FreshNetworks Blog

Most big brands track what their customers (and also often what their non-customers) think. Brand tracking is a well established and developed market research tool that often feeds directly into performance metrics for the marketing department or the firm as a whole. Typically this brand tracker has been developed over a number of years and measures a small amount of quantitative factors, building a time-series data set that will let the firm show how the attitude towards its brand has changed (or stayed the same) over a period of time.

Brand trackers are incredibly useful. They allow you to identify if and when there is a change in attitudes towards your brand. Are people less trusting of your brand now than they were previously? Do they have a more positive attitude towards you than they did six months ago? A regular and well managed brand tracker can identify these changes in customer and consumer attitude and can highlight these to brands.

What many brand trackers can’t tell you, however, is why or how these changes happen.

Quantitative data, such as brand tracking, is best when accompanied by qualitative data. The quantitative tells you the what and the when; the qualitative tells you the why and the how. One way that you can understand the why and the how of changes in brand perception is to run focus groups. We’ve spoken about the limitations of focus groups before, and the danger with using these in this case is that you investigate a change after it has happen. You notice in the Q2 brand tracker that positive attitudes towards your brand are down on the same period last year and so you launch some focus groups to investigate why. But these groups happen many months after consumers attitudes have change and so real understanding is difficult to gain.

This is where online research communities can really come into their own. They offer real-time qualitative research. You can watch how customers discuss and respond to your brand and detect changes of opinion as they happen. Overlaying this with the quantitative data from a brand tracker will let you see when attitudes change and immediately look at the qualitative conversations and insight to understand why.

If most brands currently dow some form of qualitative brand tracking, I would expect more and more of them to pair this with the kind of real-time qualitative insight you can gain from online research communities. To date brands have had to second guess why attitudes have changed, with online research communities they can really know.

Some more reading

• What do consumers think about your logo?
• How to create brand authenticity
• Brand and Branding - A Fundamental Difference
• one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies

I’ve been asked to address an international market research conference in October this year on the future of the industry. The conference is the ESOMAR Panel Research conference and I’ll be talking about how online research communities are changing both the client experience and the dynamics of the market research industry. My thesis is that online communities are not totally replacing more traditional market research panels, but offer new ways of doing new things. At times the two can work together quite successfully.

Below are my initial thoughts in preparation for the conference. If you’re interested in finding out more about the conference or going, then look at the ESOMAR website here. If you have any thoughts on the below then let me know.

Changing the dynamics of the research industry

Research is about engaging in a conversation with a brand, but to date traditional research panels have not enabled this. They let you ask questions but not listen, get responses from individuals but not an understanding of why, and they are transactional rather than really engaging respondents.

Online communities provide a real step-change in research. They allow you to truly engage with your customers and build a research community that becomes an extension of your internal team. Rather than contacting participants through a research agency on a periodic basis, you can engage them directly and ongoing. The agency acts as the glue between you and the community.

Online communities will fundamentally change the way agencies work. They will:

1. allow participants to take part when it suits them not us
2. need agencies to work differently with respondents - collaborating on the research and letting them drive the agenda
3. require agencies to work differently with clients - the brand is much more highly involved in the research and the agency just the glue with the community

Online communities in detail and in practice

Online research communities are different to panels. They do different things and have different advantages. Compared with research panels, online communities:

• get faster responses - the 24/7 nature of the communities mean that they are always available as a resource. Responses typically get a week to get on a panel, whereas results can emerge in less than 24 hours from a community

• ensure more brand contact - the communities are branded and participants feel that they engaging in a direct conversation with the brand rather than answering the questions of a research agency. Feedback through the community adds to the positive and involved feelings towards the brand

• reduce surveying costs - panels rely on incentives to get responses to questionnaires when you ask them. A community grows and develops, with members taking part in activities and conversations at all times. The stickiness created, the ongoing community management and the brand engagement mean that incentivisation is not needed and you no longer needed to pay each respondent each time they complete a survey

• provide a richer quality of response - a panel will typically offer a restricted amount of time for input - the length of the questionnaire. An online community allows people to contribute when they want and as much as they want. The quantity and depth of responses is greater. People give reasoned responses and are encouraged to come back regularly to add more.

