What is journey mapping and how can it help you grow your brand? In this introductory webinar on December 15, 2022; 1 to 1:45pm Eastern, we’ll discuss what journey mapping is from beginning to end and how you can use it to build a a more successful brand.

• Learn which types of businesses can benefit from journey mapping
• Understand why journey mapping is so important
• Learn how to build a journey map
• Uncover how to action a journey map

The webinar has finished and you are welcome to watching the recording here.

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Speaker

Annie Pettit, PhD CAIP FCRIC is the Chief Research Officer, NA, at E2E Research. She is a research methodologist who specializes in participant engagement, data quality, and innovative methods. She has spoken at conferences around the world, educating researchers about the best ways to conduct research that is valid, reliable, and actionable. She is also Chair of the Canadian ISO Standards Committee (ISO 20252). Most importantly, she’s an avid ukulele player.

What is a persona?

Simply put, personas are short, simple descriptions of a group of targeted people but written as if they were describing one single person. The best personas are grounded in quantitative and qualitative research and summarize the demographics, psychographics, motivations, needs, and goals of those people.  You might also see them referred to as Buyer Personas, Customer Personals, Patient Personas, User Personas, or something similar.

Personas are a fantastic way to ensure that a business puts the customer at the center of everything they do, whether it’s product development, packaging, messaging, or customer service. As we all know, the most successful companies focus not on their own desires, but rather on ensuring their customers’ needs and desires are met. Building personas is a great way to get there.

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How do marketers and researchers use personas?

Personas are particularly useful when combined with segmentation and journey mapping research. After conducting segmentation research, you’ll have a list of very specific details and statistics about each of the various groups of consumers who are, or may become, relevant to your brand. You will also be able to identify which segments are valuable enough to pursue and therefore would benefit from having a persona. And, after personas have been built, you can use them to map the journey each persona would take as they progress on their path to learning about your category, your brand, and finally choosing a product to purchase.

There are many ways to use personas, but here are seven of the more common use cases for marketers and researchers.

• Understand your customers: Fundamentally, personas help you understand who your customers are. On just one page, they provide a clear description of the key traits, needs, and desires of each important customer segment, and what makes each of them distinct and valuable.

• Shared understanding of the target audience: Particularly in larger companies where people and departments are often siloed, personas help ensure that everyone has access to the same understanding of who they’re trying to serve. A single reference point means that messaging for each persona is consistent regardless of whether it’s used on packaging, in a campaign, or on the website.

• Fact-based decision making: Whether you’re in marketing, product development, or executive leadership, it’s really easy to generate ideas and run with them. But for decisions to lead to business success, they need to be grounded in fact not unconsciously biased, personal perceptions. With your idea in hand, confirm that it matches up with the personas that have been carefully built to support your work.

• Tailor campaigns and messaging: There is an infinite number of messages you could share about your products and brands but which one is the right one? As you brainstorm potential messages, regularly refer to the appropriate persona to ensure your messaging is relevant, and therefore heard and attended to.

• Target high yield channels: Sure, you can drop some funny or educational videos on TikTok or buy a Facebook ad. But if your best customers don’t like either of those channels, you’ve just wasted a lot of money. Using personas will help you make sure you spend your marketing dollars on the channels your targeted persona prefers to use.

• Prioritize product development: What do you do when you’ve got 5 great products on the go but only enough people and budget to work on two? You review your personas to identify which products would be most desirable to your high value or underserved personas.

• Tailor new product development: Is your product development team ready to work on a brand new product? It’s time to get out the personas. Which persona has the greatest needs or product gaps? Brainstorm ideas with that specific persona in mind.

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How many personas do you need?

Depending on the size and complexity of your business, you might need 1 or 2 personas or 15 to 20 personas.

If you’re just beginning the process, start with 1 or 2 or your most important segments. You can work on more later as you better understand what you need from your personas and how you will use them.

Here are examples of three (excessively brief) personas that might be useful for a small, online company that makes cosmetics. Daisy and Chris could be the most important personas to concentrate on in the early years because they will form the core customers of the business. Then, over time, as the company grows into having a retail outlet, they might need to add another persona to incorporate occasional high spenders.

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Tips for building an effective persona

As you build out your personas, remember a few key tips.

• The goal isn’t to include every precise detail about every research participant. Focus on shared commonalities and broad generalizations.
• Similarly, notice what makes each segment or persona different and ensure those differences are clear in the details.
• Even though personas are a generalized idea of a group of people, they aren’t stereotypes. Personas are based on data collected using scientific methods, not personal perceptions and opinions. If you find that a persona incorporates stereotypes, refer back to your research method and your data, and ensure that you’re not incorporating your own personal biases.
• Personas should be concise and clear. Sure, you could probably write a long essay with the information gathered from a segmentation study. However, the goal is to get a quick feel for each persona. When you’re just starting out, try to keep persona biographies under 200 words, particularly if you are working with many personas.
• Finally, if your personas don’t relate to a specific age, gender, ethnicity, disability, or sexuality, be sure to reflect a wide range of people across all of the personas.

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Components of an effective persona

When you’re ready to build each person, make sure to consider each of these four key parts. None of them are as simple as they may seem!

