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Know When to Hold Them, Know When to Fold Them

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At the AMA Market Research Conference, Andrew Baird, VP of Marketing for Convenience Retail for BP, shared stories about his years of research in the convenience-store market. One particularly vexing recent decision was whether to consolidate three BP brands or not and-if so-which brand to consolidate to.

BP had three brands: am-pm on the West Coast, the healthier Wild Bean Café in the Northeast, and bp connect elsewhere. Complicating the research process, Andrew has found that respondents in this space often shape their answers based on the influence of social norms:

• When Andrew was researching the impact of sweepstakes on petrol purchases in New Zealand, one focus-group participant said she would never be interested in sweepstakes; they would not make a difference to where she filled up her car. After the focus group concluded, as she got up to leave, her purse fell open and out dropped dozens of sweepstakes tickets. She had been too embarrassed to admit her enjoyment of such promotions.
• As Andrew studies convenience-store food choices, respondents frequently express an interest in healthy choices for food, but in real life buy the less healthy option: they say they want a salad but buy a hamburger. They "think thin, eat fat". Andrew commented that the recent failure of Fresh & Easy, the Tesco entry into the U.S. convenience retail market, may be because it seems "to have taken the American consumer at face value". Yes, the convenience store needs to offer some healthy food, but that salad serves as a permission driver to get customers to treat themselves.
• Even small decisions go awry. To save costs, one store replaced plastic coffee stirrers with wooden stirrers. Customers thought the wooden stirrers were flimsy and would take three of them on average, instead of a single plastic stirrer, resulting in increased costs rather than the expected savings.

Faced with the decision to consolidate three convenience store brands to one, Andrew didn't trust respondents. After initially concluding their traditional research, they decided the data was inconclusive. "We went back to the research table with convenience store users. We developed five trial stores. I'm a huge proponent of ethnography to understand their actual behavior. In my experience, it is the real moment of truth. After observing these trial stores, we had our answer. We moved from three brands to one: am/pm, as heavy C-store users preferred am/pm. We still had salads, like Wild Bean Café led with, but they were not the big sellers."

Summing up, Andrew said, "There is no silver bullet, no magic research recipe. It's data plus consumer behavior plus intuition. You only get one chance to launch a product or service; you rarely get a chance to relaunch. It is critical to get it right the first time. Marketers need and want market researchers at the table."