Research Surveys launches new Quality of Life Model

The new model, which goes well beyond the traditional use of wealth (LSMs) as the primary means of segmenting people, was developed in response to new thinking from around the world on how people respond to advertising and make daily brand buying decisions. However, the new model represents cutting edge thinking in that it weaves together several separate threads of thought from the US, the UK and Europe into one cohesive model for the first time.

Marketers in SA universally use LSMs as the starting point for target market definitions and as a key part of the analysis of most research studies. It turns out that this is a very "thin" way of understanding consumers. The modern trend is to throw out the term "consumer" and, instead, think about "people" in a richer way, in order to communicate at a level and in a way that will ring bells with real living and breathing people.

EQLi from Research Surveys provides a world first in doing this quantitatively. In presenting a model that measures 14 aspects of people's "whole" lives, EQLI explicitly brings together for the first time, several newly recognised marketing forces in people's lives:

There have been major advances in the understanding neuroscience brings to how our brains function, in particular, how they absorb, process and use information. We do indeed process much of the huge mass of information we receive daily at a cognitive level, with higher attention levels. But we absorb and process much more at much lower levels of attention. This has new and major implications for advertising and branding, as well as research, as these memories are at a more visceral, emotional level. In particular, it challenges traditional marketing models and shows that the effect of advertising is often greater than previously thought, particularly advertising that engages the emotions – the root of all great advertising.

These emotional associations with brands, which can be very enduring, are used by the brain as a shortcut in making many decisions, especially daily decisions. "Does it feel right?" is a common way that the brain makes these quick decisions. Our brains are now known to store at least 10 000 brands, so the use of these shortcuts is an essential way to make brand buying decisions from the ever increasing and confusing array that confronts us. These "fast and frugal" heuristics, as they are termed, depend on brand memories that are built up over time and take into account every kind of encounter that a person has with a brand, its parent company, its people, as well as, crucially, the views of others, either explicit or implicit. Much of the information we receive about brands is associated with a positive or negative feeling that the body generates unconsciously and stores as part of the brand memory.

If we do think about a brand cognitively, the emotive component is still at play. Ultimately, in any conflict between cognitive and emotive decision-making, emotions always win. These emotions are largely developed from the low attention component of our brand memories.

A person's own degree of happiness affects the level of attention given to incoming information and the level of attention employed in making daily decisions. People fall on a continuum from lower attention/heuristic processing to high attention/more cognitive processing. Happier people make more use of heuristics; less happy people tend to agonise more over decisions and pay more cognitive attention to brand communications. This has a huge influence on the way we think about the style, tone and manner of our communications.

Realising that people are parts of networks of other people and that this has a fundamental modifying influence on their everyday buying decisions is now considered as a previously highly neglected force. The terms "the tipping point", "the Latin school of marketing", "viral marketing" and "tribal marketing" are indicators of this new view and again challenge much of traditional marketing thinking.

There is a new focus around the world on health at all levels – understanding the body, mind and soul. This fundamentally affects people's sense of well-being and the judgements that they bring to their daily buying trade-offs.

"Consumer" confidence is a key indicator of future buying pattern changes in most countries. At an individual level, a measure of optimism provides a way of understanding how people approach money management, leisure activities, lifestyle planning – and daily buying decisions.

Finally, in many sectors of society, there is a growing disillusionment with big companies and with big brands. People are savvy to conventional marketing activities and are becoming more vocal about accountability, the need to be treated as real people, and the social corporate responsibility that they are beginning to expect as routine from big companies. So, marketers need to understand their customers properly and the unique, complex and unpredictable beings that they are.

All of this points to the need to think beyond LSMs and to examine people's broad well-being – their Everyday Quality of Life. The new RS EQLI model provides a framework to understand all these influences, and to measure specific aspects so as to provide marketers with new ways of understanding why communications do or do not work, why brands respond as they do, and what types of communication and media will work best with different people.