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12.08.2005

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

09.08.2005 "Reality Marketing: What It Is...And How to Get It"

For more Hartman Group articles on MEAL FRAGMENTATION, click here...

10.20.2005 "Uncertain Future of Meal Preparation Retail"

04.14.2005 "Emerging Trends in Parenting the Healthy Eater"

09.23.2004 "Asian Dinner Mixes & the Family Meal"

11.11.2004 "What's for Dinner?: Understanding Meal Fragmentation"

08.05.2004 "Snacking Our Way Through the Day: Food Culture in America"

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Out-of-the-box Ideas From The Box Itself...the Home: meal Fragmentation And Other Cultural Trends

- Lynne, 42-year-old mother of two

For the past several years, Hartman Group analysts and ethnographers have been hearing brief living room confessions from moms who claim that they "have to" tailor evening meal production to suit the individual preferences of their children, spouses and, in Lynne's case, even themselves. While, in some cases, this has to do with a child's food allergy or intolerance, the less easily explained cases we've run across involve the household whose 12-year-old daughter has just discovered vegetarianism; the household whose Mom, sous chef du jour, bemoans her daily restaurant-like dinner planning of individual meals (even though she too generally refuses to share what she's making for herself with anyone else); or the household whose parents believe their children clearly communicated food preferences long before they could even talk. Regardless of its causality, the fragmentation of the evening meal along lines of individual taste preferences appears increasingly common, despite the fact that it is one of the last meal occasions Americans routinely try to enact at least some of the time each and every week.

We term this cultural trend meal fragmentation and have had our eye on it for some time, especially in relationship to the macro-cultural forces contributing to increased rates of weight gain and obesity in the United States. Our current Hartman Interactive survey on meal fragmentation is indicating that only a third of homes with two or more people actually share the exact same foods when they sit down to eat together. The other two-thirds of such homes experience some degree fragmentation of their evening meals.

While this is all very nice to know, how exactly can businesses make sense of this kind of trend to create strategic value?

Making Sense of Cultural Trends

Many marketers and entrepreneurs jump too quickly to tactical solutions upon catching a glimmer of a behavioral shift in this or that segment they routinely target. Large-scale tracking survey vendors, like the NPD Group, provide annual updates of isolated data points concerning what we might call cultural level data (e.g., number of restaurant visits per week in this or that demographic group). Because they are one of few sources for this kind of general cultural behavior, clients are tempted to move straight to action based on shifts in the bar graph.

But the hasty leap from thin cultural trend data like this to tactical solutions ignores a critical step in both research and analysis: Useful analysis on this kind of cultural behavior requires a broad context in order to see what its true implications, its ripple effects, really are within households. This cultural context is critical to knowing how to respond to a cultural trend most innovatively or when to simply ignore it. The less context one has on a trend like meal fragmentation the more likely businesses will simply innovate within the same old set of parameters.

But, to get at this kind of context requires a different way of engaging with consumers than market research has in its current toolkit. It requires a level of intimate, ongoing rapport with specific consumers and households that generally can only be found in academic social science research, if that. Most client-based projects, although quite efficient, productive and actionable, simply do not allow for the scope of contextual inquiry, the exploratory depth or the time necessary to interact with consumers intimately enough to understand how complex cultural trends operate at the household level, how they profoundly impact how consumers live, shop and use within key categories of cultural activity relevant to out-of-the-box thinkers looking for opportunity spaces that will be mainstream business concerns in five or 10 years.

How Do Businesses Learn about Cultural Trends Accurately?

But how, exactly, can anyone really understand the impact of a trend like meal fragmentation and how it affects grocery shopping? Traditional market research methods generally rely, unfortunately, on respondents being already aware of their attitudes and behaviors. This makes most market research techniques great for studying top-of-mind attitudes and behaviors, including those related to counter-cultural consumer movements, such as organic foods consumption. Direct questioning on more mundane cultural behavior, however, is often another story. Most Americans don't have much coherent or top-of-mind to say in response to questions like: "How do you plan your dinners?" Meal planning, for example, isn't a practice that people are used to talking about with others...it is an inherently tacit behavior whose details get forgotten quite easily and quite quickly in the rhythm of everyday life.

To uncover tacit cultural dynamics requires that analysts develop relationships with consumers that include the ability to observe their everyday behavior as it happens and to track that behavior over time to develop precisely the solid patterns direct questioning struggles to yield. It is, then, the household that is the most ideal laboratory in which to observe the forces driving hard-to-research cultural trends, like meal fragmentation, and their implications for businesses.

