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A Beginner’s Guide to Usage and Attitude Studies

By E2E Research | January 11, 2023

Ah, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet! Roses? Well, instead of using the phrase Usage and Attitude, you might hear some people use the phrase Habits and Practices. And instead of shortening it down to U&A, they’ll shorten it down to H&P. Whether you’re interested in a U&A or an H&P, we’re generally talking about the same thing. Use the acronym you prefer and we’ll all gain more valuable insights into consumer behavior, attitudes, and usage patterns.

What is a Usage and Attitude Study?

Decorative image Usage and Attitudes studies aim to understand a broad range of behaviors and attitudes related to the people experiencing a product or service. It’s relevant for all products like food, beverages, hair care, and electronics, as well as services like healthcare, banking, and education.

Most U&As gather information about the brand of interest, as well as competitive brands and the category as a whole. This ensures you gain a full understanding of any behaviors and attitudes that could eventually be relevant and important to the brand of interest.

Why is a Usage and Attitude Study Important?

U&As create a solid foundation for building a brand. They serve a number of important benefits in a variety of key areas.

People: Know your buyer and your consumer

Create more relevant and memorable messaging by understanding the unique demographic and psychographic characteristics of each segment of users that has been identified in any segmentation research you’ve conducted
Understand purchase drivers associated with each persona, e.g., price, availability, loyalty, packaging, sensory features, sustainability, durability
Plan for the future by identifying what each segment needs and wants from an ideal product
Differentiate between the needs of buyers (e.g., availability, pricing) and users (e.g., efficacy, sensation), and ensure the targeted message reaches each audience

Place: Know your buyers’ preferred information and purchase channels

Focus your marketing spend in the most effective channels by identifying the marketing and sales channels and influencers that are most effective and important at each stage of the purchase journey

Pricing: Know your buyers’ preferred pricing models

Create the most effective pricing model by understanding attitudes towards various pricing strategies, e.g., every day low pricing vs sales vs bundling

Promotion: Know your buyers’ preferred promotion tactics

Create the most effective promotion model by understanding which types of promotions are relevant for your buyers, e.g., in-store promotions, OOH promotions, door-to-door promotions

Product: Know what your consumer needs and wants from your product

Prevent switching and abandonment by identifying and resolving frustrations, complaints, and pain points
Encourage purchase by identifying and reminding people of desired benefits and advantages
Plan product improvements by understanding which product features people love and hate

Strategy: Know how to position and plan for the future

Decorative image

Plan for a more competitive long-term evolution of your brand and potential brand extensions by understanding the competitive space
Predict the growth and avoidable decline of your brand by maintaining and tracking accurate norms as they relate to current culture and society
Create a data-driven baseline that can be used to support strategic decisions unaffected by changes in leadership
Forecast category and brand growth

What Questions to Ask in a Usage and Attitude Study

Decorative image As with any research project, there is an unlimited number of questions that could be asked. The key is to identify the specific research objectives for the imminent research project and focus the questions there.

Then, select a set of engaging questions that will keep the entire questionnaire to less than 15 minutes long. Don’t try to do everything or the data quality will suffer.

Brand Metrics

Awareness: When you think of this product category, which brands come to mind first?
Aided Awareness: From this list of brands, which ones have you heard of?
Discovery: How did you first hear about this brand?
Trial: Which brands of this category have you ever tried?
Trial: Why did you decide to try this brand?
Consideration: When you think of this product category, which brands would you consider buying?
Consideration: From this list of brands, which ones would you considering buying?
Preference: When you think of this product category, which brand do you most prefer?
Loyalty: If your preferred brand was not available in your usual store, what would you do?
Perceptions: Which 5 of these words reflect your opinions about this brand?
Perceptions: What 3 things do you like about this brand? What 3 things do you dislike about this brand?
Perceptions: Which of these brands is most innovative? Fun? Likeable? Effective? Appealing? Different?
Perceptions: What is your opinion about the effectiveness of this brand? Quality? Appearance? Texture? Taste? Scent? Sound? Durability? Sustainability?
Perceptions: Overall, what is your opinion about this brand?

Product Usage

In your household, which of these people use this category?
In your household, who uses this category most often?
Where in your home is this category used?
At what time of day/week/month/year is this category used?
How is this category used?
What occasions is this category used for? Every day? Holidays? Religious days? Birthdays?

