How to Use Blob Trees to Uncover Real Emotions (Full Transcript)

[00:00:08] Speaker 1: Hi friends, Catherine Korostoff here from Research Rockstar, and today I have a very special guest with me. I'm going to start off with a conversation with Martha Hayward, who is a true research rock star in qualitative research, and she and I have been talking about some interesting things lately, including the importance of understanding emotions. You might find yourself doing qualitative research projects where you've been asked to discover or explore emotions, but it's kind of a complicated thing to do. So Martha, welcome, and I was hoping you could start us off by maybe you could share an example of a project you've done where it was important to understand the participants' emotions.

[00:00:48] Speaker 2: Absolutely, and thanks for having me, Catherine. So an example that comes to mind is doing patient journey work, and a patient journey means understanding the full path of someone who's got some kind of medical condition, starting with before they were diagnosed, going through the diagnosis process, going through treatments, and bringing them up to present day, and that kind of end-to-end experience that an individual might have as someone who's been diagnosed with a certain condition. And you can probably imagine talking to patients, immediately it can be emotionally fraught, but you might also make the assumption, if you didn't ask, that it's terrible being a patient or that someone's always distraught to get a diagnosis, for example. So it's really important when doing a patient journey or anything of that nature to explore these emotions along the way and to find out they might have been frustrated before they were diagnosed, and then actually at diagnosis they're happy and delighted because now they know what's going on, what is it that was causing the situation. And so similarly, someone might be very anxious going into treatment, someone else might be excited going into treatment for various reasons. So it's important to understand these emotions because in this example, if you're working for a company that provides treatments to the situation, they want to make sure that they're talking to patients in a way that resonates with the patients at the moment that they're having that experience and that they're sort of meeting people where they are. And if they can't understand the emotions that someone might go through, or they just go with an assumption, it's terrible to be a patient, then they might be hitting the wrong tone in a communication.

[00:02:36] Speaker 1: I really love that example, and it really resonates with me because even though I've never done healthcare research personally, I've mostly done work in tech and electronics and consumer products, I've definitely done projects where the emotional responses we got were very different than what we were expecting. And it would have been very easy for the marketer or the brand to have made an assumption about the emotional associations that people have. And if we hadn't done the research, we wouldn't have found out that actually the emotions are quite fragmented or just different than we expected. And in your experience, do you find that some people are better able to express their emotions when they're participating in in-depth interviews or other types of qual?

[00:03:24] Speaker 2: Yeah, I definitely think it's natural that some people will pretty readily come out with some pretty deep thoughts on their emotion without a whole lot of prompting. And some people certainly need a bit more to help them get to their true thinking. So I think just a casual example, you might go, how are you doing today? Oh, I'm fine, right, just as a very standard way of talking. But a lot of people, if you ask, oh, how are you feeling? Oh, I'm fine. It's good. I liked it. It's nice. You sort of get this very generic response. But if your goal is to really understand a real emotion about a certain situation, about a certain product, behavior, whatever it might be, then having the qualitative researcher having some tools and techniques to get beyond that surface level can be really helpful.

[00:04:13] Speaker 1: I like that explanation a lot. And I also find, frankly, that it can vary somewhat in terms of demographic profiles. In my experience, I have found that there are certain demographic groups that can be harder than others. And I've also done a lot of multinational studies. And in some countries, it's really hard to get people to be candid about how they're feeling. And that can be a big challenge as well.

[00:04:40] Speaker 2: And it can even change with the person's passions, right? If you say, what do you think about that ice cream? It's nice. What do you think about those shoes? Oh, let me tell you all about those shoes because they're a sneaker head, just as an example.

[00:04:51] Speaker 1: That's a really great point. Yeah. So getting them where they're engaged or talking about a brand where they're engaged, you're going to get more richness. I love that. And that's always something we deal with in research, too, is that we do have a tendency. And we know as professionals, we are aware of this. So we're sensitive to it. But sometimes in research, we hear about the extremes. We hear about the extreme negative or the extreme positive. And sometimes teasing out some of the important things that might be more neutral but still important can be hard to tease out. So I think that's an interesting issue. So we know that emotions can be important, and we know that sometimes it can be hard. What are some techniques that you like as a way to get beyond superficial responses about emotions?

