The Consumer Champion
by Justin Coates
What is a Consumer Insights Leader anyway?
People ask me why a materials company that rarely markets directly to consumers would hire someone to monitor consumer trends. It’s not as crazy as it sounds — consumers drive change. A few years ago, most of us couldn’t have predicted that yoga pants would become the uniform of choice for most American women; that the dairy section of your local grocery store would have more non-dairy versions of milk than traditional milk; or that using a plastic straw in public would be as distasteful as picking your nose in public. All these consumer shifts mean major changes for companies that make the materials that go into end-user products. My job as Consumer Insights Leader at Eastman is to keep an eye on what’s trending and predict what’s going to happen next to help our customers make the products consumers want.
It was a bit of an accident that I fell into doing this work. I had studied economics while working at Cotton Inc. After someone changed positions, I was temporarily put into market research, and my mentors recognized that I had a natural talent not only for analyzing data, but also for telling stories. Most people do not like to look at a bunch of numbers; it can be scary, daunting, and agonizing. Storytelling is the most effective tactic I use to bring all those numbers to life. In the wrong hands, this stuff can be incredibly … let’s say dry. Everyone loves a good story; only a few of us nerds like a good spreadsheet of data.
What do I look for?
For a company that doesn’t necessarily market directly to consumers, it is even more important to recognize what consumers want because we are responsible for developing the fundamental materials that wind up in the products we all use. I’m frequently surprised by what the average consumer thinks, and often they might say something that totally changes my existing perceptions. And because I never know what a consumer is going to say, a few statements from a focus group participant could completely derail a well-formulated marketing strategy.
For example, we found a huge gap in consumer satisfaction with clothing comfort during a global research campaign for our textile business. Coming from Cotton, a fiber group that defined comfort for a generation of consumers, it was shocking to learn that there was room in the market for new materials that better met consumers’ comfort needs and expectations.
Learning about this comfort gap and sharing this with leading mills and brands allowed our textiles team to position our fiber portfolio (including Naia and Avra) as the next generation comfort solution to better meet consumer expectations. These surprises from consumer responses force me to really consider what’s behind their thinking and dig into it. It’s the part of my job that appeals to my curiosity.
How I research
Each project I work on is unique. I look at some of our growth businesses — Specialty Plastics, Coating and Inks, or Fibers — for example. I work with someone within the business — a project champion — to develop the research objectives and plan how we will use the results internally and externally with key customers. We create the questions and zone in on the demographics we want to target. Then, I partner with a market research vendor to help execute the project.
I recently conducted some focus groups in China on behalf of Eastman’s Corporate Innovation division. We set out to explore perceptions of sustainability and product safety to understand where some of Eastman’s bioplastic materials would best fit with consumer needs. With this type of project, it is essential to have a good research partner who can help you tailor questions to the local market and provide feedback on other areas to explore based on their on-the-ground knowledge. For focus groups, having a seasoned moderator who can guide the discussion and access the opinions of everyone is key because you never want one person dominating the conversation.
To find the right people for a focus group study, Eastman works with our research partner to develop a screener questionnaire that helps us find the right people to include from our research partners’ consumer sample pool. For this project, we wanted Chinese consumers between the ages of 20 and 50 who had lived in Shanghai, Beijing, or Chengdu for at least five years, and who had differing views on sustainability. The participants who passed the screening and fit our profile were asked to join the focus group session. These sessions lasted about 90 minutes and were mainly an open-discussion format. We asked participants to bring an item they owned that they felt was sustainable or environmentally-friendly to get them comfortable discussing sustainability. Typically, focus groups are held in a room that allows for observation through a two-way mirror. I also prefer a professional videographer film each group, so we can craft compilation videos of consumers discussing certain topics. From my experience, you can show a customer facts and figures all day, but showing them one video of a real, live person saying the same thing tends to be more meaningful and impactful.
The most fun part of my job is taking our research stories to our customers and convincing them of the value of our information and material solutions. It’s exciting to hear that our research is valuable to their business, that it helps them understand the value of an Eastman material, or that they want me back in a few months to hear more insights.
My experience shows me that consumer research is nearly always worth the extra time and attention. It helps move an innovative material forward and builds credibility with our customers.
Learn more about Eastman innovators at Enhance.eastman.com.
