Focus groups and other qualitative research techniques are often used to generate ideas for new product development. In spite of this frequent application, it is notoriously difficult to bring eight, ten or even twelve strangers together for a discussion. Add to that the need to get them to open up and “be creative” about your brand, messaging or products and services, and you have a real challenge.

Great recruiting and great moderating are two of the most critical elements for this process to work. Great recruiting brings you open, honest, articulate individuals who have imagination and a sense of play. Great moderators create an open and accepting environment where participants can say whatever is on their minds. Once you have those, you are halfway home.

The next critical element is to have some creative ways to get people talking. Here are some ideas to break the ice and get people thinking outside their comfort zone – and generating great ideas for you.

• Change Your Perspective: Think about the user of your product and how they see the world when they are using it. Developing a dog product? Get participants on their hands and knees so they can experience the world from their dog’s point of view. Looking into baby products? Perhaps asking your participants to imagine sitting in their baby’s stroller or car seat would give them a new perspective. (Disney asks their merchandising managers to crawl through their stores on their hands and knees to get a kid’s perspective. If it works for Disney, it might work for you!).
• Get Comfortable: The traditional focus group setup of respondents around the table, and the moderator at the head, may not be optimal for all groups. Try a living room setup to create a more casual and open environment. Alternatively, skip the facility all together and hold the focus group in a congenial bar or restaurant. If you’re researching tweens, how about holding your discussion at the food court in a local mall? Or how about discussing baby products at a baby shower? You may have some technical challenges, but letting people stay in their natural environment might get you richer insights.
• Take Some Time: Most people need more than an hour and a half or two hours to feel comfortable with a group of people they have never met before. And, most people need more than that to immerse themselves in a topic enough to generate new and exciting ideas. Many researchers believe that longer focus groups (four to eight hours, with appropriate breaks) are better for generating creativity, especially in new product development.
• Put on a Play: Role-playing around a situation can reveal many interesting insights about the customer’s experience. Ask participants to role-play explaining to a friend how they use your product – or explaining to their spouse why they chose your brand (even though it is more expensive than the competition). Be sure that everyone gets a chance to play roles on both sides of the discussion to get as many perspectives as you can.
• Picture This: Many people relate better to pictures than words, so use pictures to generate ideas. You can produce pictures of different kinds of people (in different settings) and ask respondents whether the people in each picture would be your brand’s customers, and why. You can give participants a stack of magazines and ask them to create a collage of images that they associate with your brand or product. You can even ask them to draw pictures on flip charts or white boards, as long as you make it clear that artistic talent is not necessary.
• Bring Props: When you recruit respondents, ask them to bring something with them to open the discussion. You might ask them to bring something that they associate with your brand. If you are working on children’s clothing, ask them to bring their favorite outfit so they can explain what makes it their favorite. If you are designing pet products, have them bring a picture of their pet(s). (Everyone loves to talk about their pets, and different breeds will need different toys, so it will help to understand everyone’s context.)

• Get Sticky: Sticky notes and markers are great tools for generating discussion. You can ask respondents to brainstorm ideas, make lists (challenges, strengths and weaknesses, do’s and don’ts, etc.), hypothesize uses and many more. Then, once the ideas have been generated, you can stick them on a wall, a white board, a flip chart or another surface. Once they are posted, they can then be evaluated and prioritized by moving the sticky note around. You can even use different color sticky notes to denote different types of ideas or categories.
• Throw A Party: When you need to differentiate similar products by exploring and defining their brand personalities, ask respondents to imagine that they are “going to a party at the ________ house.” For example, local hospitals are pretty similar in their benefits and features: they all have similar emergency rooms, x-rays and doctors. So how are they different? We asked participants to imagine the hospital was throwing a party at their house. We asked them to describe the party they imagined in detail (e.g., who was there, how they were dressed, what food was offered, how was it served, what music was playing). The resulting discussion revealed these three local hospitals were indeed very different in terms of their brand personas.
• Flip Your Questions: Sometimes, we just need to think of things differently in order to loosen up great ideas. So instead of asking the usual questions (e.g., what kind of people would use this product?) flip it: What kind of people would definitely NOT use this product? Asking negatively based questions can easily lead participants to thinking about the opposite. And the more outrageous the question, the better. For example: “You’d have to be crazy to use this product to _________.” or “No one in their right mind would buy this product to _______________.” (Note: Fill-in-the-blank questions are good for generating interesting ideas once the group is warmed up and comfortable with each other.)
• Orient Your Respondents: Two of the biggest hurdles for using focus groups to generate new ideas are respondent’s lack of comfort and familiarity with each other and with the specific idea-generating techniques being used (which can seem strange to the uninitiated). In order to overcome this obstacle, bring your group together twice. First, bring them together to get to know each other, to learn about the problem being addressed, and to become familiar with the creativity techniques you will be using. Then, convene the group again a few days later to conduct the focus group. In this way, you let your respondents overcome their shyness, and get them thinking about and looking forward to participating in the group.

