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L&E Webinar Recording | Automation: Assessing the Impact on Qualitative Research

DWG Admin on February 17, 2017

Automation is set to be a game changer for market research in 2017, a view supported by the recent GRIT report which listed it as one of the top factors likely to disrupt ‘business as usual’ in 2017. Most of the discussion about Automation has focused, so far, on its impact in quantitative areas, such as survey design, analysis, and big data. But Automation is also threatening to disrupt, challenge, and change the way many aspects of qual are conducted.

On February 17, 2017, L&E hosted a webinar, “Automation: Assessing the Impact on Qualitative Research”, with guest speaker Ray Poynter, Founder of NewMR. In this webinar, Ray highlighted the key ways that automation will impact qualitative research and provided a list of tips and action points that will help you stay ahead of the game in this year of change.

Webinar Video

Webinar Presentation

To download a PDF of Ray’s presentation from the webinar, click here.

About Ray Poynter
	Ray has spent the last thirty-five years at the intersection of innovation, technology, and market research. Ray is the Managing Director of The Future Place and is the author of The Handbook of Mobile Market Research, The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research, and editor of ESOMAR’s book Answers to Contemporary Market Research Questions. Ray is in popular demand as a conference speaker, workshop leader, writer and consultant, appearing regularly in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific.

About Ray Poynter

Ray has spent the last thirty-five years at the intersection of innovation, technology, and market research. Ray is the Managing Director of The Future Place and is the author of The Handbook of Mobile Market Research, The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research, and editor of ESOMAR’s book Answers to Contemporary Market Research Questions. Ray is in popular demand as a conference speaker, workshop leader, writer and consultant, appearing regularly in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific.

Using Qualitative Research to Prevent Another Election Debacle

DWG Admin on January 19, 2017

Much has been written about, discussed, and broadcast about the apparent failure of public opinion and political polling in 2017.

To be clear, there was not an issue with the data in the U.S. election; almost all reputable polls were within the margin of error nationally. There were certainly issues with the interpretation of the results, and challenges associated with trying to translate national polls into state results for an Electoral College projection.

There are numerous implications of this interpretation failure for commercial research and analytics on the things that are important to the Market Research industry: trust in research (especially surveys!), new tools and techniques, predicting & modeling behavior or trends, implicit vs. explicit data sources, the application of cognitive & behavioral psychology, and more.

Arguably, approaches using experimental polling methods, social media analytics, behavioral economics-based analysis, “big data”, meta analysis and data synthesis, and text analytics were more predictive of the results than traditional polling – and the implications of that for other forms of research should not be ignored.

However, there is another set of tools that also can help address some of the issues with polling: qualitative research. Sure, campaigns use focus groups all the time, but in the era of communities, mobile ethnography, social media listening, iterative and agile rapid qualitative feedback and many other approaches, the available tool kit has expanded far outside of dial testing in a focus facility.

Dianne Hessan, Founder and former CEO of community pioneer C-Space worked with the Clinton campaign to use more qualitative approaches to provide ongoing insights to the team. After the election she wrote in the Boston Globe a bit about how she used qualitative tools to try to fine tune the messaging:

“Over the summer, I found and interviewed over 300 undecided voters, and 250 of them agreed to stay in touch, to send me weekly diary entries about their emotions, what they were thinking about both Clinton and Trump, and how they were leaning when it came to their vote. I had no responsibility to change their views; instead, I synthesized the data that I was collecting, and reported in to the campaign. I also added the insights that I had and made regular suggestions about how the campaign might better articulate its positions and modify its strategies.”

She goes on to write about how she knew there was a problem: the infamous “basket of deplorables” comment made by Secretary Clinton at a fundraiser. The backlash among the undecided voters she was engaged with was instant and forceful. The damage was done, but using qualitative research she was able to apply the appropriate context and insight to the polling data to help the campaign understand why they were in trouble.

That is the real secret here: quantitative research is a highly scalable and cost effective way to get to who, what, when, where, and how – but not why. To achieve real predictive accuracy, we need a contextual framework that gets us closer to consumers, that allows us to get past the limits of check boxes and grids and instead helps us understand the underlying drivers of behavior. There may come a time when different tools can fill this gap, but today only qualitative approaches can help achieve that.

The issue around missing the human story in the math of quant data isn’t limited just to research though; it impacts basically all of the predictive sciences. Wolfgang Münchau writes in the Financial Times:

“High quality global journalism requires investment. The curse of our time is fake maths. Think of it as fake news for numerically literate intellectuals: it is the abuse of statistics and economic models to peddle one’s own political prejudice… Economic models have their uses, as do opinion polls. They provide information to policymakers and markets. But nobody can see through the fog of the future.”

Qualitative techniques may not entirely clear that fog, but they are lights that make it easier to navigate by illuminating the way into the hearts and minds of humans. Pollsters, pundits and political scientists would do well by looking past the math of polls and surveys and starting to use a variety of qualitative tools to really understand consumers.

