What Your Car Trunk Says About You

LOS ANGELES, July 6, 2008 -- Wearing latex gloves, Kelley Styring picks through the interior of a Chevrolet Malibu like a CSI technician searching for clues.

The contents — every candy wrapper, napkin or torn-up plastic foam cup — is laid out on a sheet, logged and photographed as owner and paid volunteer Dennis Shaffier looks on. Passersby in the Northridge Fashion Center's garage glance nervously as if they'd come upon a crime scene.

They haven't. Styring, a market researcher, is on a seven-city swing to study what people carry around in their cars. Armed with her inventories and a survey of hundreds more car owners, she hopes to tell the auto and products makers sponsoring her work what they're doing right or wrong.

Do moist towelettes stay moist in a hot car? Where do people squirrel away all the extra house keys she keeps unearthing in cars?

And those "cup" holders? "Lots of things end up in cup holders," Styring says. She's found coins, a golf ball, gloves and an air freshener, to name a few.

Cupless cup holders are significant. A feature co-opted for other uses is a product design boo-boo, says Styring. She likens it to aluminum cans piled by trash cans — crying for their own recycling bin.

Her research also may validate automakers' hunches, since they have been trying hard to put more useful storage spaces in vehicles.

Styring is no rookie. A Procter & Gamble and Frito-Lay research veteran, she views the chance to root through strangers' cars as a perfect encore to her study that involved emptying 100 women's purses. She found things from long-lost baby photos of grown children to a porn receipt (neither of which the owners recalled having in their bags).

One marketing insight from the purse survey: The most popular hand lotion brands were not in purses because those brands didn't make attractive travel sizes. The detective work led to a book, In Your Purse: Archaeology of the American Handbag.

Such painstaking inventories are important in verifying what consumers tell market researchers, says Becky Ebenkamp, West Coast bureau chief for Brandweek, who came to see Styring.