Shaping a Future Customer 'Mindset'

Testing future or hypothetical mental states is always difficult, especially with physicians, who tend to claim that those mental states will be dictated solely by clinical data. We had to devise a way to identify barriers (subtle and obvious) to adoption of these mindsets and then to walk Rx'ers through a number of potential steps needed to get them there.

We made a tiny disruptive tweak to the usual card sort methodology by asking respondents to rank a group of four 'Mindsets.' With the rankings in hand, we broke with convention by asking the doctors to focus on the 'Mindset' they least agreed with.

As they sat with the problematic Mindset staring up at them, we then asked them to choose three Reasons to Believe (RTBs) that would get them closest to embracing the ideas behind that most problematic Mindset.

The exercise harnessed each respondent's contrarian side and essentially enlisted them to find RTBs that would persuade them (despite not wanting to be persuaded!). The resulting insights gave our customer a huge leg up in nudging the market toward its hoped-for Mindsets.