Keeping it real 

Editor's note: Patricia Sauerbrey Colton is partner at the San Francisco office of research firm rheingold USA.

“My online friends don’t get to see the train wreck I can be in real life.” (Jen, 36, comparing her online and real-life self).

Social media are adding a new layer of complexity to already multifaceted consumers as their self-portrayals inevitably show up in the online media we use to conduct research. Yet our job as researchers is exactly to make sense of consumers’ “train-wrecky” sides. It is especially their contradictory, irrational, spontaneous, raw and honest sides that can lead us to the heart of their longings. Good news: We can account for their newly-forming communication patterns by disrupting these increasingly automatic processes in our own and the consumers’ heads.

Let’s take a step back. We as researchers and consumers have immersed ourselves in the Internet and social media. We slipped into new communication forms that are fundamentally changing how we interact.

We have grown into a performance society. When we are online, we show off, present ourselves and try to gauge reactions of others to our thoughts and productions. Likes, shares and comments have become new currencies of how well we are doing. We have become savvy at filtering the facets of our personality and looks and avidly use the opportunity to repeatedly edit what gets to be a final post. We are becoming specialists in simply portraying an aspirational version of ourselves by creating online personas that serve the interest at hand: getting the job, growing a business, looking good, being a good parent, supporting a cause. This typically goes along with a can-do and all-access mentality – the opportunities are virtually unlimited. At the same time, we easily get to pick and choose what works within our framework and what does not. We simply crop off, shut off or ignore the inconvenient truths of ourselves and others so that we can live in fairly comfortable bubbles that we can re-design on a daily basis.

Just like consumers

In our researcher mentality of trying to be where the consumers are, we eagerly adapted online methodologies that closely mirror social media interactions and elicit similar masking behavior. The convenience, lower cost and the ability to reach so many people at once with less effort fascinates us just like consumers. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of creating information or insight bubbles ourselves, by accepting the validity of their personas or taking respondents’ reactions at face value because these reactions are simply all we get. We are not physically with the consumers and therefore we cannot draw valuable insights from mismatches of facial expressions, tones of voice and body language but rather must go by the edited photos, videos and text that they present online. And we must therefore wonder about what is not being shown, about the absence of what is more difficult, potentially embarrassing or too “train-wrecky” for the respondent to discuss online.

Against this backdrop, we as researchers can assume a crucial role: adapting a more disruptive mentality to help consumers express themselves beyond bubbles and personas.

In our daily work at our firm, we use various online, offline and hybrid methodologies to get to the bottom of the consumers’ minds and have found that not only the methodology (mix) selected but also the way the methodologies are applied have a fundamental impact on the depth of results. In the following, I will focus on online bulletin boards and face-to-face interviews as examples of our discoveries.

Considerable impact

In a project for a large food delivery service, we saw the considerable impact of the determined, seemingly “in control” online selves of consumers. When exploring the consumers’ relationships to their delivery person in a bulletin board, respondents primarily saw this relationship in the light of them being in the position of a master and the “delivery guy” being the servant. They highlighted the rational, practical side, keeping themselves as the customer in a comfortable, shielded position of the director of this relationship (like they typically do in their social media interactions).

Yet the face-to-face in-depth interviews opened the view towards the more embarrassing emotions in relation to the delivery person: respondents felt dependent, needy and also partially uncomfortable admitting that they actually might not always cook (which meant in this case relying on delivered food). The direct interaction with the interviewer seemed to allow for this type of opening up, which turned out to be crucial in helping the company (beyond other objectives) shape its relationships with its customers.

However, in another study, this one for a baking products company set up in a similar way as the food delivery study, the insights gathered online and face-to-face were surprisingly similar. The engaging and connecting topic seemed to have sucked people in and the online bulletin board provided a welcome forum for their enthusiastic exchanges. It even facilitated their wish to share and hear from others using similar products.

Online personas

In a recent research project, circling around social media usage, we wanted to get to the bottom of this and directly discussed respondents’ online personas, the differences to their “real-life being” and their openness online versus face-to-face. We used an online bulletin board and did follow-up real-time Webcam interviews.

Nearly all respondents admitted that their online personalities are quite different from what they are like in real life, a fact that influenced their behavior in the online bulletin board as it made them wonder about veracity of the other participants and their posts. Face-to-face, revealing truths were uncovered. A woman talked about social networking around sex toys; some opened up about over-filtering Instagram photos; another respondent discussed resentments against his online friends and thoughts about fellow bulletin board participants with whom he could have interacted.

The Webcam interview was described as having relieved some pressure of editing, portraying and considering. They had to only consider one listener, the moderator, who was more transparent by being also readable through her facial reactions, tone of voice and body language. The conversation with the “connectable human” interviewer triggered a sense of commitment while the bulletin board made some respondents post what was “good enough.”

The interview setting triggered a sense of being involved in a process of shaping and developing something together, guided by the very specific and more natural communication flow with a less “robotic,” actual person. In contrast, the bulletin board thought processes were constantly interrupted by other daily tasks as moderator and participants asked and answered at their own convenience.