Applying Qualitative Research to Marketing Challenges: Better Insight, More Success!

DWG Admin on November 9, 2016

You’ve heard it said before – qualitative research gives you the “Why?” and quantitative gives you the “How much?” However, qualitative research also delivers so much more than simply the “why” of consumer behavior:

Voice of the Customer. Qualitative research shines when you need to hear how customers talk about your products and services. You may be trying to isolate what factors customers use to make decisions to purchase and then evaluate their satisfaction. Alternatively, you may need to figure out what language customers use when they discuss your brand, your products/services, and the experience they have had with your employees. In any event, qualitative research excels at helping you get close to your customer.
Dig Deeper. Quantitative research techniques include open-end questions, but market researchers agree that most consumers don’t take the time or make effort to enter their deeply held feelings and beliefs in surveys. Even if you have a live interviewer in-person or on the telephone, the nature of the question and response format discourages the contemplative thoughtfulness that a good moderator can elicit in a qualitative research setting. Qualitative research allows respondents the time to think deeply about their perceptions, their beliefs, and the reasons for their behavior.
Before and After. When paired with quantitative research, qualitative research can help improve the survey instrument, as well as increase the value of the quantitative results. Before the survey is designed, qualitative research can help inform the quantitative research by increasing the researcher’s understanding of how the product/service is used, by whom, and to accomplish what goals. Additionally, identifying the appropriate metrics or scales for questions can ensure better data is collected. After the quantitative research is over, qualitative research can help the researcher better understand the data through the customer’s explanation of their responses.
Innovation and Improvement. Qualitative research can help marketers explore new products and innovations by working with consumers to identify unmet needs and dissatisfaction with current solutions. After all, you can’t ask what you don’t know to ask! Using qualitative techniques such as focus groups or ethnography is often very helpful in developing new products and new marketing programs.

BUILD YOUR BRAND WITH QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

In the words of Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and Linchpin, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection, or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.”

To build your brand, you must understand what your customer thinks about you. You must go beyond measuring awareness and familiarity and how much your brand is associated with certain attributes. You need to tap into the deep, emotional relationship that your customers, especially your most loyal customers, have with your brand. While it is interesting, and perhaps important, to understand the metrics of your brand, the real power comes from understanding consumers’ emotional attachment to your brand.

Qualitative research can be used in many ways to uncover information to strengthen brands:

Establish Your Unique Brand Position. Your brand has more competition than ever. Regardless of your product or service, it is likely that your customers have multiple options from which to choose. This makes differentiating your brand from the competition essential to building loyalty and expanding your market influence. Qualitative market research offers ways to discover what your target market finds valuable about your brand or service and how that is different from and better than your competitors.
Define Customer and Brand Values and Voice. Establishing a set of core values and definitions is often included as part of a business plan. So, it is likely that your brand has already defined its value, quality, and integrity. However, are you sure that your core values and definitions reflect those of your audience? Through qualitative market research, you can determine how your market determines value, quality, and other key terms and align your products and services accordingly.
Find Brand Weaknesses with Qualitative Research. If your brand is suffering or just not competing as well as you would like, you might try some qualitative research to understand why. Is it your service? Has your product quality slipped recently? Do you just need to communicate better or differently? Qualitative research can help to highlight brand weaknesses, as well as identify ways to improve brand performance and defend your brand from the competition.

Whether it is focus groups, ethnography, or in-depth interviews, qualitative research allows marketers better to understand consumer relationships with their brand, as well as competitive brands. In this way, marketers can develop communications and branded experiences to strengthen competitive differentiation and build brand loyalty.

KEEP CUSTOMER SATISFACTION HIGH WITH QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Satisfied customers are the growth engine that delivers so many benefits, including:

More repeat purchases
More recommendations to other purchasers
More word of mouth advertising
A willingness to pay premium prices and ignore competitive offers

However, improving customer satisfaction takes more than just measuring satisfaction and calculating your Net Promoter Score. You have to understand what satisfies customers and why – and that only comes through qualitative research. If 30% of your customers are very satisfied, and 30% are just satisfied, is that good or bad? More importantly, what should you do about it? Is it smarter to try to address those who showed dissatisfaction, or to try to knock the socks off those who are merely satisfied?

Qualitative research can help answer those questions. By gaining a better understanding of the customer satisfaction dynamics of your market, your business, and your brand, you can find the low-hanging fruit to address immediately. Then you can design longer term initiatives to address the more difficult challenges.

Address Dissatisfaction

Asking follow-up open-end questions to get at the reasons why respondents rated themselves as dissatisfied with your product or service is a start, but often it will not give you the whole story. If respondents say the reason for their dissatisfaction is “pricing”, what do you do about that? The solution might not be decreasing prices; there might be payment plans that are needed, bundled pricing that could address the problem, or even volume pricing that could fit the situation. Without conducting the follow-on qualitative research, you could be leaving money on the table.

