When Nissan wanted to ensure that it’s luxury Infiniti brand direction was in sync with Infiniti customer values, they engaged Zwillinger Research to create a custom study that would guide their strategic decision-making and lower their risk.
Using a qualitative research technique known as Laddering, Zwillinger was able to determine what the customer wanted—even when the customer wasn’t sure what influenced their buying decisions. During the research project we ascertained both conscious and preconscious triggers that lead Infiniti customers to make buying decisions.
According to Rachel Nguyen, Director of Advanced Planning and Strategy for Nissan North America, “What the qualitative research was doing, and laddering in this case, was soliciting intangible values from tangible ones. And, that’s a powerful tool when you can have someone tell you what’s at the core of why something is important to him or her. And that’s what Zwillinger’s research provided us.”
With that information and working together with Zwillinger Research, Nissan was able to choose the features in the design pipeline most likely to increase interest in product purchase for the next several model years.
Michele Zwillinger was very accommodating to all of our research ideas and she tried to resolve all concerns by custom tailoring the research specifically to answer all the Nissan questions. Plus she made changes to enhance the results as we got more and more comfortable explaining the items to our target consumers. She was very flexible in traveling to cover a huge amount of territory within the USA to be very complete. On our request, she included all the various geographical areas that might have differing opinions.
I feel that the work that Michele did for Nissan and the Infiniti brand allowed for important decisions to be made on what future features to offer. That is a very strong opportunity that was not available prior to completion of this research, so this makes all of us (both Americans & Japanese partners) feel like we could construct a good road map for the future. We are happy and pleased with the results, in other words.
Michele, again I wanted to tell you that it was a pleasure to work with you on the Infiniti Future Feature Customer Laddering Process Research.
~Randall Fior, Regional Product Manager (Product Planning – Infiniti), Nissan North America, Inc.
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