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Usage & Attitudes

Usage & Attitudes is a foundational piece of research used to better inform yourself about your consumers and how these consumers interact with your category.

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When is usage & attitudes (U&A) research useful?

The scope and approach of U&A can range: large or small, generalized to answer the 5Ws (who/what/when/where/why/how) or informative on a very specific topic area. But, the end goal tends to be similar for clients: the research fills in knowledge gaps in order for some sort of strategic implementation to take place.  

Typically, U&As are conducted when clients need to learn or re-learn the dynamics of their category and the consumer. A mature brand in a mature category may conduct a U&A every few years to update the brand team’s knowledge but this may be different for a new brand breaking into a new category and have no prior research to lean on.  

Inflection points like Covid-19 is another (extreme!) example of when clients needed to refresh and learn how the pandemic would affect consumer behavior, as it relates to their category or brand. If you have a laundry-list of questions about their consumer and category, it’s usually a good indicator that they need a U&A!  

The benefits of usage & attitude research

Foundational knowledge

Doing a U&A provides foundational knowledge to guide strategic decisions; used as ‘building blocks’ for plans over the next few years.    

Debunks hypotheses

Doing a U&A can debunk and/or affirm hypotheses within your organization or about your category/brand; rooted in research facts for better decision-making. Useful for when someone says “show me the evidence”. 

Connect to the consumer

Running a U&A will connects your organization with their consumer. It also allows consumers to have a voice and for you to intimately know them. 

Our perspective on usage & attitudes research

It’s not difficult to understand what the benefits of U&As are, but a common risk or complaint at the end of an U&A is its application – we want you to be able to use it. Therefore, it’s important to align on what you are hoping to learn from a study, what you’ll do with the info and who will be responsible for implementing it. We work with you and your team members to make the results come to life and find ways to refer back to the U&A study.

“Attitudes” is built into the name, but it’s also important to build in some trade-off techniques into an U&A study. Think: MaxDiffs for long attribute lists, or even a short Upsiide to complement the other attitudinal data you’ll be collecting.      

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