It’s a familiar scenario for marketing teams. You’ve invested time and money on a new advertising campaign. You’ve carefully researched customer opinion and know your message hits the mark in terms of what customers say they want. Yet when you launch, the marketing fails to generate the interest and sales anticipated.
It’s frustrating when your efforts fail to achieve the predicted results. Yet estimates suggest that a very high proportion of marketing is simply ignored by customers. Why? Well, one of the major reasons can be put down to customer resistance.
Inundated with ads on a daily basis, customers are more dismissive of marketing communications than ever before. That’s why it’s so important to clearly understand the barriers between the customer and your brand that your marketing is creating and reduce this resistance.
Overcoming the Constraints of Traditional Market Research
Marketers usually turn to market research to try to understand or predict how well a product, brand or campaign may be received. The problem is the source of so much of this resistance exists in the subconscious mind, putting it beyond the scope of conventional research methods.
You can ask a customer why they are put off by something but you’re unlikely to get the real answer. In fact, the customer may say they like a product or service while subconsciously they are resistant to it. This leads to the familiar situation where customers react positively to a new product yet fail to buy it.
It’s not that customers purposefully give misleading answers during standard research sessions; it’s just that the underlying reasons for purchasing choices are made by the subconscious mind, often outside the awareness or understanding of the customer themselves.
Traditional market research assumes that purchase decisions are a conscious choice based on rational preferences. In other words, we know which choices we like and why, and are happy to disclose it. However, scientific evidence shows that up to 95% of our decisions are made by the subconscious mind. So the message is clear: to gain a real understanding of the motivations and preferences of your potential customers, you need a way to tap into their subconscious.
The good news is, thanks to latest breakthroughs in psychology, we can for the first time see directly into the subconscious minds of customers. We can quantify the resistance levels, understand what is creating them and discover how best to break that resistance down.
The Colour Word Association Technique
The CWA technique (CWA) is an established and patented psychological tool that has been used extensively in the fields of education, sports psychology, HR and personal development. Now it is being applied to measure customer attitudes and perceptions.
By using the CWA technique researchers can side-step the usual pre-defined questionnaires, tick boxes and focus groups which can lead customers’ thinking and rely on customers rationalising their responses. Instead these are replaced by a scientific method that taps into the subconscious, decoding data to gather accurate insights into customers’ real views, emotions and thought-processes – unclouded by conscious reasoning. There’s no need for the respondent to explain, predict or analyse their answers and no danger of the participant being influenced by external factors.
CWA is a simple yet powerful method that allows much deeper analysis of customer preferences than has been readily available to researchers to date. Crucially, it can explain why some of the key findings from conventional customer research just don’t materialise.
How does the Colour Word Association Technique Work?
CWA allows customers to express their subconscious feelings, attitudes and emotions about words, products, brands, images etc. through the use of colour. All this is done online making the process both quick and cost-effective.
Algorithms translate these responses back into usable data to reveal the feelings and motivations that are often hidden, even to the respondents themselves. The analysis can also show how these perceptions are likely to change. This is particularly important because how people feel today drives their future behaviour.
How You Can Use CWA to Overcome Customer Resistance
CWA can be used in almost any industry to examine customer resistance levels and predict how open or resistant customers are likely to be to any proposed campaign.
Using this revolutionary method, we can recommend ways to reduce resistance and identify the content which is most likely to resonate with customers.
If you’d like to find out more about the results from a recent retail banking study or discover how the CWA technique could help you overcome customer resistance, get in touch.
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