Some more reading

• Hosted tool helps companies study online opinions about products, services
• Companies that Track Discussions in Forums and Communities
• Incentives In Online Social Communities
• Don’t Treat Web 2.0 Like Web 1.0
• Social media is not a focus group
• The Art of Conversation - It’s About Listening Not Marketing

I’m featured in an article in this week’s edition of Marketing Week talking about how online communities can be used for research: online research communities. The article talks about how brands can now use Web 2.0 and online techniques to engage with their customers and how agencies are helping them use these for market research: Research 2.0 as it’s often called.

At FreshNetworks, we work with a lot of clients helping them use online research communities, where research and insight are either the primary purpose of the community or as a secondary benefit. As I discuss in the article, the best communities don’t focus specifically on the few questions a brand wants to answer, and may not restrict itself to existing communities. This can be one of the benefits of online research communities - you can explore issues in a wider context (allowing organic discussions) and gain real and rich depth on specific issues (through agreed activities and areas of focus).

Traditional market research assumes that brands and their research agencies already know all of the questions they want to ask. This isn’t necessarily the case. In fact in every project I’ve worked on we’ve uncovered new and different angles on a subject or found that consumers talk about issues in very different ways. Participants start to discuss issues on their own terms.

And this is where the real benefit of online research communities can emerge. They help brands to listen better to what their consumers discuss and what they want to tell them. It also helps them engage in a conversation - responding and reacting to consumers and entering a two-way deliberative process.

Last night, I was actually a participant in a focus group. This was a new experience for me. I’ve seen groups before, even moderated a few, but never sat in the respondent’s chair. The group was about a trade magazine I subscribe to and it was clear that the brand wanted to understand where else we got news and comment from, how we ranked this magazine compared to others, and then to test some new concepts with us.

Focus groups are a useful research instrument. I’ve used them lots in the past and our sister company, FreshMinds Research, does focus groups for clients all the time. Last night I was just reminded that they’re not always the answer to a client’s needs.

Focus groups work when you’re looking for getting a small group of people to give instant reactions to and feedback on a product. Or to explore people’s attitudes to an experience of event. They don’t allow for reflection and so really suit a situation where the brand has quite well developed ideas that they want to audit or assess.

Last night’s group was a great case of where more reflection was needed. We were presented with a range of potential new formats for the magazine, sections that might be included and layouts. Each time, it was described verbally by the moderator and we were asked if it was a good idea or not and then encouraged to talk about it. As a respondent, this was actually really difficult to do. I had no time to think about one idea in any depth before we moved on to the next one. I don’t think we were able to give reasoned and intelligent responses beyond a simple “sounds good” or “not really” when presented with these ideas.

This is where online research communities can really come to the fore. They allow a longer and more reflective engagement between the brand and the respondents. In fact they’re no longer just people responding to stimulus, but members of a discussion. You can show material at an earlier stage in development and get the community members to discuss and brainstorm ideas over a longer time period. Allowing people to contribute when they have an idea and something to say, rather than dictating responses in a short time period one evening after work.

Online research communities are a great way of letting people reflect and allowing the brand to understand why they react as they do to stimuli. If people are against a concept it may not be the concept as a whole but just one aspect of it, and you’re most likely to find this out if you engage in an iterative process with them.

But most of all, focus groups rely on the participants having ideas on demand during a relatively short period. This works where the group is focused, and about reviewing and commenting on already developed ideas. But last night I was left with that awful experience where I thought more about some of the concepts we were shown on the way home.  I had ideas that I had no outlet for. The research engagement was over and so any ideas I had afterwards were not taken onboard.

The French have a phrase, l’esprit d’escalier, which means the thought you have after you’ve left a room and it’s too late to say it. There’s a real danger of this feeling with focus groups. Online research communities, on the other hand, provide a way for these kind of thoughts to be captured as part of the research process.

We’ve had market research panels for years. Selected groups of people who meet some screening criteria and are sent surveys at periodic intervals during the year. Panels are a great way of getting surveys completed. You know that the respondents on the panel have been screened (meaning you can choose who might be apropriate for your survey), the contact details are correct (so less wasted time) and the respondents have a history of wanting to answer surveys (so ar, perhaps, more likely to respond). Panels are effective and efficient ways of doing large-scale quantitative surveys and building time-series data from the same or comparable respondent groups. Panels are not, however, communities.