[00:05:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So I really enjoy using projective techniques. And of course, what's a projective technique? It's in the name. It's a way that it's a tool that allows the respondent you're talking to to project their emotions onto whatever it is, the tool, the technique, the instrument that you're using. And it gives them a way to sort of safely and easily get to that deeper emotion. And so some examples of these, one that I've used that was very straightforward for one project was we literally had a list of emotions. It was an emotion wheel. It was sort of a circle with all of these emotions, and they sort of went from happier to less happy emotions as you went around the wheel. But just give them something to pick from so they can sort of identify, oh, I'm feeling, I felt anxious, right? I felt excited, whatever it might be, from a list of emotions. That's a very straightforward one. But then you can get a little more, a little deeper and a little more creative. So another example that people like to use a lot is image selection. You can put up on your screen or in person, whatever it is, a variety of images. And these are images that are many times very ambiguous. And they're not necessarily like a person smiling and a person frowning. That might be too straightforward. Like it's a lightning in the sky, and it's a tree alone in the field, and a variety of things. And then say, well, which of these images represents how you feel about whatever it is that you're asking about, about when you were diagnosed? I'll just stick with that example. And then they can look at these, and they can say, oh, well, I identify with the lightning coming from the sky because it was like this aha moment. Like now, eureka, I know what's going on. And a totally different person might look at the exact same picture and say, I choose the lightning in the sky because I felt this pain from my situation. So it's just giving people something to kind of put their thoughts and feelings onto lets them articulate it and give you that deeper level of thinking without necessarily, you know, without just saying, oh, I felt fine. So I got off topic. That was image selection, but that's a very popular one. Similarly, you could do collages, which is a couple images put together, ask someone to make a collage. And then there's also something that's easy to do on the fly. If, say, you're doing an interview and you're like, oh, I'm not getting anywhere. I need to like quickly pivot. I don't have anything prepared. You can do some kind of personification exercise. One example is, say, we're talking about a brand, and you can just say, and they're like, it's fine. It's nice, right? You're sort of not getting anywhere. You might ask, well, if this brand were and say, let's say you're working for a shoe brand. So you say, well, if that brand was a car company, which car company would it be? And then they can say, oh, well, I choose, you know, it's a Lamborghini because it's really high end and fancy, et cetera, and expensive. Or maybe they say, oh, it's a Toyota Corolla, right? This is a very, very basic shoe brand, just as an example. So something like that, you can really quickly get them into this, like, how do I feel about it? How do I identify and associate? You can say the same thing. You can say, what animal would it be, right? Or if they were attending a party, how would they act at a party? So it's a couple of different ways to, like, just pretty quickly get to a way to talk about the topic in a less direct way, but at the same time gets you to this sort of deeper thoughts and feelings about it.

[00:09:06] Speaker 1: I love all of those examples. I've done all of those myself. In fact, I've done projects where I've done in-person focus groups where I was doing research for a brand, and we were trying to understand brand associations. Now people really felt about this brand versus its competitors. And so on the wall of the focus group room, we had our client's brand and their key competitors printed out on poster-sized paper around the room. And then we gave everybody cards that had animals and different animals, just a wide variety of animals, and had them take the animal to the brand. And then we debriefed on that. So, oh, I noticed you put the kitten on this brand. Tell me more about that. And it was just a great conversation starter. And I for sure feel like we got things that we wouldn't have gotten if we had just said, tell me what you feel about brand X. It really got them into that whole storytelling kind of mode, almost kind of gave them permission to go a little bit deeper than to just give, like, a polite answer.

[00:10:16] Speaker 2: And I'll just add, often for the respondent, it can be kind of fun. It gives them this little bit of permission to be creative, but it breaks up the flow of just, like, I'm asking you a question, you're answering a question, back and forth, back and forth. It gives them a chance to be like, hmm, let me think about that. Let me get into a different perspective. And so it's also just a nice way to have variety in your focus group interview.

[00:10:42] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very energizing. I completely agree. Thank you so much for sharing those examples. I really appreciate your experience here. And so I know that there's another projective technique that you have experience with that we're going to be getting into in more detail. Can you just briefly give us an introduction to the next topic?

