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Lesson 3: Research Process
Test Your Understanding
Here is an opportunity to apply the material from this lesson. Below is a scenario in which a strategic communication professional used research to solve a problem. See if you can identify how she used each of the eight steps in the scientific process. Below the scenario you will find a list of the eight steps. Fill in the blank to summarize how it was used in the scenario.
Scenario
Sally Clark works for an advertising agency that represents a large ice cream company based in the US. Recently, the company ran an advertising campaign promoting a new chocolate covered ice cream bar that comes in four fluorescent colors—pink, blue, orange, and green. The bars are made with low fat milk, and they have more vitamins and fewer calories than the competitors' bars.
The campaign was conducted entirely on social media including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. The target for the campaign was 25–44 year old moms who would make buying decisions about desserts for their kids. After the campaign began, web analytics showed that the demographic that most commonly viewed and shared content from the campaign was 16–24 year old females. While this was interesting, it didn't tell Sally why others weren't clicking on the advertisements or videos, or why people weren't reading or viewing other information on the product. To begin to explore these questions she reviewed reports from prior campaigns that the company conducted, and she revisited the research that had been conducted on 25–44 women before the campaign was launched. As she read through the materials, she found that health was a key concern of this demographic, and she found that social media use by this group was rapidly increasing. This led to two research questions. First, Sally wondered what kind of material moms in this age range were most likely to share in social media. And, second, Sally wondered what role health played in their engagement with promotional materials for the ice cream product.
To better understand why the campaign was not reaching the target audience, Sally conducted a study to determine what kind of content moms share online and how they perceived the ice cream social media content. She decided to hold three focus groups with moms in the target age range. She recruited the focus group participants through a newspaper advertisement and paid each participant $50 for her time. During the focus groups, participants were asked to talk about the kinds of social media advertisements and videos that they clicked on and shared with others. Laptops were made available for anyone wanting to log in and show examples of her favorite content from companies.
Next, the focus group moderator showed the group examples from the ice cream campaign. The participants shared their thoughts about the product and about the messages in the ads, videos, and pictures.
After the focus groups were complete, Sally had the dialogue transcribed, and she analyzed it for key themes and patterns. She found that the mothers valued content that they considered to be funny or useful. In specific, they were interested in content on health, budgeting, and relationships. They considered content to be more "share-able" if it was humorous as well.
Most moms in the focus groups had seen the content before, but they expressed a concern about the dye that might be used in the products to give it the fluorescent color. When the moderator pointed out that the video messages included information about the all natural content of the dye, some participants said that they had not watched the video, and so they did not know. They did point out, however, that the stationary ads did not mention "natural content." In addition, others said that they were not convinced that "all natural" meant healthy, so they were not interested in the product. Even though some of the content was funny, the moms still did not think that they would share the content with others because of their uncertainty of the product.
Sally interpreted the data to mean that the humor in the ice cream campaign content was not effective in attracting the moms because of the concern that the product raised about health. Sally recommended that the company clearly communicate about the content of the dye and further promote the relative healthful content of the product compared to competitors' products. The campaign will only be effective, Sally concluded, if moms feel comfortable about the ingredients of the product.
Sally wrote up the report and presented it to her boss, the vice president of marketing, and to the account representatives for the client.
In the end, the client agreed to modify the messaging in the advertising to reflect a focus on the healthful aspects of the product and to clearly disclose the ingredients of the ice cream bars.
Eight Steps in the Scientific Method
Below each of the eight steps, summarize how it was used in the scenario above.
- Identify the problem
- Define the problem: review existing research and information
- Develop hypotheses and research questions
- Determine an appropriate methodology/research design
- Collect relevant data
- Analyze and interpret the results
- Present the results in an appropriate form
- Replicate the study