Pi-Consulting

Since the 1950s, market researchers have watched the ascendance of disparate consumer value groups, and the transition from mass- to niche-marketing. These observations have spawned a number of different forms of market research focused on consumer insight. The techniques range from the most basic demographic, socio-economic and lifestage models to brand usage and attitude (U&A) studies, focus groups, segmentations and perceptual mapping, among other techniques.
Advertisers have generally welcomed the development of these tools. As noted in the listing of techniques below, each new development has initially been hailed as a breakthrough in consumer understanding, but in practice many of the newly available “insight” products have turned out to be frustratingly simplistic and impoverished in content, sometimes only offering “dim and mysterious glimpses into the obvious”. Advertisers sometimes see such studies as lacking in clarity and actionability due to a somewhat exclusive “guru-culture” among market researchers, an insistence on complex jargon-ridden presentation formats, and a growing catalog of obscure and shifting value definitions.
Furthermore, many consumer insight research studies have been developed and applied for one specific country, or consumer group within a country. This has given rise in many cases to a pervasive “not-invented-here” attitude which hinders cross-border brand learnings and international comparisons.
The result has been a mixture of growing advertiser commitment to seeking consumer insight with a growing frustration in using the available tools for pursuing that commitment. Faced with ever-increasing competitive pressures, advertisers are anxious to avoid wasting time and money. They want simple, revealing consumer insights that they can apply to their multi-national brands. Though market insight services have traditionally been the preserve of ad agencies, many advertisers now regard them as too important to leave to others. Advertisers themselves want hands-on participation in generating and applying the strategic insights relevant to their global business. No single market research product on the market has succeeded in meeting their needs satisfactorily. Using those products in combination has often resulted in confusion and contradiction rather than clarity.
It was against this background that Pi was created.

Emerging insight tools

In the first decades following World War II, society was inherently stable and predictable. An individual was supposed to “know his place”. As seen above, the new-fangled science of marketing started out in the certain knowledge that a good product with a winning commercial proposition would appeal evenly and consistently to a mass-audience. Back then we confidently defined our target groups in terms like “Housewives With Children” and “Young Males 18-34”. Consumers appeared conveniently obedient to the habits and mindsets their demographic group supposedly embodied.
Then along came the 1960s and 1970s, and everything started to fly to pieces. The concept of “The Consumer As Individualist” asserted itself in the public mind, and demographics-based group definitions began to look clumsy and misleading. Consumer groupings became more arbitrary, discretionary and transitional. Values and attitudes research began to change marketing ideas in the 1970s, when SRI in California introduced its hugely influential VALS (“values and life styles”) segmentation model. Suddenly demographic stereotypes were being overtaken by labels like “Achievers”, “Experiencers”, Strivers” and “Believers”. Rival segmentation systems crowded into the market with a mission to explain the “fragmentation effect”, and the days of mass-marketing suddenly seemed numbered.
VALS and its segmentation approach were not the only tool available to advertisers who wanted to “look inside the consumer’s head”. Below is a brief review of the five main types of tools available.