Using Research to Map an Uncertain Future

Sep 21

With recession fears looming, brands want to stay a step ahead of declines in consumer spending. As discussed in the last post, forward-looking research is a great tool to inform a strategy refresh for uncertain times. But forward-looking research runs the risk of becoming too speculative, yielding weak or misleading findings.

If you're looking for an off-the-shelf AI-powered Whiz Bang (TM) to fix the pitfalls of forward-looking research, I am sorry to say it doesn't exist. But what I can offer is a set of principles to guide your approach to forward-looking research.

Are you thinking about forward-looking research for your team? Reach out for a POV on your situation.

Here are three principles I use to design insightful, forward-looking market research programs:

1. Get Up to Speed

If your brand has already conducted foundational market research, such as driver analysis, chances are you’re already sitting on helpful findings.

You could revisit a past driver study to see how cost affects choice of brand or category participation. Or perhaps a recent pricing study reveals specific thresholds in price tolerance.

For example, you may already know that premium orange juice customers are willing to tolerate a 20% price increase, but demand tanks beyond that. Or, you may already have evidence of a significant interaction between price and other factors (such as price per carton vs. price per fluid ounce, customer loyalty rewards, etc.).

The point is to take full advantage of what you already know, so new research activities can focus on what matters most.

2. Get Real

Whatever methodology you choose, be it quantitative or qualitative, design the questions so that your audience is responding about a scenario that is actually happening now, or a scenario that has actually happened in the past. Thinking back to our premium orange juice example, here are questions we could ask:

What is Actually Happening Now

· What are premium OJ consumers thinking/feeling/doing today about their grocery budgets?

· What changes are they already making because of recession fears?

· How do they plan their grocery budget week-to-week?

· What decision-making process do shoppers go through when they're standing in the OJ section? When they're reviewing their online cart?

This is a great opportunity for ethnographic interviewing. Join respondents in settings where they are making purchase decisions naturally, whether it's the grocery store aisle, or screen sharing their monthly budget spreadsheet over Zoom.

What Actually Happened in the Past

Past behavior can be a great indicator of future behavior. Using a story-telling approach, ask respondents to describe a time when their income decreased or became uncertain, and have them walk you through how it affected their habits and choices. Many Millennials live with the scars memories of the Great Recession, so this could be a powerful starting point for asking about how they're managing financial anxiety today.

Start exploring the past scenario holistically before moving into brand-specific probes: What were their initial reactions and fears? What changes were easiest and quickest to make? What decisions were more challenging? And having lived through that experience, what might they do differently this time?

One caveat: People aren't great at remembering the nitty-gritty specifics of the past. If you're using story-telling approaches, focus on broad-strokes attitudes and experiences. Don't expect to get percentage-point shifts in their brand spend.

3. Get Specific

You can also learn about potential future behavior by asking respondents to make choices in specific, detailed scenarios. This is where advanced quantitative methods, such as discrete choice exercises/choice-based conjoint, can shine.

For example, you could use a discrete choice exercise to see how brand choice changes in response to factors such as a price increase or decrease in available grocery budget. You could learn that once the available grocery budget decreases by 10%, buying habits change significantly.

To use the discrete choice methodology well, you'll need to take great care to design the exercises in a realistic way. In other words, it's not enough to just test price and brand; you'll also need attributes to represent factors such as shift in grocery budget, share of grocery budget, product format, frequency of purchase, etc.). Further, factors such as household size and composition will come into play in the analysis. Starting with qualitative research before designing the discrete choice exercise will help ensure you're capturing the relevant attributes.

By using detailed and specific scenarios, you’ll set clearer parameters for interpreting quantitative results and applying them appropriately to future projections.

Final Thoughts: Mapping the Uncertain Future

Although no forward-looking research method is perfect, using these approaches is more helpful than relying on broad, self-reported projections. By investigating past behaviors and/or specific scenarios, your team can create a clearer roadmap for the future.

To use an analogy: no map can represent every detail of New York City, but you're better off using a map to navigate the city than no map at all--or even worse, a map invented based on hunches in a Los Angeles boardroom.

Designing high-quality, forward-looking research isn't always easy—but it is always worthwhile. By applying these research principles, you can feel a bit more confident about navigating uncertainty.

Happy researching!