Qualitative research is an excellent tool for generating innovative and creative marketing and new products and services. Using unique and creative question approaches and brainstorming activities can help even the most reserved respondent open up and share their deepest insights. Introducing an element of fun and “out of the box” thinking can increase the likelihood of generating innovative and exciting insights and ideas.

What other creative techniques have you used to get respondents to share their insights? Leave a comment below!

It’s no secret that qualitative data is harder to analyze than quantitative. The replacement of ticked boxes for a plethora of data from verbatim, videos, group conversations and observations means that participant answers are vastly more time consuming to categorize. Not only this, but the context and motivations of the individuals need to be considered in addition to their responses and behaviors. But the effort is worth it; you can work to really understand consumer behavior and get to the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.

Of the many techniques used to analyze qualitative information, sentiment analysis and semantic analysis are two we often come across. These provide insight into the data by looking at attitudes and themes. And as new technology continues to make its way into qualitative analysis, we need to understand how it can impact these two methods of analysis, and how it can help develop more meaningful insight.

As a reminder, sentiment analysis categorizes language based on opinions, often checking for a positive or negative viewpoint. This can include, for example, the views of consumers expressed on social media or online communities toward a specific product, idea or service. Although this deep analysis can be done by humans, it is quicker using technology – most often machine learning. Machine learning is helpful in analyzing large quantities of information and making judgements based on language that would be far too time consuming for researchers.

However, it’s important that sentiment analysis is not entirely reliant on technology. We are often asked to analyze data in a binary way, but the expressed sentiment is rarely that black and white. Technology often makes assumptions about the sentiment of a response to make it fit a binary format, while humans would be more cautious to force content into a category. Moreover, while humans can contextualize written language and understand colloquialisms and contradictions, as well as turns of phrase and humor such as sarcasm, machines struggle with this. Machines simply cannot understand all the nuances of language and its grammatical patterns to the same accuracy that a human can. In spite of the claims of some of the technology providers, we are far off being in a place where text can be analyzed by a machine as well as by a human. It is therefore important to use a joint approach to sentiment analysis; machines may make things quicker, but they’re also more likely to create inaccurate data through generalization, lack of contextual knowledge and a lack of natural language skills.

Semantic analysis, on the other hand, generates meaning by grouping together the themes in qualitative data. It is often referred to as topic or keyword analysis. This is an important approach when trying to understand the important subjects in the field of study, regardless of how a participant feels about them. This is often useful in the early stages of a research project, when exploring a broad idea and looking into other relevant and more specific ideas that need to be examined further. As with sentiment analysis, this can easily be done by a computer, and indeed, it is far more efficient to do so, leaving the researcher with more time for deeper analytical thinking. Furthermore, a machine learning process can take place with no prior knowledge of the documents – again saving time. However, there are limitations, as the grouping of themes needs to go beyond basic classification to give a meaningful representation of the qualitative information.

So machine learning speeds up sentiment and semantic analysis; for text based analyses this can open up a whole new world of information about consumers from social media, communities, and other online resources. The tech guys are working hard to solve the nuances of language such as sarcasm – machine learning’s biggest barrier in sentiment analysis. And then with semantic analysis comes the challenge of context – such as the ability to distinguish Mars the chocolate bar from Mars the planet. Technology is certainly getting closer to solving these problems, but in the meantime, it’s nice to keep the humans around.

For more on qualitative analysis, download our white paper here.

For the deepest, most comprehensive insights and personal opinions, it is difficult to beat the one-on-one interview.  However, there are other options. Many people assume that B2B qualitative research cannot use the same variety of methods as B2C qual, or even B2B quant for that matter. While it’s true that the in-depth interview is a great way of gaining deep insights into a participant’s thoughts, the vast potential of the internet means there are more convenient ways to reach professionals with tight schedules across varying locations. Moreover, observational methods such as ethnography provide objective viewpoints of businesses that personal interviews may miss.

Admittedly, focus groups are less frequently used in B2B research than they are in B2C because of the time and geographical restrictions of participants. B2B projects often require researchers to reach senior staff members to provide insights on specific issues and these are, of course, the people with the busiest schedules who have little spare time to provide feedback. Moreover, geographical issues mean that even if spare time could be aligned between participants, there would be no convenient place for everyone to meet. This issue can be solved by holding online focus groups so participants can log in to a virtual research space wherever they are. And, to make sure participants join, remember to send a meeting request to participants’ work calendars so the event is firmly scheduled.

