

At a recent event, we used improv to look at the intersection of personal privacy and targeted communications and discovered that people are now more worried about a cyberattack than physical assault. By translating improv insights like this, marketing researchers can help drive positive changes in a brand’s digital communication strategies and implementation.

In today’s environment, connecting with target audiences in a meaningful way has become the Holy Grail for many brand marketers. This drives sales and builds long-term brand equity. By discovering what is important to people, marketing researchers can help brands build strategy and communications with the consumer at the heart of the brand proposition.

Laughter has a role in helping us understand people. When used in conjunction with skill, artistry and sensitivity it can be a key facilitator to deep insights. As a tool for marketing research, improv facilitates the connection of people with their innermost thoughts and feelings and provides a safe environment to express them spontaneously and free from judgement, shedding new light on issues and providing additional layers of understanding of our target audience and how they relate to the subject matter. As researchers, we then take those customer insights and translate them into meaningful brand strategies.

REFERENCES

Berk, L. and Tan, S. (2009), “Laughter remains good medicine,” ScienceDaily, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090417084115.htm.

Scott S.K., Lavan N., Chen S. and McGettigan C. (2014), “The social life of laughter,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25439499.