Earlier this year, Tropicana – the leading juice brand in the U.S. – undertook a rebranding of its ubiquitous packaging.  Gone was the graphic of an orange with a straw in it, a clear symbol that the juice inside the carton was fresh, and in was a more abstract graphic of a glass of OJ.  No doubt, Tropicana took all of the traditional steps for testing the new packaging and rolled it out across the nation.  But consumers who saw the new packaging in stores reacted strongly: they didn’t like it.  And they weren’t shy about contacting the company or posting comments about it on the Internet.

Tropicana quickly relented and reverted to the previous packaging.  A senior executive said, “What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal, small group of consumers have.  That didn’t come out in the research.”  Tropicana listened to what its customers were saying and shifted course.

This is but one example of how companies are increasingly learning more about their customers by tuning into unprompted consumer expression, or “listening.”  In an age where delivering what your customers want is more important than ever, companies in a range of industries are pairing listening with more traditional forms of research that are based on asking.

Read more about the importance of listening and how it can be used effectively in the latest edition of Consumer Insight.

What’s driving all the excitement and energy around “listening?” After all, the basic notion of “listening” – observing and interpreting naturally occurring consumer behavior – is not new. In fact, when the first professional market researchers sat in consumers’ living rooms and talked with them about their lives and their needs, they were engaging in “listening” as much as they were asking questions. These pioneers were literally the eyes and ears of their organizations. They brought consumers to life in ways that inspired a host of innovations, improving consumers’ lives and their businesses in the process.

Market research evolved to become a valuable source of information to drive decisions, even as the connection between researchers and consumers became more distant. In a slightly ironic twist, the social media revolution and 21st century technology afford modern-day practitioners the opportunity to routinely engage in “old school” hands-on research – or at least a form of it- by listening to consumers online.

P&G and Nielsen conducted a series of parallel studies to understand how learning gleaned from “listening” to online consumer conversations compares to survey-based findings (”asking”), and how to best use these techniques going forward.

What We Heard

Findings from “listening” and “asking” were largely consistent. Most importantly, in every case, “listening” added to our understanding in important ways, meaningfully enhancing insights, and sometimes suggesting a different course of action. For example, a survey on cloth diapering identified cost savings and sustainability as key reasons for using cloth diapers. Listening took this further, revealing the passion cloth-diapering moms have for “CD’ing,” and connecting it to core values around parenting. This led to a fundamentally different, more holistic understanding of cloth diapering than was available from survey results alone.

Listening consistently provided valuable depth and context… adding listening to the picture was a little like going from an X-ray to a CAT scan. Furthermore, listening revealed the level of consumer passion or intensity associated with a specific topic. Understanding “intensity” can be just as important to winning in the marketplace as understanding size or “magnitude,” suggesting the need to pursue survey-based and listening-based approaches (or hybrid methods) going forward.

To learn more about the findings from this joint study and how to use listening to enhance your understanding of the marketplace and bring consumers to life in your organization, please join us for a complimentary webinar on Friday, June 26, at 2:00 p.m. EDT.

Register for the Listening Vs. Asking webinar.

Is “listening to the unprompted consumer voice” finally going mainstream? Last month, Nielsen co-chaired a sold out Industry Leader Forum delivered by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). Among other things, the event focused on how social media is spurring online conversations about brands, companies, products and services. How do we ‘listen’ to these conversations? And how do we utilize these findings? These insights are expanding the role of research beyond measurement and testing, inspiring a new vision for market research. At this exciting event, I gave a presentation on the “Six Signals of Listening to the Unprompted Voice of the Consumer.” In the brief video below, I summarize key highlights from that presentation. In January. we’ll be co-chairing a similar event on the West Coast. Click here for more information.