Home>What We Do>Expressive Techniques
Respondents here are asked to project their inner feelings and express them outwards by translating them into another modality like paper, 3d models, acting, etc. Usage of such techniques is time consuming but can be quite stimulating.
Examples of these would include Role-Play, Clay modeling, Court room drama, Split personality, Market plays, Life on a camera, Visual technique (mood boards, collage making, etc), psycho drawings etc
Role play: As the name suggests it is a projective technique wherein the respondents are assigned roles and asked to play someone else (that could either be a brand or someone related to it) while enacting a relevant/ provocative situation that is weaved by our researcher. Role play is worth introducing into focus groups for several reasons. Valuable insights can be gleaned from studying the specific language used by respondents as they re-enact relevant situations and moments of truth. It allows the ‘role players’ to express opinions, but one can derive maximum value only is the other members of the group also react and respond to the role-play.
Courtroom drama: The ‘courtroom drama’ projective technique is often used by us when using focus groups to conduct concept testing and creative development projects. Respondents are asked to break into teams and form a ‘case for’ or ‘case against’ the client preceding with one or more concepts or service improvements. Various interesting twists can be added. For example, taking respondents and asking them to ‘defend the indefensible’ by arguing the case for concepts that they were initially critical of. Teams can be constructed to balance the views of respondents that are more opinionated and vociferous in their views.
Split Personality: Participants in a group are divided into two teams, wherein each team uses collage making to expresses nuances (about a schizophrenic person, who has split personality).
Especially useful in bringing out contrasts in brand personalities, when the brands in the category are very similar to each other. Through semiotic decoding, one takes out stark points of differences between two ‘close’ brands. It is a superior technique than a simple personification exercise.
Market-plays: It is a system of action techniques borrowed from the performing arts and psychodrama utilizing consumers and/or marketers as the players. Participants enact and express their feeling about a product or brand indirectly which allows them to go beyond the literal and convey more of the elusive feelings and associations that the product evokes.
Market-plays technique is used to demonstrate and better understand dynamics of:
Product posturing and position
The in-store drama between brands
The impact of marketing applications, i.e., name, graphics, packaging, colour, etc.
The interplay of consumers' functional and emotional needs in brand selection
Life on a camera- This is a technique whereby we hand over a camera to the respondent who is made aware of the task at hand. He then captures through the lenses a ‘slice of his life’ in terms of his likes, dislikes, his way of life etc. depending on the objective of the research. These snapshots are then woven into a final picture/story through analysis by our team of researchers.
Visual techniques (Collage-making, Mood boards, sketches, cut and paste..) – Visual techniques tap into the unconscious. One technique that is easy and consistently engaging for respondents is the use of collages. A technique whereby research participants create rough collages/ mood boards from magazines or other visual material to represent something relevant to the research - often a brand, or an activity. The key to success is giving respondents both clear instructions and a creative license. One needs to provide as much ‘inputs/ material’ as possible from which the mood board can be created – like a wide variety of magazines, newspapers, fabrics, coloured pens/pencils, glitter etc. This enforced move away from the verbal helps to access intuitive knowledge and may allow access to non-verbal aspects of the topic that would otherwise remain unarticulated and thus open them up to discussion.
Psycho drawings- Psycho-drawings are most commonly pre-prepared sheets of paper with stick men and women and an empty speech or thought bubble. They are useful for capturing individual views on subjects. This is a handy technique for respondents that might be initially reticent about verbalising their own emotions in front of a group of strangers as it also allows us to use a third-party perspective e.g. “this is how I feel most customers would react to this service experience”.
