Observational Methods: Part 1
Slide 1
Although marketing researchers can acquire very useful information—the kinds of information
that help managers make better decisions—by querying consumers either directly through
conventional surveys or indirectly through projective research, the act of asking consumers to
report what they’re thinking, or to report how they behaved previously or how they might behave
in the future, can distort those reports relative to consumers’ true attitudes and either previous
or possible future behavior. As an alternative, marketing researchers can use observational
methods. The goal of this lecture is to discuss those observational methods and how they might
be used to inform marketing managers’ decisions.
Slide 2
The issue broached by this cartoon is that people who know they are being observed will act
differently than they would if they thought they weren’t being observed. Although this is a
ludicrous example of primitive people trying to pretend that they are far more primitive than they
are in fact, the underlying issue is disguised versus undisguised observation. From an ethical
standpoint, it’s preferable to inform people that they are being observed. That way, they can be
willing participants in the study. Alternatively, informing people that they are being observed will
influence the behaviors they will exhibit.
Slide 3
Observation is not as straightforward as consumer self reports, as this quote from Sherlock
Holmes hint: “You see, but you don’t observe.” Although we can see many things in people’s
behaviors, we often don’t recognize what’s important and what’s trivial. Holmes was especially
good (as are the lead characters in the detective television series Psych and Monk) at
recognizing that the smallest detail may speak volumes in revealing a secret. There’s true art in
understanding what should be observed.
Slide 4
What types of things do marketing researchers observe about consumers? Researchers can
observe consumers’ physical actions. For example, researchers can observe how consumers in
a department or grocery store move up and down the aisles, how long they examine shelves
and displays, how many items they examine before making a selection, and whether or not they
read packaging labels. Researchers can observe consumers’ verbal behaviors; for example,
they could observe interactions between department store sales clerks and customers at check
out. Researchers can observe expressive behaviors; non-verbal acts like hand waving and head
scratching. Researchers can observe spatial relationships and locations; for example, the effect
of store atmospherics (like lighting, spacing of merchandise displays) on customers’ behaviors.
Researchers can observe changes over time (temporal patterns), such as how behaviors shifted
within a sales encounter or across multiple sales encounters. Finally, researchers can observe
people’s responses to either verbal recordings or pictorial records of things.
Slide 5
Here are more examples of what can be observed. For example, physical action means
observing shoppers’ movements within a store. When I visit a grocery store, I tend to start in a
certain aisle and work my way through the store, always essentially in the same path. I usually
start with produce and finish with frozen products, like ice cream. There’s a repeatable way in
Page | 1
which I travel through a Sam’s Club store. Examining the movement of consumers through a
store might help a store manager to organize the placement of products within the store.
Researchers can observe verbal behaviors, such as statements made by airline travelers
waiting in line. Queuing behavior—what people do while waiting to be served—provides useful
information to marketers. Expressive behavior, facial expression, tone of voice, or any sort of
body language, show that people’s words suggest one thing but their non-verbal behaviors
suggest an entirely different thing.
Slide 6
In terms of spatial relations and locations, researchers might observe how close visitors at art
museums stand to the paintings. Similarly, they might observe how close salespeople stand to
customers as they complete a transaction or discuss the possibility of a purchase. In western
cultures, people like their space; as a result, people conducting business tend to stay several
feet from one another. In other cultures, people crowd very closely together. In Europe, for
example, restaurant tables are placed closer to one another than in the U.S. (except possible in
New York City) because people feel more comfortable being in what we’d call ‘each other’s
space’. For temporal patterns, researchers might observe how long fast-food customers wait for
food from the time they enter the restaurant. (It’s called fast food and customers are buying that
convenience.) For physical objects, researchers might observe the brand names of items stored
in consumers’ pantries. Such pantry audits suggest what people have in stock and therefore
use. Finally, for verbal or pictorial records, consider the bar codes on product packages and the
scanner data that local grocery stores or Sam’s Club collect. Matching a brand to a person and
the degree to which a person routinely buys a brand can be observed.
Slide 7
What are the basic categories of observers in marketing? In many cases, the observer is a
human being. Alternatively, the observer can be a mechanical device, such as a scanner or
video recorder. Observers may be visible—in the sense that the person being observed knows
he or she is being observed—or hidden. Hidden observation has ethical implications, which I’ll
discuss in the lecture on marketing research ethics. Observation can be direct, in the sense that
people are observed in their natural environment behaving naturally, or contrived, in the sense
that researchers create an artificial environment that encourages or discourages people to
behave in a certain way.
Slide 8
Here’s a silly example of how a human observer might disguise himself to be unobtrusive in a
study of ice cream sales. I don’t recommend dressing as an ice cream sundae to unobtrusively
observe people’s ice cream consumption at Baskin Robbins.
