Concept
Projective Techniques
research-methods qualitative-research marketing
Indirect or hypothetical questions can surface subconscious attitudes, attachments, and motivations that direct questions can't, because people often can't consciously articulate why they feel a certain way about a product, even though they can reliably describe what they did or experienced. Patrick Fagan recommends staying away from "why" questions (which invite people to guess at their own rationality) in favor of concrete behavioral questions ("what," "where," "who," "how") and genuinely projective prompts.
Examples of projective prompts: "if this brand was a person, who would they be?" (reveals implicit brand personality); and the "withdrawal technique" — asking someone to imagine the product didn't exist, or was unavailable for six months, to surface what specific need it's actually fulfilling, since people struggle to answer "what do you like about this product?" directly and reliably.
Adam Ferrier recommends a related indirect method he calls collateral interviewing: rather than asking a person directly about their own behavior, ask people around them instead — a spouse or a bartender will often give a more accurate account of how long someone actually spends somewhere than the person themselves would. When you do have to ask the customer directly, ask about their present context, not the past or the future — people are relatively reliable describing what's happening around them right now, but unreliable projecting forward or reconstructing why they did something earlier.
Discussed in
- Episode 50 — 50- What marketers can learn from your Facebook profile
- Episode 54 — 54- Stop Listening to Customers (collateral interviewing)