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Last week my 4.5-year-old rode his bike over wet leaves, slipped and fell, then screamed as if he’d snapped his tibia, when in reality his “injury” was a small bruise.
If you have young kids, this routine will sound familiar.
They dramatize their pain.
We downplay it.
Because the second you respond to their melodramatic cries, you validate them. Next thing you know your kid is covered in band-aids while the real help they need — to grow up — goes unaddressed.
The parent-young kid dynamic turns out to be a useful model for shoppers.
Shoppers, like kids, overstate minor inconveniences and struggle to articulate, and sometimes even notice, more consequential issues.
The challenge is distinguishing these deeper, less-visible challenges from the superficial complaints.
If you don’t separate the two, you risk devising solutions for non-problems.
How do you avoid this mistake?
I’m not exactly sure.
It's a big question, like “How do you raise kids?” – which I also wouldn’t claim to have the answer for.
But when it comes to surveying shoppers, there’s one method that’s helped me differentiate the breaks from the bruises: Intensity Questions.
Intensity questions gauge the emotional weight – or intensity – of an inconvenience or struggle.
Let’s say you’re marketing stress-relief bath bombs aimed at working moms.
You know about two common evening stressors:
• The urge to “be on” continuously checking email.
• The habit of reaching for one’s phone to mindlessly swipe and scroll.
Both may stem from an inability to simply relax.
But the urge to check email could be felt more intensely than the urge to swipe and scroll, or vice versa.
Should you say to customers “Switch off at the end of your workday” or “Get through your evening without reaching for your phone”?
You don’t know.
To find out, you conduct a survey to measure the occurrence of each behavior and – to discern which one impacts customers more deeply – you include an intensity question.
It looks like this, repeated for each stressor:
Occurrence Question ⤵
Q1: While relaxing at home in the evening, do you find yourself reaching for your phone, even though you don’t need to access anything?
• Yes
• No
Intensity Question ⤵
Q2: How strong or weak is the urge to reach for your phone?
• Very strong
• Strong
• Moderate
• Weak
• Very weak
The analysis is straightforward.
Compare each stressor in terms of their occurrence rate and emotional impact, and you’ll get a firmer grip on what customers need the most help with.
How you can use these questions right now
I designed three data visualizations that you can use to visualize data from a question sequence like this one.
They’re in a Keynote file, which you can download here.
Link to data visualizations
Next Steps
Considering creating a survey to identify shopper pain points but not sure if you’re doing it right?
Get a Survey Roast.
I’d love to help.
Intensity questions are just one of the many nuanced design tips I provide.
https://www.sammcnerney.com/45-dollar-survey-roast
Cheers,
Sam