Purchase Journey:

Who usually buys the product?
What are all the places where this category/brand is bought?
Where is this category/brand usually bought?
Where do you prefer to buy this category?
On the next shopping trip, which brands will be bought?

Purchase Frequency / Recency / Monetary

How often is each of these brands bought?
How often is each of these brands used?
In just the last 7 days, which of these brands have been bought?
When was the last time each of these brands have been bought?
What size package of category/brand is usually bought? What size is preferred?
At what time of the day/week/month/year is this brand/category usually bought?
The last time this category/brand was bought, about how much was spent on it?
The last time this category/brand was bought, were any coupons or cost savings used?
What is your opinion about using coupons? Buying at regular price? BOGOs?

Personal Details

Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, ethnicity, religion, household size, children in home
Psychographics: Personal attitudes towards relevant category characteristics, e.g., sustainability, early adoption, pricing preferences

Why Ask About Behaviors that Can Be Measured Digitally?

Decorative image If time and money were no objectives, many metrics could be confirmed visually or digitally. Sometimes, however, it’s faster and easier to just ask people. Sometimes the data isn’t available in a properly formatted, readable database. Sometimes the data isn’t available for purchase. And sometimes, we need to match attitude data with behavior data for specific people.

Or, and this is much more interesting, maybe we want to understand what people think they are doing. The way people think about or recall their behaviors is an indirect measure of awareness, loyalty, believability, and likeability. If people can’t remember which brand they buy, whether the name or the logo, that’s not a great indicator of brand loyalty which could permit a premium pricing strategy.

What’s Next?

Most brands are well served to conduct a U&A study. If you’re ready to discover top quality insights about your buyers, brands, and business, email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

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What are customer personas and why does your brand growth depend on them?

By E2E Research | December 23, 2021

What is a persona?

Simply put, personas are short, simple descriptions of a group of targeted people but written as if they were describing one single person. The best personas are grounded in quantitative and qualitative research and summarize the demographics, psychographics, motivations, needs, and goals of those people. You might also see them referred to as Buyer Personas, Customer Personals, Patient Personas, User Personas, or something similar.

Personas are a fantastic way to ensure that a business puts the customer at the center of everything they do, whether it’s product development, packaging, messaging, or customer service. As we all know, the most successful companies focus not on their own desires, but rather on ensuring their customers’ needs and desires are met. Building personas is a great way to get there.

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How do marketers and researchers use personas?

Personas are particularly useful when combined with segmentation and journey mapping research. After conducting segmentation research, you’ll have a list of very specific details and statistics about each of the various groups of consumers who are, or may become, relevant to your brand. You will also be able to identify which segments are valuable enough to pursue and therefore would benefit from having a persona. And, after personas have been built, you can use them to map the journey each persona would take as they progress on their path to learning about your category, your brand, and finally choosing a product to purchase.

There are many ways to use personas, but here are seven of the more common use cases for marketers and researchers.

Understand your customers: Fundamentally, personas help you understand who your customers are. On just one page, they provide a clear description of the key traits, needs, and desires of each important customer segment, and what makes each of them distinct and valuable.

Shared understanding of the target audience: Particularly in larger companies where people and departments are often siloed, personas help ensure that everyone has access to the same understanding of who they’re trying to serve. A single reference point means that messaging for each persona is consistent regardless of whether it’s used on packaging, in a campaign, or on the website.

Fact-based decision making: Whether you’re in marketing, product development, or executive leadership, it’s really easy to generate ideas and run with them. But for decisions to lead to business success, they need to be grounded in fact not unconsciously biased, personal perceptions. With your idea in hand, confirm that it matches up with the personas that have been carefully built to support your work.

Tailor campaigns and messaging: There is an infinite number of messages you could share about your products and brands but which one is the right one? As you brainstorm potential messages, regularly refer to the appropriate persona to ensure your messaging is relevant, and therefore heard and attended to.

Target high yield channels: Sure, you can drop some funny or educational videos on TikTok or buy a Facebook ad. But if your best customers don’t like either of those channels, you’ve just wasted a lot of money. Using personas will help you make sure you spend your marketing dollars on the channels your targeted persona prefers to use.

Prioritize product development: What do you do when you’ve got 5 great products on the go but only enough people and budget to work on two? You review your personas to identify which products would be most desirable to your high value or underserved personas.

Tailor new product development: Is your product development team ready to work on a brand new product? It’s time to get out the personas. Which persona has the greatest needs or product gaps? Brainstorm ideas with that specific persona in mind.