[00:10:59] Speaker 2: Sure. So one of my favorite techniques or one of my favorite projectives is using the blob tree. The blob tree is another pretty simple and straightforward way to give a person something to react to. And it's, which you'll see shortly, but it's a tree full of blob characters or blob figures. And each one provides an opportunity for the respondent to sort of address an emotion or a feeling that matches how they might feel about a certain topic.

[00:11:30] Speaker 1: I love it. And anything that brings in visuals, I think, can be so powerful. So we'll segue over to the blob tree introduction. And Martha, thank you so much for your help with this. I am sure that learning about projective techniques, especially for people who are newer to qualitative research, is really going to help amp up their research. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Catherine.

[00:12:01] Speaker 2: First, I want to start with why you might consider using the blob tree. So it is a projective tool. It's in the set of projective tools that can be used for market research that are ways to help participants project their opinions and their emotions that you might not get with a question like, how do you feel about that topic? So these are activities that are designed to be intentionally ambiguous. They let someone come up with their own thinking and reasoning for their ideas, and they can lead to a very rich discussion within a market research exercise. They're also a really nice way to provide some variety in an interaction. So if you're doing an in-depth interview and a focus group, it can get a little bit tedious sometimes. You just have question, answer, question, answer. And pausing for an exercise such as a projective tool is a really nice way to break up the flow and keep people interested in the activity. The blob tree is all about feelings, which you'll see quite a lot more in just a moment. So it is a way to really get to these deep emotions quickly and can also be used to talk about behavior, what you did in a situation, what you might do in a situation, or how someone might make some choices. It's also easy to use and it's fun to use and very versatile. So you'll hear from us a lot of different ways that you might apply the blob tree to an upcoming market research interaction. So why are we sharing this with you today? My name is Martha Hayward. I'm a qualitative market researcher, and I have done over the past seven years over 1,500 in-depth interviews and 100 focus groups. And the blob tree is one of my favorite tools. I use it quite often and I find there's a lot of richness in being able to use it.

[00:14:00] Speaker 3: And my name's Ian Long. I'm the illustrator and author of the blob tree visual tools. I began them when I was 19 years old and I've been working, developing all sorts of no word tools ever since. They're used in over 120 countries around the world because they're so simple and easy to access for children as well as adults. So this is the basic blob tree, and it's a place that symbolizes where you might have a couple of people or a whole group of people, maybe a community. It could be a whole country, the whole world, or as often is the case, one person on a variety of occasions. And into the blob tree, we place the people. And the blob people represent the two key emotions or the two key ways of communicating emotion, and that is body language and facial communication, which are two of the primary ways that children learn to understand how people feel. And they're scattered randomly around the picture. There's no particular hierarchy in order to generate a lot of looking and moving and noticing of how the blobs themselves express themselves. And we designed this really to help people to express themselves, who find emotional literacy more challenging. All they have to do is touch the blob that they feel like. And Pip on the right developed this when he was working with particularly challenging young people in the east end of London, and he struggled to get them to talk about their feelings. Generally, they operated in a fight or flight mode, but he got them to use their fingertips to touch the blob. And by so doing, they gradually developed their way of communicating. And he found ways of getting them to share. It went into one of his books and gradually spread all over the world. And that's why the blob tree is here today. When people use the blobs online, they often use numbers, and that's just to improve and enhance communication. But the numbers themselves don't represent anything. Sometimes people try and suggest that a certain blob and a certain number means a certain thing, but that's not the way the blobs work. They are a discussion tool, and the numbers imply nothing other than helping people to identify in a digital conversation which blob that they're feeling like.