Customer dissatisfaction isn’t always about pricing. What if they tell you your customer service representatives are rude and unprofessional? Does that mean you need better training, or to change your hiring practices? Alternatively, perhaps it means the respondent doesn’t like the answers they are getting from Customer Service, and you need to look at your policies?

In almost any customer satisfaction survey, open-end responses are insufficient to pinpoint the problem and the appropriate solutions.

Define Exemplary Service

Often, it is more efficient to move the customer satisfaction needle by raising the merely “satisfied” respondents into the “very satisfied” category. However, what is not easy is determining what makes up exemplary service. Qualitative research can help you understand what actions would raise your customer’s experience to delightful. Don’t assume that you know what is needed to create raving fans; sometimes delivering more consistently through small changes in standards and processes is all it takes to raise the bar.

Adding qualitative research to your customer satisfaction research program can drive business improvements that deliver more satisfied customers. The benefits of increased customer satisfaction are long-lasting, creating a strong foundation for business growth and success. As Bill Gates said, “Your most unhappy clients are your greatest source of learning.”

BEAT THE ODDS: NEW PRODUCT SUCCESS WITH QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Did you know that:

80% of all new product launches fail?
75% of CPG new product introductions fail?
Less than 3% of CPG new product launches earn more than $50 million in their first year?

The odds of new product success stories are certainly not good. But they can be improved by understanding the reasons why products fail. Copernicus Marketing identified ten reasons why the new product success rate is so shockingly low:

Marketers assess the marketing climate inadequately
The wrong group was targeted
A weak positioning strategy was used
A less than optimal “configuration” of attributes and benefits was selected
A questionable pricing strategy was implemented
The ad campaign generated an insufficient level of awareness
Cannibalization depressed corporate profits
Over-optimism about the marketing plan led to an unrealistic forecast
Poor implementation of the marketing plan in the real world
The new product was pronounced dead and buried too soon

Further, Harvard Business Review has identified five other flaws that doom new products:

Flaw 1 – The Company can’t support fast growth.
Flaw 2 – The product falls short of claims and gets bashed.
Flaw 3 – The new item exists in “product limbo,” without significant differences to sway buyers.
Flaw 4 – The product defines a new category and requires substantial consumer education—but doesn’t get it.
Flaw 5 –The product is revolutionary, but there’s no market for it.

Clearly, there are many causes for new product failure. But many of them can be addressed or avoided by market research, especially qualitative research.

Identifying Problems that Need Solutions

One of the most important applications of qualitative research is in exploring how consumers currently purchase products and services, how they much they like these products and services, and how they would improve the products and services they are using. Consumers are notoriously poor product designers (and hence Henry Ford’s statement about the automobile, “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”). However, they excel at telling you how a product or service works for them and with or against their lifestyle. Focus groups, in-home or on-site tests, and in-depth interviews are all excellent techniques for learning what consumers like – and don’t like – about using your product or service.

Observation

Ethnography, or research designed to observe the behavior of consumers, is a very powerful tool. Observing the consumer planning and preparing to use, using, and then evaluating the use of a product or service can help you identify ways to improve your products or come up with completely new products.

Successful new product development requires a disciplined process and the courage to say “no” to weak concepts. However, without a good understanding of consumers’ needs and desires, new product developers can only guess at what will work. If you want to increase the odds of new product success, you need more information, and qualitative research is an important tool for delivering that information.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROVIDES A FLEXIBLE PLATFORM FOR USABILITY TESTING

According to Wikipedia, usability testing is “measuring a human-made product’s capacity to meet its intended purpose.” While most people typically think first of websites, software, and technological products when they think about usability testing, just about any product or service could be tested to determine ease of use and whether consumers can use them to accomplish the intended tasks. You can employ usability testing to evaluate food products, packaging, customer service or ordering procedures, training and documentation effectiveness – in essence, any product or service where there is user interaction.

Usability testing often uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques. While the sample is typically small, usability testing often involves recording whether a task is successfully completed by the user and these data are presented quantitatively. Usability testing is also interested in the quality of the experience, and collects information on the users’ emotional state, reaction to the process, and comparison to other similar products/services they have used.

Some of the reasons for conducting usability testing include:

Ensuring seamless, intuitive interaction with the product/service
Exposing usability problems before launching the product/service
Testing alternative design concepts and comparing design approaches
Challenging the design and marketing teams’ assumptions
Comparing your product/service to competitive offerings
Improving ease of use, documentation and learning
Attempting to decrease the need for technical support
Saving time and money
Increasing sales

Typically, a usability study tries to replicate as closely as possible the setting in which the consumer will use the product or service being tested, and identifies several tasks or challenges for the user to accomplish. In addition to tracking whether they complete the task or not and how long it takes, usability testing can also document the typical step-by-step thought process of the consumer while completing the task. Patterns will emerge quickly, but individual variations will continue to appear and are important for developing the best possible product. After the tasks are completed, the moderator will discuss the experience with the respondents. The goals of this discussion are to evaluate the experience in comparison to other products and services used, in the context of how the respondent might plan to use the product, and to generally rate the product in terms of ease of use.