Slide 9
In a contrived observation, researchers create an artificial environment. That environment is
created for one purpose only: to test a hypothesis. For example, a contrived observation would
entail an experiment in which people are first shown several ads for soft drinks and then given
an opportunity to select a soft drink for consumption. If a large number of people selected one
soft drink more frequently than the others, it could be assumed that selection was related to a
preference inspired by the different ads.
Page | 2
Slide 10
Here’s an example of a somewhat different contrived observation; more like a secret shopper. In
this case, a person pretends to be a bank customer, enters that bank, tries to interact with the
employees of that bank in some meaningful fashion, and then reports on that interaction. This
slide show the report this faux customer—a human observer—made of that experience.
Slide 11
It’s helpful for human observers if researchers provide them with a structured report form; that
way, the human observer knows what to concentrate on observing. Clearly, researchers want
observers to look for behaviors that are relevant to the research problem.
Slide 12 (No Audio)
Slide 13
One type of observation that has no ethical implications, because it doesn’t require the
observation of people and their behaviors, is the observation of physical objects. In this case,
what’s observed is how those objects change over time. What’s observed is physical trace
evidence. For example, if we wanted to understand how people use books, we might look at the
wear and tear on a book. This is a type of unobtrusive measures because we’re not affecting
the thing we are trying to observe. For example, a museum director might want to identify the
most and least popular displays. If one room is not especially popular, then the exhibit housed in
that room can be removed and replaced with something that might be more popular. After all,
most museum directors are responsive to patrons’ preferences. One way to assess which
exhibits are more or less popular is to administer exit interviews to museum patrons; either
person-to-person interviews or self-administered questionnaires to be completed before leaving
the museum or returned later via snail mail. Such interviews or questionnaires would be very
obtrusive. Handing someone a questionnaire upon exiting the museum is unlikely to result in a
carefully considered and completed interview. Instead, most people are likely to trash such
questionnaires. The research problem is to identify the most or least popular exhibits. Given this
particular problem, it’s unnecessary to bother museum patrons for that information, and not
bothering patrons would be a big plus. How could the most and least popular exhibits be
inferred without bothering people? It’s simple. People, like slugs, leave behind a trail of dirt;
fingerprint smudges on glass, scuff marks and candy wrappers on floors. All that’s needed, at
the end of the day, is to determine which rooms are cleaner and which rooms are dirtier. The
rooms with more fingerprints and candy wrappers house the more popular exhibits and the
cleaner rooms house the less popular exhibits. Such evidence provides a more direct and less
obtrusive way to acquire the information the museum director needs to refine the mix of the
exhibits.
Garbology studies provide another type of unobtrusive measure. Suppose we’re interested in
people’s consumption behaviors relative to fast foods or alcohol. We could ask them in a
survey, but their answers may be colored by social desirability biases. If we ask people what
they drink and they believe that they drink to excess, then they may not fully report how much
they consume. If we’re interested in the consumption of convenience foods by lower-income
households, and respondents recognize that such foods are both more expensive and less
nutritious, then they may be less willing to fully disclose their consumption. As opposed to
asking them directly and triggering social desirability biases, we could instead sift through their
garbage because anything left on someone’s curb is public domain. If we want to infer lowerincome households’ convenience food consumption or households’ alcohol consumption, then
Page | 3
we could comb through those households’ trash systematically and count either the empty
packages or the empty alcohol bottles.
Slide 14
Although the aesthetics of this slide leaves something to be desired, it does summarize another
unobtrusive study. Let’s assume that marketers are interested in understanding more about the
way innovations diffuse through populations. Diffusion can be motivated by the promotional
efforts of product producers and/or consumer word-of-mouth. Which of those influences is more
important? In a study conducted many years ago (the 1950s), a researcher examined the
diffusion of window air conditioning units to assess whether or not neighbors influenced their
neighbors to purchase or not purchase a unit for their respective homes. Specifically, that
researcher took aerial photographs of Philadelphia neighborhoods and look at the pattern of
households that owned and didn’t own such units. As the pattern of X’s on the slide suggests,
where an X indicates a house with a window air conditioner and a blank indicates a household
without such units, the pattern isn’t random. A house with a window air conditioner is more likely
adjacent to houses with window air conditions. This pattern suggests that people who see their
neighbors have installed a window air conditioner are likely to buy and install one as well, which
implies that other people were the dominant influence in this purchase decision. It could just be
imitative, but as this is a Philadelphia neighborhood, it’s not unreasonable to assume that
people would ask their neighbors about a window air conditioner they bought. Therefore, based
on the observation that the pattern of households with and without units was not random, the
researcher inferred that word-of-mouth was a relatively more important component of the
diffusion process than promotional efforts. Had that researcher asked people directly whether or
not they were more influenced by what their neighbor said or what they might have seen in a
television or newspaper ad, it’s unlikely the responses would have truly reflected the underlying
mechanism that inspired or failed to inspire the purchase of a window air conditioning unit.
Page | 4