Had an ‘interesting’ meeting about a qual project we could conduct in the near future. From the client’s side - the dominant market leader of an FMCG product category - is an old school managing director who basically represents the corporate side over the consumers’ - neglecting the simple fact that the consumers are the ones who produce his salary. No, his salary is given by the company he works for… you know this attitude.

Recently the market has changed and the 2nd brand in the category (who is approx. 1/8 the size of the market leader…) tricked the leader and took the agenda setting and the communication into their hands, leading up to setting the theme / tone and core content of the dialogue with the consumers of the category. The market leader brand has functioned in a follower (almost ‘me too’) mode as a response. Now it feels the negative impact and decides to do research to understand what’s up and what to do.

So, the guy sits there with all the seriousness in the world, the atmosphere is as formal as if it was an international diplomacy meeting.
And then he starts speaking slowly with well chosen words in a strict yet calm and quiet tone that can either be frustrating or threatening and he shares his deeply reconsidered, a thousand times refined and boild down wisdom only a long time leader can share. So I listen carefully:

- Our consumers have this delusion, this false illusion, a truly deceptive and wrong and flawed positon that our product is unhealthy and artificial. This is a terrible and serious delusion they have as our product is basically natural and there is nothing unhealthy in it.

He elaborated some more on the fact that the faulty consumers are deadly wrong and they insist on their stupidity (he used less harsh words).

Oh, my… unfortunately the meeting was not done with the consumers’ faulty thoughts. The research he wanted to order is a mission impossible to execute. Here’s the equation yet to be solved:
4 focus groups - that is the size of the sample and it is not really negotiable
14-49,
3 locations (and the groups should consist of people who live in different districts of the locations)
sex
family status
brand preference (and the sub-brands are not even considered)
purchase location / frequency
communication recall - seen the communication of the brand and the competitor
(education, attitude, and the other nice to have criteria that were not even mentioned)

Nice, huh?

And in the final part of the meeting when he was summing it up, he said:
- And after the fieldwork you are going to present the results we require.

Needless to say that it is not really likely that we are going to get the project for two reasons:
1. I’ve put the guy back to the earth and crushed his formal image by contradicting him as there are no consumer delusions but consumer beliefs, perceptions, emotions, thoughts and opinions. If your consumers think something about you that you are not then it is you who have done something terrible wrong, not them. (I phrased it as: Well, I think that I sit on the horse the other direction as there are no consumer delusions but…)
And when he was talking about the required results, I interrupted him and noted it gently that it would be either not too professional or not too favorable if we knew the results to be presented this far in advance…

I know, it is my bad, but come on! How can you be soooo………………..and such an ………….., you know.

2. Design-wise it seems to be too inflexible - we gave more options with different sample sizes and dividing but they came back to the original one which is certainly not possible.

Good story… now we are waiting for the decision. For some reason I’m not too nervous about the outcome. And I wonder what the quality of the research and the output would be if the project would be executed by his imaginations…

I wonder what the lesson would be from this but I cannot come up with any substantial learnings…

Any thoughts?