In an online research community members (rather than respondents) talk to each other - they exchange ideas and discuss issues with each other. Unlike a panel this lets you watch how people interact and let them raise the questions you want to ask. You can get richer responses because you get to see how members talk about issues, what language they use. You see what questions they ask each other, which may not be the ones you’d choose to ask them. It’s all about seeing members in their social context. Without this interaction, this sense of community, you essentially have a panel of respondents. People who answer the questions in isolation of each other. You don’t see how they interact with others and can’t understand why they give the responses they do.

Communities are always-on. Members can log-on and contribute at a time that suits them rather than having to take part at a time that suits the research agency. This is a major difference and a major benefit. By encouraging conversations that occur constantly and people can contribute to in their own time you remove a significant barrier to taking part in market research. The need to incentivise respondents diminishes and so you stop paying people for their responses, but encourage an environment where people want to take part and respond.

Communities are great for getting real insight rather than just facts. People can respond to and build on the comments of others. They can return to their own comments and expand upon them when they’ve had an opportunity to reflect a little more on their thoughts. You get a much rounder and more reasoned set of responses and the insights you can draw are a lot richer. If a panel can typically report findings, a community can report understanding.

Finally an online research community offers a way for brands to truly enter into a conversation with customers rather than getting a research agency to ask the questions for them. People respond more thoughtfully when they know the brand is definitely listening and so the comments you get from a research community will be better thought out and argued. Because the brand is engaging with the consumers through the community you also get the right of reply. You can close the feedback loop. Let people know what you thought of their responses and what you did with the results. People like to know that they’re contributing towards something and feeding back to them, in a properly managed online community environment, will be incentive enough.

Online research communities are different to research panels. They allow you to do different things in different ways; getting a dept of understanding and richness of insight that just isn’t possible with a panel. Sadly, some of the online ‘communities’ on the market at the moment feel much more like panels than real communities.

There’s a lot of talk about online research communities at the moment. At almost every event I go to people want to talk about using online communities for market research, often creating their own communities. And every week there seems to be the announcement of another brand launching such a community (this week it was the Mirror newspaper with their Mirror Mouthpiece).

It’s great to see so many brands recognising the power of online research communities. At FreshNetworks, we’ve been running online research communities for a while now (FreshMinds, our parent company is an award-winning research agency in the UK) and even wrote a paper about earlier this yea (click here to read an earlier post about this). But looking at some of the online research ‘communities’ that exist, I’m not sure all of them actually are communities, rather than networks or panels of respondents.

There are a number of characteristics that define a community and these should be present in a true online research community. Some of the most pertinent include:

1. About a common issue not individuals - A community is focused on a common or shared interest, issue, end point or goal; as a community member you are working with the other members to a common goal. That’s why, amongst other things, research communities are great for helping to create new ideas for products or services, having discussions on brand positioning, getting depth of understanding behind quantitative results and for deliberating. If you don’t have a common goal or purpose to the community, and a focus on, then you probably don’t have a community.
2. Members discuss issues with each other - In a community, members talk and form relationships with each other. This isn’t a one-way exchange from brand to consumer, nor the two-way ‘conversation’ between these two. A real community is driven by the conversations between consumers - which the brand just watches. For research, these conversations are critical - they allow you to see how your consumers talk unprompted - what issues do they raise, what language do they use?
3. Used for depth and breadth of qualitative comment - Because of the nature of communities, they make an ideal space to watch and lead discussions. They allow individuals to respond to questions in a thought-through manner and to review and comment on the thoughts of others. This offers a real depth and richness of qualitative comment and should be the heart of the community. It isn’t a place to just run quantitative surveys, but needs to be nurtured as you would with other qualitative techniques (like focus groups or interviews).
4. Allows reflection and reviewing - A community is always on. Unlike issuing people with surveys you let them respond in their own time, then go back and see what contributions they made and add further to their original thoughts when they’ve had chance to reflect a little. This kind of reasoned response, done in a way that lets you analyse how people’s thoughts have changed, is a real opportunity for research. But to get this kind of reflection and reviewing you have to create a vibrant online community where members contribute and share.

A few of the online research ‘communities’ do not make the most of these criteria. They are using the new technology to deliver an old process, rather than offering a completely new service. This is a real shame as online communities offer the chance to really revolutionise research, especially qualitative. And this is something all brands should be ceasing.

At FreshNetworks, we work very much in Research 2.0. Our sister company, FreshMinds, has been market research agency of the year here in the UK for the last couple of years and some of our communities are specifically designed for research. It was interesting, therefore, to listen to a great presentation from Guillaume Weill at CRM Metrix on his take on what Research 2.0 is.

