The cheapest, dirtest qualitative research technique
The Assignment: do primer qualitative research
Our current assigment is to figure out a cool loyalty program for Kids Foot Locker shoes retail stores. They have a pretty basic one now: spend $100 and get 10% discount. If you spend more than $300, you can join the VIP program, which has more benefits, like free shipping.
Our weekend instructor, Yvette Quizon made mandatory to make primer qualitative research. With, with our non-existing budget, meant street intercepts.
What is street intercepts?
The simple method when you ask people on the street to answer some questions. In professional setting these people get some money or incentive, but in our case they didn’t. And this was pretty hard.
What I learned from street intercepts?
We went to a mall in New Jersey with my planner partner, Ines. She is from Peru originally, but she has been living in USA for 13 years. Her native Spanish knowledge was really helpful as a third of our respondents didn’t speak English at all.
First we went to Kids Foot Locker, then Foot Locker and and last Foot Locker’s other brand, Champs.
1. People answer as short as possible
The first princible of interviewing is to never ask Yes/No Questions. Instead you have to use open ended questions, and you have to phrase them smartyly to get valuable answers.
Example
-”What kind of shoes are you looking for?” (I expected a long answer about style, brand, usage of shoes.)
-“Nike.”
2. The 10/90 rule
10% of respondents give you the 90% of valuable answers.
3. Almost everybody answers 3 questions
I expected more rejection, but if you smile and state that you are a student and only have 3 questions, almost everybody will answer.
4. Rephrase on the spot
We wrote more than ten questions about loyalty programs. But after 3 responses it seemed nobody knew anything about Foot Locker’s loyalty progam. So we changed our direction to more general questions.
And finally that’s how we found our insights.
What we learned about Foot Locker?
About Foot Locker:
- Foot Locker’s customers don’t care about Foot Locker, it is “just the shoe shop in the mall, where I can buy the new Jordan, Nike or Adidas shoes.”
- Customers also don’t know if there is any loyalty program and how it works.
The insights which we build our campaign on:
- Kids buy new shoes every 3 months.
- When people don’t want to use their shoes anymore they:
1. sell them
2. throw them out
3. or maybe donate them.
