How to Effectively Conduct Consumer Research to Increase Sales

Consumer research is critical in copywriting. It allows you to tailor your message effectively, ensuring it resonates with your target audience. This drives engagement and sales.

However direct market research cannot be relied on. You cannot rely on surveys, interviews, or focus groups.

The real thing

In the late 1950s, Coke outsold Pepsi by more than five to one. Coca-Cola summed up its dominance, in just three words: The real thing.

The campaign launched in 1969, reinforced Coca-Cola’s authenticity and distinguished it as the original cola beverage in the face of increasing competition and shifting consumer preferences.

The campaign resonated with consumers across generations and it solidified Coca-Cola’s position as a cultural icon and reinforced its brand identity.

However, in the late 1970s, Coca-Cola experienced a significant deceleration in growth, slowing from its historical average of 15% per year to approximately 2%.

Concurrently, it faced a decline in market share at retail, with Pepsi overtaking it for the first time in 1980, claiming 29.3% to Coke’s 29% share in supermarkets.

The Pepsi generation

The Pepsi Generation advertising campaign, initiated in the mid-1960s refreshed the Pepsi brand by resonating with the influential Baby Boomer generation.

Former Pepsi Advertising Director Alan Pottasch’s words captured best the company’s approach;

“In the 1960s we stopped talking about the product and started talking about the user, and this was a major difference. We made cola into a necktie product. What you drank said something about who you were. We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital and young at heart. And we targeted a group of consumers whose taste buds weren’t yet going steady with Coke. We were forced to look at the next generation of consumers as the only ones who might not have to rectify their behavior, their attitudes toward colas; The Baby Boomers. We called them ‘The Pepsi Generation.”

Pepsi presented itself not just as a beverage but as a lifestyle choice. It effectively tapped into the spirit of youth and vitality capturing the aspirations, values and desire for modernity and youthfulness of younger consumers. At the time, Coca-Cola was often associated with older, more traditional consumers.

The Pepsi challenge

In the late 1970s, Pepsi came out with the “Pepsi Challenge” to contest the prevailing perception that Coca-Cola was the superior cola beverage.

Participants were blindfolded and asked to taste two unlabeled cola drinks, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, and then choose which one they preferred.

Through television commercials, print ads, and public events, Pepsi highlighted the results of these taste tests.

Most participants preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi over Coca-Cola.

The Pepsi challenge

By directly comparing Pepsi with Coca-Cola in blind taste tests, Pepsi was able to challenge Coca-Colas market dominance and undermine its brand perception especially in terms of taste preference.

The Choice of a New Generation

In 1984, as a follow-up to the Pepsi Challenge campaign, Pepsi launched ‘The Choice of a New Generation’ campaign.

Pepsi aimed to reinforce its image as a beverage choice that resonated with the evolving tastes and values of the younger generation. It became a symbol of youthful energy, innovation, and individuality.

The campaign featured popular celebrities and athletes of the time, such as Michael Jackson, who starred in one of the most iconic commercials of the era.

The Choice of a New Generation

New Coke

The “Choice of the New Generation” campaign helped Pepsi maintain its competitive edge against Coca-Cola and solidify its connection with younger consumers, contributing to its continued success in the cola market during the 1980s.

Coca-Cola had to do something. And they did. After devoting two years to market research, spending about $4 million and conducting internal taste tests of about 200,000 consumers changing the taste of Coca-Cola seemed logical.

A new cola flavor was created that beat the old Coca-Cola and Pepsi in taste test. At a New York city press conference on April 23, 1985, CEO of Coca-Cola Roberto Goizueta announced the introduction of New Coke;

“The best soft drink, Coca-Cola is now going to be even better. Simply stated we have a new formula for coke. Some may choose to call this the boldest single marketing move in the history of packaged-goods business, we simply call it the surest move ever made.”

Rather than divide its market share between two sugar sodas, Coca-Cola discontinued its 99-year old classic recipe.

Public reactions to New Coke

Coca-Cola’s decision to replace the original formula with New Coke was met with public backlash from loyal consumers.

The company received thousands of letters and phone calls from unhappy consumers expressing their disappointment and dissatisfaction with the decision.

The Company’s Atlanta headquarters was forced to hire extra operators to handle the angry 5000 phone calls that were coming in each day. By June, they were handling 8000 calls a day.

• “Our children will never know refreshment.”
• “Dr. Pemberton, where were you when we needed you!”
• “We want the real thing!”
• “I don’t think I’d be more upset if you were to burn the flag in our front yard.”

Consumers poured the contents of New coke bottles into sewer drains. One Seattle consumer went as far as filing a lawsuit against the company to force it to provide the old drink.

Pepsi capitalized on the on the backlash. Pepsi gave its employees the day off and declared victory in full-page newspaper advertisement that boasted, “After 87 years of going at it eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked.”

Coca-Cola’s extensive testing confirmed the superiority of New Coke in taste tests but it still failed.

Direct market research is great but it cannot be relied on. The ONLY kind of research you can always rely on is indirect.

Indirect Voice of Customer

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.”

David Ogilvy

People usually don’t say what they actually want. Indirect Voice of Customer research involves gathering insights about your target audience from places where they have no idea they’re being probed for market research.

When people don’t feel like they’re being questioned, they don’t feel the need to change their answers.

The best way to know what the market wants is to let the market tell you what it wants, what is relevant and intrigues them. You can find this out through secondary sources like:

• Blogs relevant to your product or service
• Amazon listings and reviews
• Youtube video comments
• Facebook groups and Facebook ad library
• Relevant subreddits
• Online forms and other social media
• Feedly
• Twitter
• Instagram comments
• Quora

Copy anything that is relevant to your product from these sources; comments, posts, direct quotes. This will help you know what to say and how to say it in the most effective way.

• What do they want?
• What’s currently getting in their way of them getting it?
• What do they think of similar products?
• What issues do they have with the solutions already available to them?
• What promise would most likely make them buy?
• What language are they using to discuss your product?
• What are their pains and fears?

Your customers are interested in solving their problems and if you can show them how your product or service will help them solve their problems then they would buy.

The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy. Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire—but to channel and direct it.

Eugene Schwartz

Summarize all the information you have collected and rank the summaries by intensity and frequency. Then, match each summary to a corresponding benefit that your product offers.

As Eugene Schwartz put it, “List the number of different performances it (your product) contains, group these performances against the mass desire that each of them satisfies and then feature that one performance that will harness the greatest sales power onto your product at that particular time.”

Your copy should connect your product to your prospect dominating desire. Show prospect how product performances satisfies that desire.

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