Frankly, Scarlett, I Don't Give a Damn...

By Dave Waddell

Should my friend Scarlett ever catalogue the many reasons she sought a divorce from Rhett (I have changed the names to protect the innocent), his indifference to the things she appeared to find fascinating would be up there with his infidelity and drinking. Scarlett - who cared about home décor - once gathered samples of every shade of paint in the neighbourhood of burgundy, and painted a square of each of them on her living room wall. She presented her handiwork to her husband and asked him to pick his favourite. It took him all of 5 seconds to announce that they all looked the same and that Scarlett should just whichever one she damn well liked.

 

He thought he was helping, but it turned out he wasn’t. Scarlett thought the difference between Smoky Jamon and Belgian Chutney was worthy of debate. Rhett thought a choice between red and grey may merit a discussion, but that anything beyond that was pointless.

 

Rhett did care about brogues and racing bike fitments. Scarlett would have preferred him to wear Cuban heels in order that he came up to something like her height, and ended up wishing he’d bought brakes that didn’t work.

 

We all care about some things more than others. Some of us will only drink one brand of bottled water. Others think tap water is just as good. Some of us do an annual search for the best value car insurance. Others regard that as a colossal waste of time.

 

But just as some people are more discriminatory that others, there are products that we are more likely, collectively, to care about. I’d argue that only a few of us would walk out of a store selling Ecuadorian bananas and seek out a store selling bananas from Colombia. But more of us might reject all but our preferred brand of mascara or whisky.

 

Mixed news if you are launching a new brand, and a very good reason for doing a proper job of finding out about the market you are entering.

 

30 years ago, one of the big cereal manufacturers launched a product in direct competition with their big rival’s version. The older product had that section of the cereal market to itself, the product was rubbish. It tasted bland and it went from soggy to soup within 30 seconds of coming into contact with milk. If I named the cereal, you’d know exactly what I mean. Logic said that it had absolutely no defence against a superior product. And the new product was superior. It looked good, it tasted great and it still looked like a cereal long after the original was slush. They spooned a ton of the stuff down the necks of focus groups and they all agreed. Nothing could go wrong.

 

It launched. The marketing was on point. It got listed. It failed.

 

It succeeded on every metric except one. No one cared enough to change brand. The sector of market it was in just wasn’t one that people thought about that much. Shoppers were happy not to change.

 

The opposite of this would be something like Fever Tree. Again, an excellent product, but this time in a market that was attracting a new audience (more for the gin than the tonic!) that were open to new players.

 

We have constructed an interest v apathy table showing what people spend most time on sourcing. It is not exhaustive; we asked about 30 items (we didn’t want our panel to lose interest, ironically), but we’ll keep adding to it.

 

Bear in mind the positions can mean 2 different things. Someone who spend hours searching for car insurance is more likely to consider a new provider. Some who will only feed Suppurs Hunter’s Chicken and Duck by Lily’s Kitchen to Tiddles may not be prepared to let their cat taste your own offering.

 

So, starting with the items we spend most time on…

 

1	Car insurance
2	Pet food
3	Baby food
4	Coffee
5	Home insurance
6	Sanitary protection
7	Foundation
8	Tea
9	Beer / cider / lager
10	Electricity & Gas
11	Spirit of choice (gin, whisky, vodka etc)
12	Bread
13	Butter / margarine
14	Chocolate bars
15	Wine
16	Toothpaste
17	Home internet
18	Car breakdown service
19	Shampoo
20	Biscuits
21	Mobile network
22	Mortgage
23	Tinned fish
24	Shower gel
25	Lipstick
26	Credit card
27	Gym membership
28	Bank account
29	Sugar
30	Salt

 

Reassuring to see we are slightly more choosy about pet food than we are about baby food, and yes, we made sure we only asked our panel about the items they actually bought or used.

Market Research