International mental disruption - 6 actions to escape your own pre-COVID mindset.
Despite all its limitations, the COVID 19 pandemic offers opportunities for brands - and also for the market research industry. Rheingold researcher and head of the US branch of the Cologne-based market research institute Patricia Sauerbrey Colton shows how mindful market research with corona-sensitized consumers can uncover hidden insights.
"Social distancing" has pushed us to our psychological limits and extremized what is going well at the moment and what is rather problematic. Regardless of whether the stress of everyday life has been alleviated by the lockdown or whether we have struggled with the excessive demands of the home office and childcare, we have been shaken up internally, shaken up mentally and are now developing new strategies to cope with our everyday lives. In the U.S., this is compounded by significant social and political unrest.
This state of mind is hard to bear for many, but for us qualitative market researchers at rheingold it is a diamond in the rough. Because our souls do not differentiate between everyday and research contexts, we now have access to sensitized consumer souls. The changed life setting simulates what we so often try to create in the research setting: a playing with scenarios, a questioning of one's own point of view, an admission of and a confrontation with one's own brokenness in the experience of things. And this subject's state of mind can still be clearly felt months after the lockdown shock - and can be used for our work.
The pandemic exacerbates existing problems
The extent of mental disruption is well illustrated by my work for the rheingold institute in the US. Here, Covid rages in a country that was already divided and struggling with fundamental systemic problems. The Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., for example, gives vent to intergenerational repressed anger that became even more stifling under Covid restrictions. Discrimination based on origin, race, socioeconomic status is a sad reality and is further exacerbated when Covid constricts freedom-loving people's own physical and psychological radius of action.
One of my interviewees summed it up as follows:
"I don't know what to fight first: the virus, white supremacy or this president (...) And all of this while worrying about my job, homeschooling a 6 year old and figuring out how I can keep my dad out of a nursery home. (...) It's just too much. I am mourning the life I can't have right now."
Mindfulness is more important than ever
Corona has forced the consumers to be researched, but also us market researchers ourselves, to take a crash course in mindfulness: We are all becoming more aware of our condition and are challenged to find a new approach.
Even if mental disruption expresses itself internationally in different symptoms, in our studies we observe across countries the mental shake-up and the associated stronger (self)reflection and search for new ways. While we as qualitative market researchers have to ask ourselves piece by piece behind the facade under "normal" conditions, we now see unusual insights and experience particularly deep, insightful conversations that look into the future.
Whereas before there were routine patterns of brand and product use, now coronaspeck, shipping boxes, and new home oases bear witness to which brands and products seek to rebuild us, how and when, with comfort, defensiveness, or soothing. Parents preemptively make sure the candy stash is replenished to soothe isolated children's souls. Binge-watching helps get through quarantine, and anger gets rebuffed in new long-distance fitness offerings.
No "back to normal"
Although the sensitization to one's own feelings was born out of Covid, there are also signs that there will be no "back to normal" even in the long term. The vulnerability that we have become aware of cannot simply be shaken off, but will accompany us at least subliminally. Being vulnerable, being aware of one's own finiteness, basically means maintaining and allowing access to shadow sides or threats in order not to be thrown off track again with such force.
At the same time, however, such a state of mind also requires correspondingly mindful moderation. As market researchers, we are asked to create a research setting that not only offers these particularly vulnerable, reflective and more open souls room for expression, but at the same time helps to transfer this mindset to the study objective. In doing so, the following points can offer inspiration to escape one's own pre-Corona mindset:
1. patience: development needs time. Inner restlessness needs space not to discharge on the object of investigation and answers need opportunity to mature, to be questioned and rethought. While the first answer may still be oriented to old patterns, the second or third can be Covid-tested: what has been redefined or broken away? What was set that may now be redefined? What did one surprise oneself with? Courage to pause, reflect, go within.
2. building bridges: The market research setting may evoke old schemas, like a meeting, a conversation, an interview. Now it's time to proactively keep Covid mindfulness alive: what did you learn about yourself during this time that might guide, sharpen, or even change your evaluation of the research subject? How are possible Covid threats, reliefs, changes reflected in the subject under investigation?
For example, one subject was able to more easily forgive herself for her more frequent consumption of sweets in the lockdown. She realized that she was now consoling herself with it as she often did, but at the same time noted that her guilty conscience bothered her less. The aggravated covid conditions legitimized her increased candy consumption as a consolation.
3. to make conscious: to let spontaneous sensations be told and described, to appreciate the momentary state and to observe it closely. Encourage to let thoughts and feelings pass by accompanied by language. Pausing and explaining connections with the object of investigation.
4. nurture contradiction: Understanding covid experiences as liberation from old structures and allowing and exploring inconsistencies, disjointedness, and contradiction.
For example, one respondent related the contradiction of taking the mask requirement more or less closely, depending on his circle of friends, to a recently purchased tablet: while he found that his approach to the mask requirement was not really scientific, he also found this to be the case with his tablet purchase. It was also a gut decision, and it let him figure out what features of the tablet he was choosing contributed to his feeling confident about the decision. His reasoning became emotional and the technical facts faded into the background.
5. inquire about meaning and establish meaning connections: Elicit how meaning can be created. What emotional and rational function does one attribute to the object of investigation? To what extent is this congruent with one's own principles of meaning-making? What facilitates, what constricts?
Covid has brought to our attention the extent to which we all contribute to the success of the whole. In our studies, this is evidenced by an increased awareness of sustainability. The downsides of products, which were once more hidden, are coming to the fore, e.g. production conditions, fairness in dealing with employees or the product life cycle from manufacturing to recycling. The downsides are now easier to illuminate with subjects now freeing themselves as a more significant cog in the wheel.
6. looking ahead: Have covid-related (new) desires, goals, fears, and anxieties relate to the object of study and develop scenarios. The often so vexed question of a brand in five years suddenly becomes systemically relevant for people who are asking themselves precisely this question for their lives right now.
Before Covid, we often used intensification as a means of uncovering deeper insights. We challenged statements, sometimes tightened them up, or confronted subjects with opposing perspectives. Covid resembles in a big way what our tool of intensification could trigger in a small way - with the difference that we will still feel provoked by Covid in a longer term, strongly culturally shaped and more deeply shaken way.