Key Questions for Understanding Meal Fragmentation

Who really drives fragmentation of taste preferences in the household?
Conventional Wisdom: Picky children are the prime agents of this kind of fragmentation and marketing to children has perhaps only encouraged this phenomenon.
Emerging Insight: Moms can also be responsible for promoting, if not causing, taste fragmentation. They may, for example, have their own dietary agenda for dinner, like Lynne who avoids the red meat she routinely cooks for everyone else. Moreover, the "picky child" theory is a cliche theory devised to explain the individual rejection of foods intended to be shared, something very different from what we are beginning to see as the primary cultural engine of meal fragmentation: individual taste preferences that are legitimized/honored in the home during the meal planning process itself. In some homes, like Lynne's, it is a proactive attempt to satisfy individual food preferences, not capitulation to manipulative children, that is at play.
What aspect of producing the evening meal does meal fragmentation most adversely affect?
Conventional Wisdom: Lack of time, the "time famine," is the prime difficulty in preparing meals. So moms are running to Applebees, Subway, to crock pot meals, etc
Emerging Insight: The "time famine" theory would seem to hold even more in homes experiencing fragmented dinners on a regular basis. The more preferences need to be accommodated, the more time it should take, in theory, to get dinner produced, right? Our pilot phase is suggesting that is not always the case. Meal planning may actually be far more of an issue in homes experiencing meal fragmentation than a persistent "lack of time" to produce a fragmented meal. The cognitive and emotional burden of fragmented meals is what we're finding looms as a larger top-of-mind issue than "time" in homes like Lynne's. In Lynne's case we witnessed her, on one occasion, cook a flank steak and fresh vegetables just for her 10-year-old son in just a 20-minute time window between returning home from the grocery store and rushing him off to a soccer game.
How do mothers make sure they satisfy individual taste preferences during the shopping experience?
Conventional wisdom: Duh? They ask their kids what they like, look in their pantries before shopping and make lists.
Emerging Insight: June Cleaver hung up her apron a long time ago; very few moms are this well organized any more. Working parents, especially, have great difficulty staying in touch with the evolving preferences of family members. We caught Lynne, for example, mis-remembering her children's preferences on a few occasions or, more commonly, remembering their category-level preferences ("Tommy likes chocolate pudding") but not the specific product-level attribute perferences (the snack pack pudding with the red label, NOT the sugar-free kind). We're finding that meal fragmentation can yield repercussions within the most banal of grocery shopping experiences. What if Mom can't remember the name, or even the look of, her son's newfound favorite pudding? What if she can't remember the specific product she bought as an experiment in promoting a healthier boxed juice? What if the staple contents of the pantry are forgotten by the husband who gets sent shopping one night and thinks that private labels are good enough? What if evolving taste/product preferences aren't remembered or communicated well between household members and, therefore, never make it to the main shopper?
The chances that the accommodation of evolving individual taste preferences will break down by the time consumers reach the store now appears to us to be much more considerable than we had earlier thought. We could have only learned this through ethnographic research, a method patient and intimate enough to allow us to observe how families integrate meal production and grocery shopping with life itself. These are questions survey designers would almost never think to ask, because they never got close enough to consumers to let them set the agenda for discovery and learning. By simply opening their lives to professionally trained ethnographers, consumers have a great deal to share about the real problems of everyday life.

Unsure of what kinds of things we could learn, our work immersing ourselves in consumers' homes already has revealed that this kind of consumer engagement can give clients access to cultural phenomena most companies rarely consider during the optimism of initial product or service development - parenting styles, adolescent identity formation, meal production strategies, etc.). This is precisely the kind of background information traditional qualitative market research won't get you and that, without a doubt, can help weed out concepts that simply have no relevance and that don't solve the pesky problems of everyday existence.

Our work offers access to how America's cultural landscape is shifting and fragmenting at the everyday, mundane level in which consumers live, shop and use. The power of these insights is in generating out-of-the box ideas for new products and services that almost never appear on this or that brand manager's agenda. These ideas emerge from connecting the dots between shopping, product usage and cultural trends affecting the home. It is moreover the power of listening to consumers first and innovating second. We are still surprised at how many large companies begin the innovation process by looking first into their supply chain dynamics and established production techniques. This is how the TV dinner was invented, apparently, when Gerry Thomas of Swanson needed a way to sell surplus turkey inventory after Thanksgiving. This was innovation for an era when consumers looked to corporate America to lead them forward to a brighter, more modern future. Today's consumer is willing to be led by companies and brands but reserves the right to betray either at the slightest hint of irrelevance to their particular situation.

To avoid the specter of irrelevance, business needs a tool like ethnographic research, a tool that provides unprecedented access to consumers' everyday lives coupled with well-analyzed insights into what the messy reality of those everyday lives actually means for business.

Is this what the circus was like?

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