DEVELOP BETTER CONCEPTS WITH QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Whether you’re coming up with a new brand or marketing campaign, introducing a new product or service, or modifying your current product or service models, getting customer reactions to your new concept is a key step in concept evaluation.

Concept evaluation starts with writing the concept so that consumers can tell you what they think about it. Do the work of thinking about and clearly defining your concept. After all, if you cannot clearly communicate what you want to do, you probably aren’t ready to put it in front of consumers for evaluation.

What makes a good concept statement? The best concept statements communicate the benefit of the new product/service or messaging to the consumer. Martha Guidry, the self-proclaimed Concept Queen and founder of The Rite Concept classifies benefits into four categories:

Benefits drawn from brand equity or the heritage of the brand. Brand equity benefits can be delivered through the company’s experience (“the oldest” or “delivering quality service for over 50 years”) or leadership.

Efficacy benefits are based in formula or service-based claims. These products and services deliver the benefit better than their competitors.

Sensory experience benefits appeal to the consumers’ senses of sight, smell and touch. (A laundry detergent delivers a “fresh scent” or “blindingly bright whites” is delivering a sensory experience benefit.)

Emotional benefits are based on the personal feelings of the consumer. (If you don’t buy jewelry gifts at the right store, the recipient will think you are not very savvy or don’t care enough about them.)

Sometimes it is difficult to define the end benefit. Keep in mind that the concept and the benefit are NOT the same. To make sure you get to the end benefit, just keep peeling the onion by asking “What’s the result of that?” and “What does my target consumer get out of that?” A dipping sauce for chicken is not the benefit. The benefit is preparing nutritious and delicious family meals quickly and easily. It is critical that your concept statement is built around the benefit your product or service delivers, so make sure you get that right first.

Once you have nailed the benefit, here are some additional tips for writing your concept statement:

Keep it short and simple. Only one benefit per concept. Only one paragraph, with three or four short sentences that clearly describe the idea. People don’t read anything carefully in our post-digital society, so use bullet points, bold highlighting, or other tools to enhance readability.
Make sure the concept sounds appealing. Especially if it is a food, be sure to include how it tastes, and who it appeals to.
Match your concept to your target audience. If your concept is a convenience food, don’t test it with food snobs! Similarly, don’t focus on the aspects that might make a gourmand find the concept appealing. It just won’t work.
Include Reasons to Believe (RTB). How are you going to deliver the benefit to your consumer? Give them enough RTBs to answer their questions, and make them confident that the concept is real. But not too many RTBs (no more than the three most compelling) and no self-promotion, please. For example, for a food concept targeted at working moms with children, the product is chicken dipping sauces, and the benefit is a quick, easy way to give more variety to serving chicken to your family. The RTBs might include that the sauces are brought to you from a brand you know and trust, available in your grocery store and have been “kid-tested.”
Use consumer language. If consumers are unfamiliar with the language you use, they will reject the concept, even if they might have liked it if they could have understood what it was. Make sure you use language that is not industry or company jargon, that the “man on the street” (or at least those in your target audience), will understand.
Be realistic. Include information to help consumers evaluate their interest in your concept and whether they might explore purchase. Price, timing, other requirements or commitments to owning and using the product or service should be included to increase the realism of the concept and help consumers accurately assess their potential response.
Be bold; don’t sell too hard, and don’t be boring. While your concept needs to be realistic, you don’t want your research participants to fall asleep over it. Don’t forget to give it a little sizzle and excitement, but only if it will really deliver on those positives.

Focus groups and in-depth interviews (either online or in-person) are excellent tools for concept testing. Use qualitative research to determine:

If consumers understand the concept (and if not, why not)
To evaluate how appealing the concept is
Their interest in purchasing
What questions they have or what obstacles they see to purchasing

SUMMARY

Qualitative research provides input into the key functions of any successful business. But before you embark on your next qualitative research project, make sure you have the following:

An experienced moderator or qualitative research consultant. Find the right partner to work with you to design and complete the project.
The ability to recruit the right people into your project. This is essential for success because if you don’t have the right kind of person in your research, you will not get the information you need.
The right setting and tools for your project. A professionally designed focus group facility will have spaces specifically designed to make your respondents comfortable and secure, your clients more collaborative and productive, and your moderator more effective.

When all three of these elements are in place, you know your qualitative research project will deliver the information and insights you need.

If you’re not using qualitative research as an integral part of your market research program, you should reconsider. Take advantage of the rich insight and deep emotional feedback you can only get from qualitative research techniques.

Interpreting Nonconscious Data | New eBook from L&E

DWG Admin on October 26, 2016

The market research industry is approaching an alarming crossroads. On one hand, DIY tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Consumer Surveys are taking off, making it possible for anyone to create their own survey for free. Research firms are left vying for work on more complex studies that require their expertise and scale, and client-side researchers are equally challenged, as budgets dry up and internal clients expect insights that are faster, cheaper and actionable.

