The laddering technique systematically “unpacks” what the respondent wants and why, following a personal chain of associations and revealing underlying goals and values. Here’s an example of the “laddering upwards” technique:
The person has been asked to look at a bottle of wine, and to speak about it without great analysis or forethought. The spontaneous nature of what he says is key to the success of the laddering technique.
The person is asked to consider the wine from the standpoint of of “choosing a good value wine to go with a meal”.
Laddering upward — that is, beginning with a detail and following its associations — might go like this:
Q: Do you prefer a wine bottle with a screw top or cork, and why?
A: Well, I would prefer a natural cork, as distinct from an artificial one…because I’d be concerned that the wine might react with the metal bottle top.
Q: Why would you prefer a wine that didn’t react with the metal bottle top?
A: Because I think it might impair the flavour of the wine.
Q: Why might that impair the flavor of the wine?
A: Because a chemical reaction might change the flavor from what was intended. That could be unpleasant.
The interviewer quickly understands that this person is concerned with the flavour of the wine, as opposed, for example, to health issues from chemicals leaching into the wine, or as opposed to a traditional view of good wine requiring a cork in the bottle. He also understands how the person comes to that conclusion, and how it’s likely to affect decisions and actions.
“Laddering upwards” can be combined with “laddering downwards.”
Laddering downwards systematically breaks down what the respondent means by a subjective or technical term. The interviewer drills down until objective, tangible features are identified.
Here’s an example. A person has been asked to look at a bottle of wine, and to think aloud about it, from the viewpoint of “choosing a good value wine to go with a meal”.
Q: What can you tell me about this wine from the label?
A: The paper’s high quality…
Q: How can you tell that the paper is high quality?
A: Because it’s quite thick, it’s embossed with this herring bone pattern, so that would be more expensive paper than just a flat matte surface, or a glossy surface.
Q: Why is expensive paper important?
A: It probably means that a lot of care was taken in the design of this wine, including the bottle and the wine inside.
Q: What does it mean to you, when a lot of care has been taken with the design of the wine?
A: It probably means better flavour; people will talk about it, and will admire my taste in wine.
Laddering reveals exactly what someone means, and what inferences they’re making.
Laddering enables the following types of discovery:
- identification of the respondent’s higher-level goals and values, which can be surprising, and unexpected to the merchant or advertiser
- discovering what clusters of higher-level goals and values are shared by different respondents – for instance, do different respondents prefer a natural cork for different reasons?
- unpacking subjective or technical terms until you reach objective terms – in the case above, specific details about the label paper that can be fed back to the marketing team
- finding out whether or not respondents agree about a term – in this case, whether they agree about what features of a label indicate high quality