Even better, for those with extremely tight schedules, is holding an online discussion group, allowing participants from any location to add to the conversation at a time that suits them. This flexibility is important when respondents have little time to spare. It will allow them to give more thoughtful, meaningful responses without the pressures of time and what is more it means they can talk with each other in a secure and controlled environment. In an increasingly technological world, respondents often feel more comfortable giving their opinions to a faceless researcher online than they would to a real person who they may feel judged by. Another benefit to researchers is that participants who do not engage satisfactorily in the discussion can be replaced, ensuring that productive discussion takes place between the moderators and participants (and the participants and participants) so authentic insight can be gathered. This is also a great method for categorizing participants, as researchers can target specific group members with different questions to develop insight further.

Depending on your research problem, B2B ethnography is also a great method to consider. Although there can be a process involved in recruiting participants, a research technique that simply requires researchers to watch and learn is a great solution for participants with limited time as no changes to their normal habits are required. This technique is excellent for research problems that look to assess behavior in the workplace and to observe the intricate happenings within a business, without asking employees for their own personal opinions which may be wound up in internal politics. Ethnography is therefore a good way to get an objective B2B viewpoint.

So, although interviews are important in qualitative research, there are other, sometimes overlooked, methods which are a great fit for the B2B sector. We all know that working life is busy, especially if you’re the CEO, so resources like online tools are useful for bringing people together regardless of location – with online focus groups providing a universal research location, while online discussion groups allow research on demand for those whose unpredictable schedules mean they can’t commit to a specific time slot. And for objective, unopinionated research, why not try ethnography, to see the background of a business without working around the time restraints of employees.

To access more information on qualitative data collection tools, download our white paper on fieldwork and data collection in qualitative research here.

Consumers have a lot of opinions and valuable advice to offer, but how can we ensure they’re heard?

Video puts data collection tools right into the hands of consumers. It does a great job in engaging research participants so that they know they are really being listened to. It puts them center stage, making them feel their worth and their value. With video open ends, participants aren’t constrained by text box responses, or even worse, a pre-written answer key. They are able to elaborate on their thoughts and opinions, while conveying their true emotions and feelings. And this is all done much quicker and easier, and on a more personal level, than typing in a box.

For researchers, video analysis means accessing deep insight from responses that are much richer than reading numbers or text alone. In fact, text box open-ends on average only get three or four word responses. While video gives researchers access to six times more content.

But although video brings a lot to the table, there’s still some confusion around how researchers can fully harness the value of video open ends.

Open-ended video questions can seem out of reach, especially for independent research consultants. But as a powerful source of insight, they’re well worth it. After all, it’s our jobs as researchers to take advantage of every technology and every resource available so as to access the raw emotions and the complex opinions of our participants, to elicit deeper insight to share with our clients.

So, how can you make video work for your research project?

Add video to current methodologies. Video works very well with in the world of qual, but it also applies to quant projects. Video helps to marry the two for richer insight, to let consumers tell the story behind the data. Video can be added to online surveys, NPS studies, online communities, brand trackers, ad testing, focus groups, ethnographies and more.

Take advantage of mobile. Mobile phones and laptops can easily capture video from anywhere in the world, at any time. Mobile is giving consumers 24/7 access to sharing their views with brands. Researchers and brands can reach out to consumers at any time with ‘push’ content to solicit video feedback in the moment.

Show and tell. Video is a great way to put products in front of participants. It can help the participants understand how a new product is used in a certain setting, and how it will be positioned, in order to find out how the messaging and language will resonate with target consumers.

Put it into context. Video should be used to go into greater depth, to get the fuller story, and to put everything into context for the researcher. A video can show the researcher how the participant uses the product in their home, or what products fill the shelves at the store.

Feelings. The facial expressions and the pure emotion that is picked up in a video within ten seconds can say much more than the typical text box response of 50 characters. Make sure the questions are designed to explore the participant’s feelings and emotions, and to probe their opinions.

Don’t settle on quality. The quality of the video software used is important as it can affect both the participant’s experience and the insight collected. Poor quality video can negatively impact the quality of the insight, so if you can control the video quality, so if you are using the software in a survey for example, the video must be of a standard that doesn’t distract or negatively influence the participants.

It’s easy to dismiss the video trend in research as a tool that is out of reach and too complex to integrate into current methodologies, but there are a lot of partners and tools out there to help. If you’re looking for more on video and other data collection tools, download our white paper on fieldwork and data collection in qualitative research here.