At the same time, there is also a growing consensus that consumers cannot always accurately tell market researchers what we want to know; that consumers are highly emotional and make decisions for reasons that are often not accessible to their consciousness (and, by extension, not discernible through classic market research techniques).

Amidst this disruption, the utilization of nonconscious measurement (also called “neuromarketing” or “applied neuroscience”) for commercial research continues to be a growing trend for pursuing consumer insights.

To continue reading, get our latest eBook by clicking here (no form to fill out), Interpreting Nonconscious Data, written by Leonard Murphy, Editor-in-Chief of GreenBook.

L&E Webinar | The Participation Game: How & Why Millennial Consumers Adopt Brands

DWG Admin on September 21, 2016

Digital connectivity has changed the way we interact with one another – people no longer want to consume marketing, they want to participate in brands. To connect with people, brands must first develop a true understanding of how they interact with the world around them. The key for marketers is then engaging with people the way that they interact naturally: ceasing to market to consumers and instead inviting people to participate in the brand.

On Friday, October 21 at 1:15 pm (ET), L&E hosted a webinar with guest speaker Norty Cohen, CEO and founder of Moosylvania. This webinar featureed highlights from a four-year study that agency Moosylvania has conducted. Norty took partipants through key insights on how and why Millennial consumers adopt brands.

About Moosylvania

Moosylvania’s mission is to truly understand how and why Millennial consumers adopt brands. By modeling how people interact digitally (with everyone from their friends to entertainment to services they rely on), they are able to connect brands with people in a world that changes every day. Their unique toolset – including original branding, digital and experiential programming – is designed to support an approach that results in genuine brand participation. Learn more at www.moosylvania.com.

Qualitative Research: Adapting with the Needs of Researchers

DWG Admin on September 7, 2016

Qualitative research is a set of methodologies whose common goal is to explore and uncover the hows and whys of consumer behavior. It’s left to quantitative research to measure the “how much”. The categories of qualitative and quantitative have been easy monikers to differentiate the concepts of exploration compared to confirmation, depth of insight compared to breadth of insight, the immeasurable contrasted to the measurable.

But the lines between qualitative and quantitative are blurring rapidly. While there are numerous reasons for this, two of the main forces are business demands (speed, cost and acting on useful information) and the capabilities afforded by technology.

Business Demands

When corporate researchers were asked about their pain points for the 2016 Quirk’s Corporate Researcher Report – too many projects for staff or budget topped the list as always or often a pain point (60%, 50% respectively). When asked about challenges – corporate researchers noted the inability to for insights to drive action and not being able to complete projects fast enough as always or often a challenge (50%, 42% respectively).

When looking at the newer methods of research, corporate researchers view qualitative tools (as a whole) as more effective at providing actionable insights. “Online qualitative/focus groups” are viewed by 70% of corporate researchers as effective or very effective. Mobile-specific surveys are second (53%). But the next couple are also qualitative techniques – social media research (40%) and text analytics (52%).

Taking the premise that actionable insights are the number one goal for corporate researchers and the number one challenge, and that qualitative research (at least among the newer methods) generally does a better job of providing these insights, then it is likely that more energy will be directed here. At the same time, there is a methodological drag to qualitative research according to this survey. The top four drivers of methodological choice for a project are; representative sample (82% viewed as very or extremely important), proven methodology (69%), speed (58%), and response rate (52%).

While qualitative has never been about representation per se, the scale in some tools is pushing that of quantitative. Some of the newer qualitative tools do have a good way to go before they are as deemed worthy of a wide variety of use cases – but that is changing rapidly.

Technological Capabilities

Technology is changing the nature of qualitative in several different ways:

Scale: We currently have some qualitative information at the scale of quantitative – and a growing ability to analyze that information. The easiest examples are both based in text analytics – customer service information and social media analytics are able to provide some structure to the vast amounts of unstructured data available in their respective data sources. While there are limitations; sample management, response bias, etc., those only limit some applications. The variety of proven use cases continues to grow, expanding into consumer needs, brand management, operations, and more.
Geography: As the tools a respondent needs to participate in qualitative research sit in the purse, pocket, or on the kitchen table, geography is much less of an issue than it was before. Many of the corporate researchers that are using newer methods, such as online qualitative, mobile ethnography, etc. are doing so to take advantage of the access to consumers in the appropriate environment. Mobile, in particular, has the benefit of providing “in the moment” access in the way that was almost cost prohibitive using other tools – particularly low incidence or sensitive topics.
Cost: The “somewhat” lower cost of qualitative methods is also seen as a reason for switching. Several researchers mentioned the cost of online qualitative and communities as reasons for moving away from more traditional qualitative methods. This was generally expressed in terms of travel cost, but occasionally as overall project cost. Though it was not mentioned, social media analytics can be very cost effective depending on the type and frequency of projects.
Depth of Insight: Deeper information is available through communities than through other traditional methods. This is a driver of choice for a few researchers that noted the ongoing nature of a community allows a more longitudinal look at consumers and their product issues.
Speed: Speed is one of the top two corporate researcher challenges. While technology has improved speed to insight in almost all the tools mentioned to this point – it is hit and miss. Once a social media program or community is up and running, the speed to insight is generally improved over traditional methods. But according to one researcher, online qualitative groups are “not a lot faster”. However, the future holds a different story.

