Karri Bass loves to do consumer research. As a former Procter & Gamble employee, she constantly thinks about what drives consumer behavior toward a particular product.
That desire is what led her to launch Illumination Research, a marketing consulting company that was founded on a passion for uncovering what makes consumers tick and translating those insights into business-building ideas.
“When I was working in marketing for P&G, a huge part of our job was to better understand the consumer,” says Bass, principal and insight strategist at Illumination Research. “We want to figure out how they think, not only about the product category that we were marketing but in general.
“Who are they as a person? What motivates them? What different segments are there in the marketplace and to really understand that in order to be able to translate all that knowledge into business and ideas.”
Illumination Research was founded in 2005. It now has 25 employees and the capabilities to show its clients exactly how consumers would respond to new product offerings — and offers those clients advice on how to improve.
Start with packaging
One of the marketing aspects that Bass helps clients with at Illumination Research is packaging and how that packaging grabs a consumer’s attention.
“Say a client of ours might be launching a new product,” Bass says. “Part of what they need to do is create a package that breaks through the clutter on the shelf and grabs the attention of the customers. The package has a lot to do with getting attention and speaking to them.”
As an example of finding what catches a consumer’s eye, Illumination utilizes a mobile, virtual wall that projects a life-size simulation of a shopping environment such as a store aisle.
“Before companies ever have to invest in making physical mockups of packages, we can show them on this giant computer screen in the context of what a product will look like,” she says.
Technology and innovation such as this helps Illumination show its clients how a product will look and simulate where a consumer may focus attention depending on what is on the shelf.
“A lot of times, we’re just trying to understand which packages in the aisle or which one of their new designs do the best job of getting consumers’ eyes on them,” she says. “In those cases, we might recommend they do eye tracking with the research.”
The company literally has consumers wear special goggles that track where their eyes go on the shelf to see if the package is even noticed.
“Then we want to understand once they see it what are they communicating about it,” she says. “In addition to innovative technology that allows clients to see how consumers relate to a product on a shelf, Illumination also poses questions to consumers and clients to understand the total messaging and purpose behind a product and how the company wants it to connect with a consumer.
Communication: oral and visual
“At the end of the day, it’s about the communication,” Bass says. “We have certain lines of questioning to get out the messaging and what’s coming across through the words and through the visual. It’s a marriage of both.”
Over the years, Illumination Research has been able to groom its process for understanding the consumer, which has helped deliver stronger results for clients.
“Every time we do interviews with consumers, you’re able to see what kind of questions better help them articulate their feelings,” Bass says. “A lot of our job is thinking on our feet, and we have to very quickly adapt from interview to interview with consumers and figure out what will yield the information that we will understand.” ●
How to reach: Illumination Research, (513) 774-9531 or www.illumination-research.com