[00:17:14] Speaker 2: All right, thank you, Ian. So let's get a little more specific on how you might use the blob tree in a market research activity. So like any market research, you want to start by saying, what am I trying to learn? What are my learning objectives for this particular situation? And from there, you would want to look at there are quite a variety of blob tools available. So you'd want to look at which one is going to best fit the need of the learning that I'm trying to get to today. What kind of things do I want to ask about? What kind of experience are we exploring in this research? Do ensure that you have a licensed copy of the tool, and we'll share more on that shortly. And then during the research, you're essentially showing the respondent the tool and asking them to pick which blob represents how they feel about the topic that you're discussing. So you just say, all right, which one of these represents how you feel about this new pair of sneakers or when you had your car towed or whatever it might be? And then they might answer you, say you're doing it online. They say, well, I feel like number 11. Then you ask, OK, why did you choose that one? What about this represents how you feel about that situation? So definitely keep probing until you make sure that you've gotten to the underlying idea of why a blob represents their feelings or their emotions about a certain situation. As Ian just said, those numbers are random and don't imply a hierarchy. Later, when you've finished your research and you're doing your analysis and reporting, what's really important is that you're capturing the sentiment, that thinking and those reasons why a person chose a blob and getting into those deeper emotions. That's what you're reporting rather than the blobs themselves. So you're not saying how many people chose this blob, how many people chose that blob. You're saying, well, they feel a lot of frustration because of the situation. And that's what you're going to be talking about. And as you just said, it's not right or wrong answers. It's not good or bad blobs. It's about those feelings.

[00:19:21] Speaker 3: Here's just one example, if you look at the blob that the red arrow is pointing at, probably you would associate that with a certain feeling, maybe feeling left out. But it's important that we don't impose or project our interpretation upon the blobs. And let me just illustrate that with a story. I was working as a primary school teacher and I asked a child or several children at the end of a lesson how they felt that their learning had gone. And one of the children selected this blob and I immediately thought, oh, no, why did they select that? And I used that important question that Martha mentioned. Why? Why did you choose that blob? And they said, because they're enjoying the view, they're looking into the distance, they feel calm and relaxed. And I was so happy I asked that why question. It's not about imposing our interpretations and meanings upon the blobs. Always ask why from the people that you're working with.

[00:20:33] Speaker 1: And so here's some from the children.

[00:20:35] Speaker 2: And so here's some further examples on how it can be applied to market research. And I do want to emphasize, Ian was saying that some of the origin of the blob came out of working with young people or youth, but it applies just as well to adults. So I have used this in the past, talking to people about their experience getting their car towed, talking about a patient journey, asking about a patient journey, going through cancer treatment for an adult. And even with business to business executives, when I was asking people which brand, which blob represents which brand that they have a variety of brands that they're familiar with, so it really can be used for all ages. Just a couple of examples here to inspire your thinking on how you might apply this. So on the left, we have some customer sentiment examples. So which one of those blobs represents that particular customer service interaction or your experience with that particular customer service interaction? Or your experience in the store? You could also use blobs in sort of a multi-part process. Which one represents how you expected to feel using the product? That might be maybe before unboxing, something like that. And later, which one represents how you actually felt while using the product? And that can lead to a nice, rich discussion on that, you know, perception versus reality as an example. When using blobs for multiple points in time, it can be quite useful to use it throughout a research interview, for example, that if you're going to use multiple, ask about people's feelings at different points in time, you could use it during the first part of a discussion, how was it at the beginning, then put the blob away later, when you say, okay, now we've talked about this next step in the process, let's look at it again, now, which one of these blobs represents how you feel, put it away, later, maybe there's a sort of step three in the process, and then you can use it throughout a research interview. So, and in particular, once respondents have seen it more than once, they can very quickly say, ah, I know what you want to ask me, right, so now this one is how I feel, that one's how I feel. Moving to the middle, this is that brand or product comparison, so which one of these blobs here represents perhaps my client on the tree, which one of these represents my client's competitor on the tree. And then in that journey, as I was saying, you can use it for multiple points of time, when you were first diagnosed, which one of these represents how you felt, when you started treatment, when you completed treatment, that would be a patient journey example, so there's just a lot of ways that it can be applied if you think about whatever it is that you're trying to learn and look for a blob discussion that would get into those, those emotions and those feelings about an experience.

[00:23:14] Speaker 3: There's a wide variety of blob tools. This one, for example, is all about transition. So, you might be going from the left-hand bank across the bridge to the right-hand bank, and within business, there's many occasions when people will use the blob tree in order to work out how people are feeling about the process of transition that they're going through. Sometimes, you can use scales in order to determine how people feel about a product or a process. So, going from the sad to happy scale, and on the left is the slightly more complex version, on the right, might be appropriate for using if you just want to find five examples or five responses, or you can just go from the left-hand bank to the right-hand bank, and you can use that to determine how people are feeling about the process of transition.

