New opportunities to obtain market insights can come from observing humans interacting with each other, through “wisdom of crowds’ and “we’ research.
“For years now the dominant paradigm of market research has been “me’ research. If we want to know what consumers feel, think of what they’ll do, we ask them. The problem with that, however, is that we’re often unreliable witnesses to our own motivations as we, as human beings, generally tend to self-deceive ourselves,’ said Ari Popper, North American president of the marketing research company Juicer at the recent 31st SAMRA annual conference at Mount Grace.
Popper continued: “A growing number of new market research techniques centered on the “we’, the “wisdom of crowds’ and behavioural economics are now evolving, some of which having been successfully applied by Juicer, delivering great results for clients, and others still in an experiential stage.
“Mass prediction, for example, has been leveraged for new product innovation by asking people to imagine they owned shares in a number of new product ideas. By indicating which ones they’d buy more of or which ones they’d sell, they’re not answering for themselves, but for other people, with astonishingly accurate results.’
According to Popper, mass prediction is also increasingly being applied to gauge box office successes over opening weekends, as well as of events and programmes such as American Idol to source talent from the crowd.
The results of these predictive models have not only revealed proven accuracy, but also greater product discrimination (versus monadic testing) as well as the ability to spot breakthrough ideas, Popper stressed.
Likewise mass ethnography is gaining ground as research tool. Explained Popper: “Again, human beings are innately really good at observing and copying others, so, instead of using a professionally trained ethnographer, a crowd of consumers are used for this purpose.’
Mass ethnographic research, for example, proved highly successful in a research study on binge drinking in Newcastle pubs in the UK, where the results revealed that everybody unconsciously starts drinking when fancy dress is allowed.’
By using the Internet and free public available data to do research, “netnography’ also provides some really interesting insights, for example about the spread of the actual swine flu virus as opposed to the “mind’ virus. At the same time, it provided interesting insights into some cultural beliefs around the virus.
A brand new development of Juicer is the introduction of the digital characters that provide direct insights into the lives of the target audience.
“In very basic terms DigiViduals™ are robotic researchers programmed to represent a particular type of person, conducting automated mass web ethnography to build up a rich, detailed picture of their lives from which understanding, insights and new product ideas can be generated.
“Digividual™s are designed as a person, such as “Nicole’ on Twitter: they scan for tweets that match their key words, characteristics and emotions, collect the relevant tweets, blogs, images, video uploading from those people and build a rich and insightful picture of character’s life, from which we can generate understanding, insights and new product ideas,’ Popper explained.
Lastly, the concept of co-creation has also been very successfully introduced, among others by Goldcorp Red Lake Mine which harnessed the technique to find new gold deposits. The company opened up its “crown jewels’, its geographical maps, to consumers who helped them find enough gold to reposition the company as one of the most successful in the world, Popper said.
Initial results of these new and innovative research tools are not only very promising but in certain instances astonishingly accurate, offering clients whole new and exciting array of research options to obtain market insights, Popper believes.