For Guillaume, Research 2.0 is letting brands finally converse with their customers. They talk to them (advertising) and listem (market research) but don’t actually engage with them. In fact Guillaume would say that brands talk 50 times more than they listen as global advertising spend is about 50 times the spend on market research.

To start to converse, Guillaume things that market research companies need to shift from a vertical view of the world to a horizontal one. He defines these as follows:

To acheive this, Guillaume recommends that brands and market research agencies:

• use the potential of online conversations to listen to their customers
• analyse these conversations in a new way - allowing customers to comment on and refine others’ contributions
• converse more often with their consumers, ideally leaving the conversation on all the time

This all makes sense and is similar to what we have been saying for a while and wrote in our white paper earlier this year (see post here).

So what does this all add up to? Guillaume thinks that Research 2.0 allows you to get the same quality of results but more quickly. This is where we disagree. We think that the quality and depth of insight you can get from a well managed conversation with your customers can be qualitatively different to traditional research techniques. Taking qualitative methods online can revolutionise the depth of insight you get and the ability to bring your customers inside your business.

If you want to find out how we’d do this then feel free to get in touch of course!

Forrester released a report on this issue last week (see here) and their answer is “Yes, but high costs mean that firms with big budgets lead”. This may be true and if it is then it’s more to do with the nature of using online communities for research. They mean building an ongoing relationship with a group of people than needs to be actively managed at all times. This is then available for the brand to dip into for research or to track.

The real issue here seems to be the shift from a project-based approach to research buying and running an ongoing research resource (which obviously has an ongoing cost). At FreshNetworks we think the benefits of using online communities for qualitative research are huge. We wrote our own white paper on the issue earlier this year (see post here). The depth and quality of insight you can get by building real communities with stakeholders can be incredible and the real value comes from the other benefits of building a community like this.

Traditional market research is very transactional. People answer a survey or attend a focus group. Using online research communities, brands can really engage with people. Involve them in their research, feedback to them and incentivise them not with the cash of traditional methods, but with the knowledge that their input is making a difference. Critically, and this is the really exciting bit, traditional market research depends on you know what questions you want to ask. With online communities, the community can tell you what you need to ask. And that’s probably something much more important and relevant to you!

Thanks to Outside Innovation for pointing me in the direction of a report by Matthew Lees, How Should you Manage Customer Communities? (see here)

As Lees points out, designing, deploying and then managing a customer community is a nascent science. It’s a new but burgeoning area of expertise in customer engagement and is seeing influences from marketing, consulting and market research. The people you have desiging and running a community are critical, and it’s not a role just anybody can do. They need to be good community managers and also have an ability to interact with and input to the core of the brand.

A good community manager acts as the glue between a customer community and the brand and makes sure that every party gets the most they possibly can out of the experience. It’s a tough role and one worth investing in.

I went to the Espresso Briefing this morning from the Word of Mouth UK Marketing Association (WOM UK) at the lovely Bean ‘n’ Cup in Camden. Fiona Blades from Mesh Planning was presenting a case study of their Research for Lynx/AXE for the Boom Chicka Wah Wah campaign - a 360 campaign that started with the commercial below.

Fiona’s talk explained how Mesh used a real-time research method. Recruiting a network of boys and getting them to text every time they came into contact with one of four brands (including the Lynx brand to make the process more thorough) or one of four catchphrases. They also had to say how they felt each time they responded. This data was then expanded using an online diary and the entire data set provides a wealth of information on where and why people came in contact with the brand or slogan and how they felt about this.

This depth of information provides real-time feedback on the effectiveness of a campaign but also helps to measure advocacy - references on social networks or even in conversation with others were to be included and reported back.

The research shows one way in which you can use new technologies inventively to gain a greater depth of insight than traditional tools allow. Real-time surveying gets a more accurate observational record of what people see; combining this with a retrospective diary tool allows you to capture what people think. This combination is powerful and provides a richer data set - you can record peoples’ opinions before and after exposure to a campaign and then really understand how they came into contact with the brand and so start to explain why their attitudes change.

At FreshNetworks we use similar tools in our communities allowing us to track and monitor how peoples’ opinions change and then to understand why this might be the case. New techniques like this are expanding the power of research and increasing the depth of our understanding!