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USING DIAL TESTING TO BECOME KING OF THE MODERATORS
by Rich Thau, President, Presentation Testing, Inc.
“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Erasmus’s bit of 16th century wisdom easily could apply to today’s world of the moderator: “In the country of focus group research, the moderator who offers dial testing is king.”
Why is that? Well, to use another analogy, a moderator with dial testing capabilities is like the physician with an MRI machine surrounded by competitors who merely take X-rays. All of them can peer below the surface. The question is, who among them can diagnose a serious problem that everyone else fails to uncover?
If you’re not familiar with dial testing, it’s a process that enables you to gather continuous, moment-to-moment audience feedback on any type of continuous stimulus, such as TV ads, movie trailers, infomercials, radio/music shows, mock trials, medical/pharmaceutical presentations, and sales pitches. It lets you pinpoint, literally second-by-second, where audiences become bored or confused with the material, or where they disagree with it or fail to believe it.
By capturing an audience’s in-the-moment, visceral reaction to the subject matter, you’re using a powerful diagnostic tool to pinpoint where your client has problems (and successes) with its messaging. More importantly, though, you can use the dial test results as the touchstone for a better-informed focus group discussion—one where you find out why a particular problem exists and how it might be remedied.
In short, the dial testing process is like that MRI: it gives you an unprecedented view of your participants’ thinking, offering you insights you’d unlikely uncover on your own. Even better, it does so in an anonymous, egalitarian way, free of undue influence from the most vocal participants in the room.
From the Moderator’s Perspective
Clearly, dial testing is not for every project. But if you’re seeking feedback on continuous stimulus material, such as a broadcast or presentation, it has a potential role. And from a moderator’s perspective, the process of integrating dial testing is simple and straightforward.
First, a moderator needs to subcontract with a company that supplies both the dials and an on-site technician. There are a handful of companies that offer that service, including mine. You usually need to provide two weeks’ advance notice to ensure a vendor is available to travel to your testing sites.
Once at a focus group session, you will need to instruct audiences on the use of the dial before you show the stimulus material; firms usually have tried-and-tested language to make that tutorial easy and brief. Note it’s important that instructions include a very quick warm-up, to ensure participants are comfortable with the dials and the zero-to-100 scale that they’re using.
While the stimulus material is being shown, the moderator usually sits in the observation room to gauge moment-to-moment participant reaction while with his/her client. To view this, the moderator watches a TV monitor as dial test results are superimposed over the stimulus material, so he can track what reaction the material elicited at any given moment. These results are burned onto a DVD recorder for future review.
Relocating temporarily to the observation room not only helps the moderator follow the dial test results in the moment, but also stay attuned to client concerns. Furthermore, the moderator can electronically “mark” particular snippets of the stimulus that he/she wants to ask about during the focus group discussion, and efficiently skip from one to the next without delay.
Once back with the participants, the moderator instructs the technician to play one snippet at a time and then asks participants for comments. One common technique, when confronted with ineffective messaging, is to ask participants how it should be rephrased or re-framed so as to be more effective in the future. These suggestions become the basis for actionable recommendations made to the client—recommendations for proposed revisions that should re-tested with other audiences in the future.
Strengthening the Moderator’s Hand
It’s one thing to hear focus group participants speak critically of a client’s messaging and convey that in a written report. Clients can often take it or leave it. But it’s much more persuasive for a client to see its own messaging nose-diving on a TV monitor, second by second, and be visually struck by the blunt force of that failure.
Integrating footage of dial test results into a presentation to clients is enormously powerful, and adds to the moderator’s cache as both particularly insightful and cutting-edge.
What’s also extremely useful is benchmarking audience attitudes about a product or service before showing the stimulus material, and then measuring the change afterwards. The dial testing system enables moderators to take votes on any scale (one-to-seven, zero-to-10, etc.) or ask questions with discrete multiple-choice answers. The moderator can privately view the answers to these questions in chart form on a miniature monitor at his/her station at the head of the focus group table.
With this instant feedback, the moderator can then use the findings to incorporate into discussions: “I see from your “before” and “after” scores that the men are much likelier to buy the product having seen the video, but the women remain unconvinced. Let’s hear from the women...”
The Payoff
Besides boosting what you learn, there’s also more money to earn. With this capability you’re phenomenally more valuable and insightful. Moderators using this technique charge as much as $6,000 per focus group for incorporating it into their research and reporting on findings. With the dial testing vendors offering the technology to moderators at just $3,000 per day, there’s plenty of room for profit.
The easiest way to know whether dial testing is right for you is to test it once and see for yourself. Moderators often don’t appreciate the full impact until they try it on an actual client project. Only then do they—and their grateful clients—recognize its true power.
Rich Thau is president and founder of Manhattan-based Presentation Testing, Inc. (www.PresentationTesting.com). His company dial tests and refines messaging for such firms as T. Rowe Price, United Healthcare, Vanguard, and Genworth Financial. Currently he is dial testing the 2008 Presidential primary debates and posting sample results at www.MessageJury.com
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