The Future of Qualitative Research

Recent advancements signal the future of qualitative research. Text analytics improve month by month. Several companies have had different levels of success in identifying emotional context, purchase probabilities, consumer values, and a number of other frameworks that build on our understanding of consumers and their relationship to our products. Other qualitative methodologies have automated processes for understanding the emotional connections consumers develop with products and brands through imagery, metaphors, and other projective techniques. Crowd-sourcing has been in use for several years, but new applications and technologies are able to provide deep understanding of an issue in a cost-effective and timely manner – and at the scale of quantitative research. Artificial intelligence is making its way into marketing research. These tools have been around for a couple of years, but have improved dramatically in the past year. Many of these tools measure delivery in hours or days instead of weeks or months.

In addition, we should start to see the synthesis of mobile sensors, shopping or purchase behavior, and advertising effectiveness over the next year. This puts the depth of qualitative insights in context with behaviors – which is the holy grail of market research.

The future of qualitative research addresses the key pain points of today’s corporate researcher. The lower cost provided by technology and improved user interface will reduce the impact of constrained resources. Technology is also quickly and significantly improving the time to insights. Experience will prove the application to specific use cases. Scale will reduce the concern about sample representation. And most importantly, the quality of insights provided by new qualitative methods has and will continue to improve Many of the newer methods are combining the depth of qualitative with the breadth of quantitative – getting us to the how, the why, AND the “how much”.

This article first appeared in the 2016 Quirk’s Corporate Researcher Report.

Webinar Recording | The What, When, Why & How of Unobtrusive Observation

DWG Admin on August 19, 2016

Ethnographic market research aims to understand the consumer in her natural environment. Typical ethnographic research requires a skilled interviewer to conduct the research onsite or in the respondent’s home, but a growing trend in market research is to employ a technique known as Unobtrusive Observation, in which the ethnography takes place without the interviewer present. This method allows respondents to act naturally, uncovering deep insights into the motivational drivers of those behaviors.

On August 19, 2016, L&E hosted a webinar, The What, When, Why & How of Unobtrusive Observation, with guest speakers Abbe Macbeth, PhD and Jason Rogers, PhD of Noldus Information Technology. The webinar provides a practical guide through the unobtrusive observation ethnography process. This session is for both those new to observational research, and those well-seasoned in traditional ethnographies.

This session covers:

A comparison of unobtrusive observation and traditional methods (ethnography, focus groups)
An overview of observational research in consumer behavior
Research logistics: cameras, coding, and consequences
Examples and stories from past research

Webinar Presentation

Click here to download a PDF copy of the presentation from the webinar.

Webinar Recording

About Abbe Macbeth, PhD
	Abbe Macbeth, PhD is a Regional Sales Manager for Noldus Information Technology. Taking her expertise in Behavioral Neuroscience into scientific sales in 2010, Abbe set multiple company records for sales within the first two years. Quickly moving into a managerial role, she is now responsible for overseeing four sales regions and Noldus Consulting Services, US. Abbe is passionate about behavioral research in all forms, and delights in helping others find the perfect solution to meet their needs. Abbe holds a Bachlors degree in Cognitive Science, a Master’s degree in Psychology, and a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from City University of New York.
About Jason Rogers, PhD
	Originally from Indiana, Jason received his doctorate in Psychology from the University of Utah. After a fellowship at MUSC in Charleston, SC, Jason joined Noldus in 2008 as Product Expert and Lead Trainer. Jason also spent time as a Consultant with Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience and Science Officer at Brandtrust before returning to Noldus in 2013 as Midwest Accounts Manager and Senior Consultant. Jason has done hundreds of lectures, trainings, and workshops around the globe. Jason lives in Cincinnati and spends his free time running, biking, playing the drums, and keeping up with this significant other, daughter, and sheepdog.

Why Focus Groups are Thriving in a Digital World

DWG Admin on July 14, 2016

Recently, technology has given marketers many new and innovative ways to tap in the customer psyche and create a stronger, more visceral understanding of the marketplace. And while these new market research tools have great promise, none has yet taken the place of the traditional focus groups in delivering valuable insight. As shown in the 2015 Greenbook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) report, 79% of respondents reported using qualitative research in the previous year – and traditional focus groups maintain their position as the most used qualitative methodology. In total, 68% of 2015 GRIT respondents reported using traditional, face-to-face focus groups, up from 59% in 2014.

