To ladder or not to ladder?

It took a while but finally the outcome of our laddering class-assignment was there: the value map that represented the value we expect that our mobile phones must represent.
On Thursday the 8th of October we started by questioning each other what features we like best on a mobile phone. From these ‘attributes’ we questioned further (using the laddering technique) to get to the customer values. Most of us had no experiences with this methodology yet. Thus we were also not completely aware of the 36 values of Rokeach or the 57 values of Schwartz. This made the coding (on Monday the 12th of October) even harder, plus the fact that we did it altogether and not very objective.
Attributes, consequences and values which were mentioned less than 3 times were scrapped. We needed another moment of a day later that week (Wednesday the 14th of October) to finish the implication matrix and the value map. See the pictures attached to this blog post. According to this the main value our mobile phones represent for us are ‘self esteem’ and ‘caring for loves ones’.
The use of this outcome is for mobile phone manufacturers to focus on attributes belonging to these values and for marketing agencies to communicate these values in their campaigns.

A part of the methodology of laddering, probing questions is also a technique used in other methodologies such as PAT (Profile Accumulation Technique), CIT (Critical Incident Technique) and mythological analysis. That’s why it was quite dominant in our two weeks of ‘New research’.

My next blog post will be about a more popular and less scientific subject: the blue ocean!