The start of any new year brings about new opportunities, new ways of thinking, new ways to understand and influence consumer behaviour. We’ve highlighted eight innovative tools to enhance your research needs over the next 12 months which could be invaluable to your brand for 2012.
1. Neuroscience: is a ‘buzz’ word in market research, going beyond traditional rational research and using behavioural and implicit research techniques. Measuring a more emotional response, neuroscience allows an understanding of how deeply perceptions are routed in the sub-conscious brain.
We have developed techniques that can be used to more emotionally evaluate packaging, products and brands. We have found that these methods better differentiate at a subconscious level thus providing new ways to influence consumer behaviour. Integrating these techniques with traditional approaches is a powerful mix.
2. The growing opportunity of Packaging: Packaging is playing an increasingly vital role in a products success – it protects the product, communicates benefits, is a brand ambassador, generates awareness and sales. Whilst the “ideal” is to evaluate new packaging using mock-ups in a full sized competitive fixture in a central location, this can be expensive in terms of making mock-ups, purchasing competitor products and conducting face-to-face research.
As a consequence, we continue to develop increasingly sophisticated on-line research with interactive ‘behavioural’ display fixtures, emotional reactions to designs, functional packaging simulators and sales ROI measurement.
3. Mobile ethnography: Today’s mobile phones are increasingly advanced and take-up amongst consumers continues to rise sharply. There is now potential for in-situ research to gain insight into the everyday lives of consumers that was previously only accessible via costly ethnography.
Be-There, our mobile ethnography application, enables participants to download an app to their mobile phone with which they can then record their behaviour via video, photos, text and audio at the point of experience.
We are finding that this new approach is very valuable when it comes to getting to the heart of consumer benefits of new products and packaging. Combined with rigorous quantitative research, this really does demonstrate if a new proposition will change consumer behaviour and be adopted into their purchase repertoire.
4. Cost-effective Sales Forecasting: Budgets aren’t always available to carry out full Simulated Test Markets. That’s why we have developed fast and cost effective alternatives to measure sales volume, using enhanced Conjoint techniques. Our enhanced Conjoint techniques can be used for:
5. On-line Communities: Online communities are used in a variety of approaches from short-term ad-hoc studies with 20-30 participants over 1-4 weeks through to longitudinal studies, with hundreds of participants contributing on an on-going basis.
On-line is often most powerful when combined with traditional qual and/or quant methodologies, supplementing face to-face groups or bringing quant segments to life. At SPA Future Thinking we also use them in exploratory U&A and lifestyle studies; NPD, ideation and co-creation projects as well as brand tracking. Feedback from online communities is so rich with emotion and detail that it’s hard not to learn what consumers really want.
6. On-line Chat Tools: Consumers are increasingly engaged with digital methods and we now utilise various chat tools including Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Skype etc. to provide qualitative feedback. Additionally video chat enables us to undertake personal conversations remotely from simple chat to screen sharing enabling real-time insight.
They are a quick and cost effective way to get qualitative insight, adding extra flavour to our research by enabling us to investigate quantitative findings or additional topics that we’d like to explore.
7. Product Placement Research: New rules have allowed product placement in TV programmes. As a result we have developed new research techniques to measure the effectiveness of this new opportunity for companies and their products. Our research methodologies have been developed to evaluate the effectiveness by benchmarking viewers and non-viewers of a particular programme from TV to films focussing on:
Our methodology includes an Implicit Response Test which shows the strength of intuitive associations with a brand by measuring speed of response to key brand metrics and thus the full impact of Product Placement on brand affinity and other key measures.
8. Web-Based Reporting: Research findings don’t have to be dull. The more visually stimulating and engaging they are the less likely they are to bore the marketing department to death. We are increasingly incorporating the use of advanced technology from HD flash reporting to real-time online reportals to enable our deliverables to come to life in a user-friendly and creative way; Particularly useful when reporting back to a varied and dispersed audience.
Our bespoke web based portals give clients immediate multi-level access to data. This is as relevant for tracking studies where the format of reporting remains the same, as it is to providing ad-hoc results with a rapid turnaround, including same day concept testing.
We hope these eight innovative areas of research have provided you with the inspiration to drive your research needs on in 2012.
In the past year, SPA Future Thinking has developed to become one of the UK’s fastest growing and largest independent market research companies. Creativity and innovation are integral to our position as thought leaders and our dynamic approach has culminated in Marketing magazine shortlisting us for Agency of the Year Award.
To discuss how SPA Future Thinking can ensure you stay ahead in 2012, call Andrew Tharme, Managing Director, on +44(0)1865 336 400 andrew.tharme@spafuturethinking.com