To be sure, periodically some “expert” declares focus groups dead – or at least dying – and advocates for their removal from the marketing research tool kit. And just as inevitably, marketers continue to ignore these so-called “experts” and use focus groups to develop stunning and exciting customer insights that deliver business success and profits.

The Internet, social media, digital technologies, video and graphics – all of these trends have changed the way we communicate and conduct business with each other. We now expect things to happen faster, more creatively and more efficiently than ever. And those expectations of speed, collaboration, creativity and flexibility are now requirements in all of our interactions with each other, personally as well as in our business and commercial interactions.

Not surprisingly, those changes in the way we need to interact with each other have also impacted the way marketers interact within their teams and how they expect to use information in managing brands, products and services. Ironically, the traditional focus group (or dyad or triad) is ideal at delivering the environment demanded by today’s marketers: offering greater speed, creativity, flexibility and collaboration than many other marketing research techniques.

COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY

Great marketing is the art of making connections and building relationships – between products and customers, between services and customers, and between brands and customers. In the most natural sense, focus groups deliver the setting and inquiry that leads to the creation of and the understanding of these fundamental relationships.

Focus groups maximize all available brainpower (yours, the consumer’s and the moderator’s) by bringing it together in a tightly defined opportunity for discussion and brainstorming. While you may begin the focus group process with one objective, you can allow consumer insight be developed ad hoc by following the discussion and commentary in the group. Indeed, technology in focus groups has delivered new ways to stimulate consumer thinking and to advance the discussion agenda, such as usability testing and other kinds of collaborative tools for marking up communications and brainstorming new product features.

CUSTOMER INTIMACY

There is great power in watching a focus group. You look your customer in the eye, you see their body language, you get a strong sense of their emotions. You can watch them feel, touch, and use your products. You can watch their reactions to your carefully crafted messages. And when the focus group participants speak, they are speaking directly to you.

And that communication can go well beyond the marketing team. Product research and design, engineering, operations – no matter your role in product development and delivery, you cannot attend a focus group without hearing the voice of the customer. Focus group respondents pronounce judgments that influence the path and development of the product or service and impact its eventual success. And those product evaluations are all the more effective because of the intimate and personal nature of the focus group environment.

SPEED

All marketers continually fight the time challenge: you have less time to do the work, less time to launch the product, less time to prove the product works or not. Consumers today demand ever-changing and ever-evolving products and services. Many marketers simply do not have the time necessary for quantitative research. And they certainly don’t have the time necessary for quantitative research that might or might not deliver game-changing information.

Well-designed, well-recruited and well moderated focus groups can deliver key insights in a nanosecond. As one marketing manager told us, “You walk into the groups scratching your head, and you walk out with answers and direction.”

FLEXIBILITY

An obvious advantage to focus groups is that you do not get to the end of the project before you realize you’ve been asking the wrong questions. Because focus groups can take an iterative approach, the questions asked in the beginning define the questions to be asked later on in the groups. If you do not know the answer, you may not even know to ask the question. Focus groups give you the chance to define the question while you are getting the answer.

FOCUS GROUPS: A Perennial Favorite for Marketers

The stakes are high for marketers and market researchers alike these days. With increasing pressure on market research budgets, each project is required to provide critical insight for business success. The risk of non-delivery is high with many of the techniques available to market researchers, for the new and innovative techniques as well as for the “tried and true” techniques. And that is why focus groups continue to be so popular. As reported in Quirk’s 2015 Corporate Research Report, corporate purchasing of focus group facility and moderating services has held tight for nearly a decade, including during the 2008 economic downturn. Clearly, focus groups offer marketers an enduring value that supports their decision making.

Focus groups have many of the particular characteristics that marketers are looking for: They quickly deliver immediately useful insight and information. They are compelling and personal, producing results that drive change in behavior and direction. They are flexible and facilitate collaboration and creativity. In short, focus groups have the ability to ignite business success.

So, while they are not new or different, it is no wonder that focus groups remain a perennial favorite for marketers – and will continue as such for years to come.

Better Together: Using Qualitative Research for Better Quantitative Research

DWG Admin on June 16, 2016

Recently, L&E Research hosted a webinar with guest speaker David F. Harris, Founder of Insight & Measurement. David is the author of, The Complete Guide to Writing Questionnaires: How to Get Better Information for Better Decisions.

(Click here to view the recording of David’s Webinar.)

David wrote his book to address the following concerns about market research and questionnaires:

Research is rarely organized to support decision making
Often, no qualitative research is conducted prior to questionnaire development
Questions are often unclear, biased, or not answerable by the respondent
Questionnaire pretesting is not practiced widely enough

Questionnaire writing is serious business and is as much art as science. Most researchers have struggled with questionnaire design, recognizing that understanding how consumers think about a topic, as well as science, logic, reasoning and sound research practice, are all necessary to producing a good questionnaire.

