A Simple Market Research Interview

The Purpose
The Elements
Construct Elicitation
Analysing the Constructs
The Ideal Element
What We Learnt

The Purpose

This is an example of a simple Enquire Within session whose purpose is to discover the interviewee’s specifications for an ideal conference venue. The interviewee, Vivian, is responsible for a variety of training courses, seminars, etc., and although she has been doing this for more than two years she says that she still finds herself in situations where she hasn’t asked all the right questions – for example, recently she was running a course which included people taking an aptitude test when the seminar next door decided to show a noisy video. So she has a stake in the interview because she hopes it will make her more aware of the features she needs to specify.

The interviewer, Jan, is a market researcher who has been commissioned by a chain of hotels to interview people like Vivian to discover what is important to them. So you have the best possible starting point, in that both parties want to learn something from the Enquire Within session.

This session is a good illustration of how to make creative use of Enquire Within’s range of facilities – how the program does not tie you into doing things in a particular order, and how you can be selective in the facilities you use. As you will see, the interview makes hardly any use of the Laddering Up facilities, because it doesn’t need to. Nor is there much need for Differentiation. Instead, you will see how the process can be used to classify the constructs in a number of different ways important to both parties, how you can generate the ‘ideal’ element, and so on.

The Elements

Unsurprisingly, the elements for this session are Conference Venues I Have Used. Jan asks Vivian to name the three best, the three worst, and three in-between. And the qualifiers are easy to determine: they are ‘... in terms of the physical facilities,’ ‘... in terms of the service,’ and ‘in terms of anything else important to you. So the Session Setup dialog box looks like this (the names have been modified, for obvious reasons):

Construct Elicitation

We can be fairly sure that this session will generate a great many constructs, each construct representing a criterion by which Vivian judges conference venues. We can also be fairly sure that the early stages of the session will go quickly, as Vivian does a ‘mind-dump’ of the constructs which come easily to her; it’s difficult to predict what will happen after that. That’s fine – we need lots of constructs because there will be many important dimensions. This session is a very good demonstration of the effectiveness of Enquire Within’s dendritic analysis.

The first construct elicitation dialog box (randomly generated by Enquire Within) looks like this:

Vivian responded: Oh this one’s easy. Quality of the bedrooms.

Jan: OK. What shall we write in the box?

Vivian: Can’t use laptops, not enough lighting, cramped working-space ....

Jan: Hold it a moment – it’s worth writing each of these separately ....

What’s happening here is that Vivian has started to give the first pole of a great many constructs, probably all ‘laddered down’ from one major construct about the quality of the bedrooms. Jan’s put her on hold for a moment while she asks for, and enters, each construct separately. So she asks Vivian how she would express the overall construct about the quality of the bedrooms, and which two are the same and which is different, and gets, unsurprisingly:

Vivian added the qualification for business purposes because she said that Discovery was fine as a family motel. Then Vivian says:

OK, now can we write in all the other things you said, and any more which occur – you already mentioned laptops, lighting, and working space ....

This produces a flood of constructs, thus:

after which Vivian says Well, that just about knocks it off for laptops, unless I think of anything else ... what did I say next?

Jan: You said Lighting. This process, by the way - unpicking each of these distinctions into its component parts - is called Laddering Down in the jargon. The idea is to get observable specifications of what you mean by a major distinction, such as the one about laptops, and so would you like to unpick Lighting now, while it’s fresh?

What Jan’s doing here is explaining the process – it’s always a good idea to let the works show when you’re doing an Enquire Within interview – and giving Vivian the choice of where to go next. Let’s skip the rest of the laddering about quality of bedrooms, and move on to the next major construct, which happens when Jan asks if they’ve had enough about bedrooms for now, would Vivian like to try another triad?

Jan: Do you want to see what the program gives you, or would you like to pick your own group of three?

Vivian: Can I pick my own? Great. How do we do that?

Jan: Here’s the dialog box - just scroll down and pick the three you want:

and they go into the Construct Elicitation dialog box. Vivian choose the two similar elements and the contrast, saying This time I want to look at conference room facilities. So her dialog box looks like this:

 

Vivian: Now I get to ladder down on this one, don’t I?

Jan: Yep.

Vivian: Thinking ahead a bit, how are we going to use all this information?

Analysing the Constructs

Jan: Well, one thing we can do is to rate the constructs in terms of priority – high, medium, and low, and we could just work with the high priority ones. What we’ll be doing is turning each of these constructs into a five-point scale, and you can rate every element – that’s the jargon for the objects we’ve been comparing - and that gives us a matrix which we can analyse statistically if it will help. We could create a new element at that stage called MY IDEAL CONFERENCE CENTRE, so that you’ve got a specification. Or ...

Vivian (interrupting) What I would like to do is to classify these constructs – I’m thinking ahead to a point where I could have one list of features which I could find out by writing to them, another list of things I could find out by visiting, and then there’s a list of things which are important but they wouldn’t own up to, like how many false fire alarms they have, or how many cases of food poisoning ... how could I find out about things like that?

