Don’t be fooled by misleading special interest marketing surveys(part 1 of 2)
Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery
Beware of “consumer research” that claims to know what consumers demand when it comes to production standards for animal agriculture. A dairy industry colleague of mine recently spoke at a conference with one of the head honchos responsible for milk and meat purchasing for Wal-Mart. Now, love ‘em or hate ‘em, but based on sales Wal-Mart knows what drives consumer purchase decisions. The Wal-Mart representative railed against “consumer surveys” recently touted by niche marketing interests and others which claim consumers want X, Y or Z associated with food products like milk and meat.
Apparently Wal-Mart (like most academic experts on consumer research) knows that you can design a survey to get people to say whatever you want. When you prompt someone with “what if’s” and “if you knew’s” people will say things that simply don’t reflect their actual opinions and rarely translate to actual product purchase behavior.
What did Wal-Mart recommend?
Watch your existing customers in the store and ask your employees (un-prompted) what they are actually seeing and hearing over time. If it doesn’t jive with promoted consumer research, it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to know which to believe: real customers and employees, or the marketing interest trying to sell you something. The Wal-Mart representative was reacting to a question regarding a special interest group claim that consumers were demanding “humane farmed” animal food products — a tactic by the animal rights movement to raise production costs and thereby reduce consumer consumption due to a combination of higher prices and the general denigration of animal agriculture: if one milk is produced humanely, then logically its competitors must be un-humane — a ridiculous, disparaging and false claim.
A similar situation arose a few years ago when an activist group called the Organic Consumers Association announced boycotts of Starbuck’s stores claiming consumers were demanding the coffee cafe giant go 100% organic, replacing their coffee with all organic, shade-grown, beans and all their milk and dairy products with “rbST-free” organic milk. Readers of this blog know the full story. For newbies, the short version is this: Starbucks responded by offering organic dairy choices to their customers and ended up throwing away more milk than they sold. Today, after spending who-knows-how-much time reacting to fake consumer demand, they no longer offer the organic milk alternatives in most stores. Today, Organic Consumers Association (between campaigns to ban biotechnology in California and leading consumer boycotts of Trader Joe’s) is urging dairies to convert to organic methods while loudly proclaiming consumer demand for organic milk is outstripping availability. Others in the dairy industry often cannot afford, like Starbucks, to make major production changes and then switch back after learning the promised customer demand wasn’t really there.
Next time you hear about “consumer demand” or “consumer research” about milk, ask a few questions and look at existing academically published research on this matter before making expensive changes. There are three types of research bandied about these days in the dairy industry. I saw a recent presentation which described this as research designed to:
research on this matter before making expensive changes. There are three types of research bandied about these days in the dairy industry. I saw a recent presentation which described this as research designed to:
- Determine actual consumer attitudes and behaviors. These are unaided consumer research (surveys) and/or actual purchasing (IRI) data analysis.
- Predict potential consumer attitudes and behaviors. These are aided or prompted surveys.
- Create consumer attitudes and behaviors. Called “push polls,” these are designed to create an opinion and/or cause an action.
Now, we really shouldn’t have to spend much time discussing the “push poll” tactic. This is usually the purview of politicians and activist groups with end-justifies-the-means mentalities. The political version of these polls asks such questions “if you knew so-and-so beat his children… would you vote for him?” Activists, like the Organic Consumers Association, run phone banks asking consumers if they want milk made with toxic chemicals and cancer-causing hormones or pure organic milk. They then take their “research” to companies like Starbucks or Trader Joe’s to bolster their demands.
The second type of polling is trickier. In some cases it’s a legitimate way to evaluate potential markets and new directions. Other times it is used to manipulate economic and political decision-making. Simply put, it is not a tool to gauge actual consumer attitudes or behaviors. Professor John Krosknick of the University of Maryland Joint Program in Survey Methodology recently presented on the challenges of this type of exploratory research. He noted, “Don’t assume that questionnaire answers are people’s attitudes, beliefs, intentions, personalities, etc…”
We have recently seen many self-interested parties providing research of this type in the dairy industry to proclaim radical shifts in consumer attitudes and purchasing behaviors. Organizations like The Hartman Research Group are out convincing people that there is a “huge untapped demand for green-labeled food, including of course organic food.” Hartman suggests that once this latent demand is unleashed, consumers will rapidly grow the markets for all shades of green-labeled food products, from humanely-raised livestock, to Salmon Safe, IPM-Grown, Bird-Friendly, and finally, the Gold Standard - certified organic food products.” However, a review of just some of Hartman’s research clearly shows that they ask loaded questions and draw their data from highly selective groups who would be predisposed to come to such conclusions. We have recently seen many self-interested parties providing research of this type in the dairy industry to proclaim radical shifts in consumer attitudes and purchasing behaviors. Organizations like The Hartman Research Group are out convincing people that there is a “Hartman suggests that once this latent demand is unleashed, consumers will rapidly grow the markets for all shades of green-labeled food products, from humanely-raised livestock, to Salmon Safe, IPM-Grown, Bird-Friendly, and finally, the Gold Standard - certified organi So what do milk consumers care about? That gets us to the first type of research: un-aided, un-prompted surveys combined with actual purchase data (such as IRI research). All of the available research on this subject (and there is a great deal) says, when consumers aren’t self-selected (meaning they didn’t phone up the local organic commune) and aren’t prompted (no leading questions about whether they care about dangerous toxins in their milk) the only things they mention about what drives their milk buying decisions are:
- Price
- Freshness
- Type of milk (whole fat v. skim)
- Specific brand loyalty
Economically speaking, research shows that price is relatively “inelastic” for milk consumers. Simply put, if prices go up consumers don’t buy as much milk. Think then of the effect of having unaffordable organic milk that proclaims to be “free of toxins” (falsely suggesting it is different, safer or of higher quality) next to conventional milk you can afford. The real effect of this type of marketing is to turn consumers away from milk completely. Rather than sort out the competing claims and higher prices, most consumers will simply purchase an alternative beverage. Freshness is another leading factor that 74-94 percent of consumers report influencing their purchase decision. Yet, we know this to be misleading as most organic brands are ultra-pasteurized for extended shelf life - thus comparisons of expiration dates can lead consumers to mistakenly choose older organic milk over the truly fresher conventional brands. Again, some are paying more and thus possibly buying less, while others are moving to alternative products.
In part two on this topic I’ll review the impact on dairy consumption of these marketing issues. We welcome anyone who has research into public attitudes about consumers and milk to share that with us and we’ll shortly post an index of all the research we’ve found and that submitted. Meanwhile, for producers, retailers and consumers our simple message remains: Milk is milk. or producer, retailers �