Do you love the Whopper?

Happy Valentine's Day! May you feel loved

and cherished today.

There are many different types of marketing research. Almost every marketer wants to get at the essence of a company or product's brand from the customer's viewpoint- really get inside their heads and find out why they like it (or don't), how they feel about it, how they would describe it, etc. Then we develop marketing strategies based on this information, hopefully being more effective at getting people to buy our products or services. Typical primary research methods include surveys, focus groups and taste tests.

Today I learned about a new (and hilarious) form of marketing research to accomplish this, deprivation research. I read about it on one of my favorite marketing sites reveries.com. They had an article about Burger King using deprivation research to find out how customers felt about the Whopper. And they videotaped it. And put it on YouTube. It's like watching a hidden camera show. Check out the article and follow the link to the video clip. It's about 7 minutes long, but totally worth watching through to the end when they start giving Wendy's burgers to customers and then denying it. Hilarious.

It reminds me of when TGI Fridays stopped making their own blue cheese dressing from scratch and switched to a premade dressing. I loved their original dressing and almost cried. The new dressing tasted nothing like the original. I even had to talk to the manager multiple times about it. And I very rarely go there anymore now...