[00:24:11] Speaker 1: Or if you're working with a younger person or a child.

[00:24:14] Speaker 3: Likewise, if you're using, trying to find out about anxiety, how anxious people feel before and maybe after some kind of experience, or if they've been using a product, and just determining the gradual feelings that they might be having. And again, by showing how their anxiety might have reduced through the process, or because of the purchase, you can show some development emotionally as well.

[00:24:48] Speaker 2: An example I like to use for this one is perhaps a company is considering making a change to their online experience, and they want to ask their power users, who are important to them and use this sort of feature all the time, how would you feel if we changed that particular experience? Maybe they're delighted, right? And they say, I'm going to move from seven to two. Or maybe they'd say, oh, my gosh, that would be terrible if you change this experience. And they might be able to express an anxiety that way.

[00:25:18] Speaker 3: In Blob Journeys, it's trying to help people to understand, maybe they imagine themselves moving from one through to 13 on the journey, facing no difficulties at all. Whereas actually, the reality for most of us on any kind of an experiential journey is that we face difficulties and problems, much like the blobs moving from four to 11 to 12 and so on. But it's an interesting question, because sometimes people do perceive any kind of activity as being relatively easy. But the reality is very different. So this can help people to talk and think that through. So you can find all of these tools at our download online shop, open 24 hours a day, blobtree.com. And this is an example of the page. We have copyrighted tools. When you purchase them, you become licensed as a user, as an individual, and you get them instantly sent to you by email. You can download them and then you can use them as many times as you want. So once you've purchased it, maybe for five pounds, then that becomes your tool for life. And if you're part of a group of people who are doing market research or some kind of surveys, then you can obtain a group license and that enables you to purchase things at a much cheaper rate. If you are looking for the tools that we've been talking about today, you'll find them labeled under market research pack.

[00:27:08] Speaker 2: So just to wrap up with a couple tips and tricks with ways to use the blobs in market research. These do work really well in a setting like an in-depth interview. You do want to be able to spend some time asking those reasons why, getting into emotions and feelings, you know, which blob represents this situation to you. That could be a nice rich discussion. And as Ian shared, if you're doing an online experience, that's where a numbered blob tree is particularly useful for the convenient discussion. But if you're in person, say you're in a focus group facility, having an unnumbered tool removes that possible perception that they might have that there's, you know, some meaning behind the numbers. So you can strip that away and just have the version where they can look at it and they can say, or they can circle, oh, this one's me in this situation. It's also do practice. If you've never used this before, it's quite easy to do, but you can easily practice this with friends and colleagues to get some experience with that before you go into working with respondents. When you're doing a screen share, you definitely want to have it as big as possible for readability. And this is a wonderful source of rich quotes from customers or from users to get that, those thoughts and feelings that go into a report. So definitely listen for great quotes coming out of this. If you were going to use this in some kind of group setting, it does work, but just make sure that you've allowed enough time that you hear about each person in the group's answers. You don't want to get two answers and then not ask other people and move on. You definitely want to have each person respond. And also make sure that you've built enough rapport in the group that people do feel comfortable sharing their true answers in the group. So that's just the use caution side. And then don't use them in a situation where you really don't have the opportunity to fully probe into their thinking. So if there's an asynchronous research exercise where you don't have any sort of follow-up opportunity, this would probably not work very well. Also make sure that you're not indicating somehow that there's good and bad blobs or that there's, again, this hierarchy concept. That's not the point. And again, don't report out to your clients which blobs the answers were. It's about the feelings. So just to wrap up, to use the blob in market research, you want to start by understanding and determining your learning objectives. Make sure you've got the blob that's best going to fit your goals. Do make sure that you've got that licensed copy. It's easy to get and very cost effective. Practice. And then in the research, it's all about asking which blob represents this particular topic and getting to the reasons why. And then at the end, when you're reporting, it's on the sentiment and the ideas discussed. It's easy to do. It's fun. And we really encourage you to give it a try. So I'm Martha. This is Ian. And you're welcome to reach out to us with questions. Thank you for your time today.

[00:30:20] Speaker 3: Thank you for listening.

[00:30:22] Speaker 2: Bye bye.

[00:30:24] Speaker 3: Bye.