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How many personas do you need?

Depending on the size and complexity of your business, you might need 1 or 2 personas or 15 to 20 personas.

If you’re just beginning the process, start with 1 or 2 or your most important segments. You can work on more later as you better understand what you need from your personas and how you will use them.

Here are examples of three (excessively brief) personas that might be useful for a small, online company that makes cosmetics. Daisy and Chris could be the most important personas to concentrate on in the early years because they will form the core customers of the business. Then, over time, as the company grows into having a retail outlet, they might need to add another persona to incorporate occasional high spenders.

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Tips for building an effective persona

As you build out your personas, remember a few key tips.

The goal isn’t to include every precise detail about every research participant. Focus on shared commonalities and broad generalizations.
Similarly, notice what makes each segment or persona different and ensure those differences are clear in the details.
Even though personas are a generalized idea of a group of people, they aren’t stereotypes. Personas are based on data collected using scientific methods, not personal perceptions and opinions. If you find that a persona incorporates stereotypes, refer back to your research method and your data, and ensure that you’re not incorporating your own personal biases.
Personas should be concise and clear. Sure, you could probably write a long essay with the information gathered from a segmentation study. However, the goal is to get a quick feel for each persona. When you’re just starting out, try to keep persona biographies under 200 words, particularly if you are working with many personas.
Finally, if your personas don’t relate to a specific age, gender, ethnicity, disability, or sexuality, be sure to reflect a wide range of people across all of the personas.

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Components of an effective persona

When you’re ready to build each person, make sure to consider each of these four key parts. None of them are as simple as they may seem!

Headshot: As the person designing the personas, you need to make sure everyone who uses them remembers that they reflect real people. This is why you want headshots of real people rather than clip art drawings or illustrations. Further if there are no appearance differences among the personas, don’t be led down the erroneous path where they all end up looking like you ethnically and demographically. There are plenty of stock art websites that include people of all genders, ages, ethnicities, disabilities, sexualities, and personal styles (e.g., Pexels, Pixabay, AffectTheVerb, Jopwell, Nappy).
Humanistic name: Come up with a meaningful name, not a gamey name like “Susy Shopper” or “Mohammed the Hoarder.” Your customers are real people, not jokes. 1) Think about the age of the persona and then search out a list of names from that decade. 2) Think about the gender of the persona. If the persona isn’t gender specific, choose a name that isn’t stereotypically associated with a specific gender (e.g., Chris, Noor, Alex, Blair, Nehal, Robin). 3) Think about names that have some kind of relation to the persona. For instance, “Heather” works well for a woman who is environmentally conscious whereas “Dusty” works well for a carefree, disorganized person. As before, avoid choosing names from a single ethnicity unless that is truly representative of all the personas.
Biography: You’ve probably got a hundred bullet point details from the segmentation research. Now it’s time to weave those details into an interesting, short story about the person. Keep it short, simple, and interesting. You’re supposed to be writing about a real person so make the bio come alive. Don’t try to include every detail in the summary. Build a picture in your mind based on those details and describe the person as eloquently as you can.
Quotes: As a bonus, you may wish to write a quote that reflects each persona. Think about whether that persona would use incomplete or full sentences, simple or complex words (e.g., “buy” or “purchase”), new or old slang (e.g., “spill the tea” or “chew the fat”), or casual vs extreme profanity (e.g., dang or f***).

Finally, what kinds of details belong in the biography? This depends on the type of product and target audience you’re working with. If you’re building a persona for a consumer product, you’ll want to pay more attention to personal demographics and psychographics. On the other hand, if you’re building a B2B profile, you’ll need to focus more on professional details. Here is a good list of starting details.

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Demographics

Psychographics

Profession

Category

Age, gender, income, education, marital status, household size, children, religion, where they live

Personal life goals, personality traits, values, motivations, goals, pain points, information seeking
Hobbies, interests, sports, music, arts
Publications they read, channels they watch, use of online and offline media

Industry, company, company size, job title, job level, skills, qualifications, decision-making role, technology used

Brands they like and dislike, related categories they use and don’t use
Favorite influences and channels
Typical challenges, barriers, and pain points with the brand and category
Consideration and purchase motivations, messaging preferences

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After all your hard work, it’s time to present your findings in a creative, visual display such as what you see in this simple yet detailed example. If you want to see the full spectrum of possibilities, do a quick image search for “customer personas.” You’re sure to find inspiration for your own designs!

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