Qualitative research is often skipped in the questionnaire development process, to the detriment of question quality. David recommends a research framework that includes two points of qualitative research to inform and improve questionnaire development:

Before You Plan the Questionnaire

First, qualitative research should be conducted before the questionnaire planning begins. Conducting a focus group or several in-depth interviews will let you hear the words and phrases the consumer uses in discussing the product or the purchase experience, understand the logical sequence of topics for the consumer, and identify the correct metrics to use in your questions. Let’s say you are conducting a survey about children’s studying habits. You think children study outside of the classroom between two and five hours per day, six days a week. In your qualitative research you find the norm is actually 30 minutes to two-and-a-half hours, five days a week. If you had based your question on your assumption, you might have used the wrong scale in your quantitative research, leading respondents to overstate their studying habits and for bad decisions to be made based on this information.

Hopefully, it goes without saying you must do the qualitative research with the same pool of respondents who will be completing the quantitative research. You can’t just ask your coworkers to help you out with this!

Pretest (and Revise!) the Questionnaire

Even if you conduct qualitative research before you plan your questionnaire, David recommends conducting qualitative research a second time, just before the quantitative data collection begins. The only way to truly test whether a question works is to have a real respondent try to answer it. David suggests a two part pretest – First, ask internal resources to review your questions, find problems, and make improvements. Second, pretest the questionnaire with real respondents, ensuring that you administer the questionnaire pretest to a sample of each segment of respondents. Bring these respondents – and again, real respondents – into a focus group facility and ask them to complete the survey using the phone, online, or whatever methodology you will use in the actual research.

After each respondent has completed the survey, go through it with them question by question. Did they have any uncertainty about what was being asked or how to answer? Was any wording vague or unfamiliar? When they were unsure about what was being asked, how did they decide upon an answer? For example, if your question asks about cars owned by the respondent, does that include trucks? Would “vehicles” be a better word choice? What if you lease your vehicle – does that count? Qualitative research can help you make sure the information you get from your questionnaire is the information you need to have.

As you consider implementing these suggestions into quantitative research project, you may encounter objections that it will take too long, cost too much, or that you already know about your customers. In spite of these objections, researchers must take responsibility for asking the best questions possible. Think of qualitative research as an insurance policy on your results; it may be very cost effective in the long run. After all how long will it take and how much will it cost to recover from a poor business decision?

Want more advice on writing better questionnaires? Check out David’s website –www.davidfharris.com or watch one of his previous workshop videos on our webinars page.

The Potential of Technology and Observational Research

DWG Admin on June 2, 2016

Can you observe the future? What about the past? Can you observe something you haven’t seen? Watching a movie or reading a book can let our brain contemplate these issues – but not experience it. So until recently, the answer has been mostly ‘no’. Observation has always been about what is happening now, and other qualitative techniques have been about “what would you do if….”.

There are two key developments in technology that have changed the “practical observable universe” – in both number and content – and will continue to do so. With over 2 billion of the 7.4 billion people on Earth on smartphones and social media – over a quarter of the world’s population is now in this practical observable universe. The “smartphone” requirement is used to narrow the population, not to limit to a particular tool – though it is the most important one. Traditional ethnography has allowed us to see only 20 people, or 50, or 100.

The passive role of our digital footprint allows us to share a lot of information with a lot of different companies. We share this information in ways that we don’t often think about – but to which we actively agree – by hitting the “Accept” button, or using sensors, or having a wearable device, or using eye/fingerprint scanning. This information can tell where you are or have been, how you’re feeling, what you watched on TV or listened to in your car, what and who you care about, what you shopped for and bought, and what you thought about and then read about online. Amazing information. When you add this information to the more active role of mobile ethnography or qualitative – the depth of information can be as impressive as the breadth. Several industries, other than the spy industry, are doing a good job of utilizing this information. Healthcare uses social media analytics and geo-targeting to identify and manage potential pandemics. The automotive industry is using the Internet of Things and sensors to understand driving styles and personal needs to adapt the time commuting to home more efficiently. These are just a few small examples.

The observable has always been in the present – but not anymore. Virtual reality allows us to experience non-existent situations – and what we would do in those situations – in a way that makes them feel very real. This technology allows us to create situations to understand consumer behavior in a “what if” manner. Projective techniques have often been used for this in a qualitative setting. Virtual reality is the mother of all projective techniques. Now that the headsets work with most popular smartphones and you can purchase them for $2 (I just checked Amazon) – their integration into marketing research is on its way to being ubiquitous. And the use cases – from advertising to product concepts to store layouts – are primed.

The “practical observable universe” is larger now than ever. One concern for learning from this universe is that our industry has lagged many in adopting new technologies (e.g., we still have methodological discussions about adapting to mobile as a data-collection channel). And aggregating and using the data is still a challenge as the “Wal-Mart” of data still doesn’t exist – but it can be found, created, and used. The effort is time-consuming – but the benefits can be enormous.