Unique advantages

Just as interview results are shaped by the skills of the moderator, the results of online research are determined by how well it is conducted, in the context of the image-shaping online mind-sets of consumers. In fact, online research has unique advantages when embedded wisely into the research process:

A collaborative, involving process. Online research, e.g., with bulletin boards or longer-term communities, provides a great opportunity to create a collaborative, involving process for all stakeholders. While face-to-face re-search is limited to the time at hand and the point of time when it happens, online research allows for a more flexible, adjustable process, building on what is understood in collaboration with the complete research team including clients. This connects to the next advantage.

Tapping into consumers’ everyday lives at their convenience. Consumers can get caught in the moment or close to the moment of actual product usage (in their home), they can visually document their behavior through videos and photos and talk about the research topic at their convenience, hopefully when on their minds, adding an ethnographic component.

Respondents can be given tasks that they can embed into their everyday lives and report on their behavior and thoughts through the online board. They do not only have to imagine how they would act but are able to re-port on a real experience that is ideally very similar to what they would do and feel like beyond the research situation. This can be testing a new product, discussing a topic with a friend, creating a collage, trying out a store, documenting ad exposure, etc.

A mix of social and personal engagement. The social aspects of a topic can be discussed among all participants while respondents can deepen their online conversation with only the moderator privately. Participants can even get selected for a face-to-face follow-up.

Hypothesis framework. Online research can provide a great springboard to collect consumer thoughts and opinions around a topic to be deepened in face-to-face sessions. This is particularly helpful when stepping into a new, unknown territory, market or psychological impact field to serve as a basis to frame hypotheses.

Become disruptors

However, to fully take advantage of these points means to commit to tackling the growing challenges that come with online research. The following describes facilitating techniques to inspire researchers to become disruptors of our own and the consumers’ changing online mind-sets.

Being aware and disrupting consciously. Like consumers, we researchers ourselves are strongly impacted by the shifts in online and offline communication. As a first step, being aware of and acknowledging these changes allows us to consciously disrupt processes of persona- and information bubble-creation. The number of online natives is constantly increasing, challenging us to dig behind even more routine behavior to uncover less-manufactured online personas. At the same time, our awareness and knowledge of these developments can serve to help us develop a unique expertise.

Keeping it real. A key disruptive and overarching principle to get the most “real” responses is to connect consumers to their actual lives as closely as possible. A great example is to use online research for documentation: reporting on everyday life examples of usages, interactions, observations, tasks, etc. As discussed, this lets the researcher tap into the respondents’ everyday lives and at the same time provides a workaround for rationalized answers and opinions that are easily tinted by a self-portrayal. Reporting on what actually happened and thought processes going along with that lifts statements into the behavioral, interactive world, getting closer to actions outside of the research project.

In this context, we researchers need to be cautious of a trap of convenience: limiting the research to opinions and statements about potential views and behaviors that we can only take at face value and are therefore easier to analyze. Connecting to the actual behavioral world of respondents requires us to analyze what happened or was created, etc., as well as how it was talked about and what this interplay psychologically means in the context of all respondents. Real-time follow-up interviews can help untangle this often contradictory interplay.

Forming a relationship. With online research getting to consumers through the same overcrowded channel as all things Internet, the moderator can assume a key, differentiating role: caring and conveying interest about respondents and their engagement. As soon as respondents recognize the authentic efforts of the moderator to form a real relationship, they usually feel safer to open up. Videos of the moderator introducing herself, explaining tasks, summarizing feedback, sharing her own experiences, etc., mimic an atmosphere closer to a face-to-face interaction. It shows some vulnerability and humanizes what could potentially be a somewhat robotic experience. Such videos also provide great opportunities to showcase spontaneity, flaws or in-the-moment reactions, relieving respondents from the drive to over-edit.

Creating something together on a collaborative journey. Participants are likely to feel more committed if they get a sense of being an important element to an overall result. Standardized and pre-formulated questionnaires bear the risk that the individual feels like only one of many, while research flexibility to adjust on-the-fly allows a deepening of the conversation flow with certain respondents and shows that the process is an organic one. The rules of engagement, the research process and expectations are ideally explained during recruiting so that the moderator finds open doors when inviting the respondents to their joint journey, highlighting how everyone’s input is important to direct it.

Leaving room for reservations and contradictions. Providing room for private conversations between moderator and respondent can help them adjust their posts to the various layers of the research and feel in a safe place throughout the process. Contradictions are typically a great sign of consumers showing various facets of them-selves. They can serve as anchor points to deepen a conversation and figure out the underlying principles together.

Acknowledgement of online needs. Participants have, in effect, been hired to fulfill a task. They are likely initially driven by taking on this “job” rather than an intrinsic interest in the content (like they are in social media). However, the researcher can trigger the interest for the topic as it connects to the participants’ lives. Taking this dive together can be exciting and hearing from others along the way is an added benefit. The moderator can serve as a guide to connect the dots and open the view towards interesting joint discoveries, indirectly “liking” the group’s and individuals’ creations.

Contradictory and hidden drivers

Keeping it real with consumers requires researchers to be real with ourselves and with them. The facilitation techniques mentioned above can help uncover their “train-wrecky,” often contradictory and hidden drivers and also serve as a basis to inspire researchers to experiment with what is most “real” or authentic for them. These are exciting times in which to be attempting to disrupt newly-forming patterns and if we can succeed at peering behind consumers’ masks, we will be uniquely positioned as cultural experts who can still find depth in a realm that often teems with superficiality.