At this point Jan is secretly rejoicing, because Vivian’s practically running the session for herself (in fact, she could probably leave the session with Vivian to work on in her spare time and come back for the next stage later). Jan also had in mind at the start of the session the ‘How am I going to find out about ....?’ question, so Vivian’s anticipated her. She has an idea herself, but she’d much rather wait and see whether Vivian produces it. So she keeps silence while Vivian reflects ....

Vivian: The information I can get in writing is going to be mostly about the physical stuff, isn’t it - like bedroom facilities, size and layout of conference rooms .... if they pass that test, then I can go and visit without declaring myself .... Ah, got it – I look at the welcome board in the lobby, find out who else is having conferences there, and talk to them. Good place to start, anyway.

Jan: Sounds good to me. Shall we unpick the construct about conference facilities? You contrasted The Terrace and Queen Anne with The Summit.

and so on. Vivian also introduced four new elements because they represented exceptional examples, which she wanted to include. We’ll not list any more of Vivian’s constructs (there were 135 in total) but there were some interesting comments as she went on, such as:

There’s a big difference between problems you can get corrected quickly, and those you have to live with – they won’t stop the disco, for example, or tell the folk in the next room to turn the volume down.

If you’re running a sensitive course, like an assessment programme, the participants tend to judge you – if you can’t arrange coffee on time, are you fit to be judging them? Jan made notes of these comments on Enquire Within’s Scratch Pad, and made a decision not to formally go through the Laddering Up process because with these comments Vivian was effectively laddering up herself. (Reminder: in Laddering Up you either ask the interviewee which is the preferred pole and why, or you ask why that is an important distinction to make. Almost all Vivian’s constructs were evaluative, so asking the first question would have looked foolish; and Jan took the view that Vivian’s passing comments were, in effect, answering the second herself. But Jan could always come back – Enquire Within gives you several bites at the cherry – and if she had wanted to, the most economical way would have been to ask Vivian to identify the highest priority constructs, and then ask why).

After she had generated her 135 constructs, and said that she couldn’t think of any more for the moment, Vivian rated all the elements on all the constructs. There is effectively no limit to the number of elements and constructs which Enquire Within can handle. This is what the analysis looked like part-way through:

Note how the constructs form clusters – we saw how these clusters were derived, as Vivian laddered down from each of her major constructs. This is exactly what the market researcher wants – that is, what Vivian means in practice by a construct like good service - bad service, or adaptable - not adaptable, or suitable bedrooms - unsuitable bedrooms. The more detail, the better, for both of them.

The Ideal Element

In some instances, you might use the Differentiation process to see whether any constructs could be combined because they are similar, but Jan doesn’t do this because she wants as much detail as possible. What she does do, however, is the following:

1. She creates a new element – THE IDEAL CONFERENCE VENUE – and gets Vivian to rate it. (Ref Using Ideal Elements). The process is simple, using this dialog box:

and the new element can be rated immediately, so they can read the characteristics of the ideal venue immediately.

2. Jan asks Vivian to assign each construct a priority - high, medium, or low – and produces a new Grid analysis which uses just the high priority constructs.

3. Guided by one of Vivian’s earlier comments, Jan offers a new construct, can discover by letter - can’t discover by letter. Looking at the constructs closely correlated with either pole, they generate a record of all the features which Jan could discover with an appropriately-written letter.

4. Again guided by one of Vivian’s earlier comments, Jan offers a new construct, can get corrected quickly - can’t get corrected quickly. Again, looking at the constructs which are closely correlated with this one gives Jan in particular (because she’s a market researcher) some very useful information, such as the fact that most of the closely correlated constructs are those which Vivian classified as high priority.

5. Vivian asks if they can do one using the construct I can find out about personally - I can only find out about by taking up references.

6. Oddly enough - or maybe not - Vivian’s constructs did not mention value for money. Jan was waiting for it to emerge, but as it hasn’t Jan feels OK about No, I didn’t mention it ... I guess because all the other costs, like managers’ time, tend to be more important ... and the market’s pretty competitive - but let’s do it and see what happens asking. Vivian’s response was. So Jan gets a list of the constructs closely associated with value for money.

What We Learnt

At that point, they decided to stop. Jan left a copy of the session with Vivian, who said that she might think of some more things over the next couple of days. Jan’s comments on the usefulness of the session:

I didn’t get many surprises in the first ‘dump’ of constructs, but then as we started to probe for more I did learn some new things which were important, at least for Vivian - for example, the importance of good lighting, because I thought you could take that for granted, or the fact that sometimes they need absolute quiet to take a test, or they need to tell the hotel whether they’ll be using the room in the evening. Where I really started to learn things was looking at the clusters, and what happened when we put in new clusters – such as the importance of being able to get things corrected quickly, the organiser hasn’t got time to negotiate; or the importance of things that can’t be corrected, like the disco next door. I’ve got a good list of things to work on, and Vivian’s got a systematic process for discovering the information she needs.

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• See how a simple market research example might be started with Enquire Within.
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• The Repertory Grid: Eliciting User Experience Comparisons in the Customer’s Voice By Michael Hawley - Published: December 3, 2007 - an excellent article in the field of user research.