At Innosight, we talk about understanding both jobs-to-be-done and compensating behaviors to spot, shape, and scale innovations. But what methods do you use to get these insights? Here’s one you may not have thought about: deprivation research.
The premise of deprivation research is: the best way to understand what people want in a product is a deprive them of it. Consumers don’t know how they truly feel about a product or the role it plays in their lives until they find themselves without it.
The technique has been used by Pizza Hut, MTV, and Burger King. It is designed to surface actionable insights that can be used to customize marketing campaign and design product feature sets that delight consumers and improve their lives.
For example, MTV wanted to understand the role that MTV and MTV.com play in the role of their heavy users. The market research firm U30 conducted a deprivation study, in which they deprived heavy users of all things MTV for a month. They asked them to track how they felt and what they turned to instead and how satisfied or unsatisfied they were alternatives. They learned that when these users were deprived from MTV they felt less connected to conversations with their friends and felt out of the loop. The data they collected was used to develop better programming, web sites and advertisements.
This technique has also been used by Burger King in advertisements testing just how loyal consumers are to the Whopper (aka “Whopper Freakout”). JanSport also deprived students of their back packs for a week to see what they used instead and what they missed most. This lead to product upgrades including a rubber piece on the bottom of the bag to prevent contents from getting wet and extra compartments for keys, music players, etc.
The implementation is fairly straight forward. In a nutshell, the process is to recruit heavy users of your product and ask them to live without it for one week (this is best suited for non-essential products that are part of a person’s daily routine, like beverages, cosmetics or consumer electronics). Ask participants to keep track of their experiences in a daily journal with pictures and videos of compensating products, services, or behaviors they are using. Ask them to answer:
- How do you feel?
- What do you miss most?
- What products, services, and behaviors are you turning to as replacements? When do you use these? What about these alternatives is disappointing? What is delightful? Why?
Deprivation research complements other research methods (like surveys and focus groups) to give you new insights into customer’s jobs and compensatory behaviors, which can then be used to spot, shape and scale new innovations. We’ll continue to post novel, low-cost ways to gather consumer insights and jobs-to-be-done in upcoming blog posts.