• Headshot: As the person designing the personas, you need to make sure everyone who uses them remembers that they reflect real people. This is why you want headshots of real people rather than clip art drawings or illustrations. Further if there are no appearance differences among the personas, don’t be led down the erroneous path where they all end up looking like you ethnically and demographically. There are plenty of stock art websites that include people of all genders, ages, ethnicities, disabilities, sexualities, and personal styles (e.g., Pexels, Pixabay, AffectTheVerb, Jopwell, Nappy).
• Humanistic name: Come up with a meaningful name, not a gamey name like “Susy Shopper” or “Mohammed the Hoarder.” Your customers are real people, not jokes. 1) Think about the age of the persona and then search out a list of names from that decade. 2) Think about the gender of the persona. If the persona isn’t gender specific, choose a name that isn’t stereotypically associated with a specific gender (e.g., Chris, Noor, Alex, Blair, Nehal, Robin). 3) Think about names that have some kind of relation to the persona. For instance, “Heather” works well for a woman who is environmentally conscious whereas “Dusty” works well for a carefree, disorganized person. As before, avoid choosing names from a single ethnicity unless that is truly representative of all the personas.
• Biography: You’ve probably got a hundred bullet point details from the segmentation research. Now it’s time to weave those details into an interesting, short story about the person. Keep it short, simple, and interesting. You’re supposed to be writing about a real person so make the bio come alive. Don’t try to include every detail in the summary. Build a picture in your mind based on those details and describe the person as eloquently as you can.
• Quotes: As a bonus, you may wish to write a quote that reflects each persona. Think about whether that persona would use incomplete or full sentences, simple or complex words (e.g., “buy” or “purchase”), new or old slang (e.g., “spill the tea” or “chew the fat”), or casual vs extreme profanity (e.g., dang or f***).

Finally, what kinds of details belong in the biography? This depends on the type of product and target audience you’re working with. If you’re building a persona for a consumer product, you’ll want to pay more attention to personal demographics and psychographics. On the other hand, if you’re building a B2B profile, you’ll need to focus more on professional details. Here is a good list of starting details.

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After all your hard work, it’s time to present your findings in a creative, visual display such as what you see in this simple yet detailed example. If you want to see the full spectrum of possibilities, do a quick image search for “customer personas.” You’re sure to find inspiration for your own designs!

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What’s Next?

Now that you’ve seen first-hand how helpful a user or customer persona can be, it’s time to build some customized personas of your own! If you haven’t already done so, start with a segmentation study to identify each of your customer segments and the details that will go into the personas. If you’d like some help along the way, email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. Let’s turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

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Podcasts You Might Like

• Navigating the Customer Experience with Yanique Grant
• The Intuitive Customer with Colin Shaw
• Crack the Customer Code with Jeannie Walters and Adam Toporek
• The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show with Jeanne Bliss

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Learn more from our case studies

• Consumer Perceptions Towards Online Ordering – A retail survey + desk research case study
• Identifying Target Audiences of Two New Tea Variants – An IHUT + JAR analysis case study
• Increasing Enrollment Through A More Meaningful Brand Purpose – An education survey case study

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Learn more from our other blog posts

• Getting started with consumer, customer, and market segmentation
• How to conduct a journey mapping research project
• Tips for the First-Time Conjoint Analysis Researcher

Journey maps are commonly created in the market and consumer industry to illustrate a set of steps taken to accomplish a goal. Well designed maps help marketers, brand managers, and researchers understand how people perceive and interact with overt and covert stakeholders, products, channels, and services along their way to completing that final goal.

Journey maps used to be simple, and the details and processes often seemed obvious. Today, however, with the internet in our pockets providing unlimited opportunities to talk to people around the world, learn about millions of new products and companies, and acquire nearly any product within hours or days of hearing about it, journeys are extremely complex. They’ve evolved from linear 5-step journeys into 30-stage ricocheting piles of spaghetti.

As such, it’s important to conduct well-rounded research to ensure erroneous assumptions and misconceptions aren’t included, and to ensure all aspects of the journey, both hidden and obvious, are accounted for.

Journey maps are more complicated and more necessary than ever.
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What kinds of journeys can we map?

Nearly any journey wherein people progress through a set of stages, interacting with channels or people, over a short or long time frame to accomplish a goal can be mapped. Here are just a few of the more common journey maps that marketers and brand managers use.

• Customer journeys: How do consumers, or your customers, discover the need for and end up buying a product? Where do they learn about various products, who do they talk to along the way, at what point do they finally buy one and how?
• Patient journeys: How does a patient or care-giver discover a health issue and follow through to a treatment plan? What was the initial point of discovery, who did they talk to about their concerns at each step, when did they choose a healthcare provider, how did they choose from among the treatment options?
• Recruitment journeys: How does a person decide to seek employment and follow through until they have settled into a new role? What created the initial interest, where did they turn to for advice about hiring companies, how did they select a best role?
• Financial journeys: How does a person decide to buy a home and follow through on that major expenditure? What caused the interest in the beginning, where did they go for advice about large loans, and how did they choose a mortgage provider?

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Why create a journey map?

Maps aren’t simply pretty pictures that make great wall posters. In addition to illustrating an entire journey on one convenient page, they serve a number of important purposes.

• Facts over factoids: Assumptions about processes, pain points, strengths, and weaknesses are easily affected by context and perspective. Every brand manager, marketer, researcher, and customer has a different view of the journey which is affected by their role, life experience, and current needs. Data-driven journey maps are simply more accurate and all-encompassing than anecdata-driven journey maps.
• Resolve issues: By mapping the journey, you’ll be able to identify strengths, weaknesses, and pain points that are negatively impacting people at any stage in the experience. You’ll learn which mobile apps need improved navigation, identify disjointed online and offline experiences that need fixing, and be better able to ensure people receive key messages at critical times via the channel they prefer.
• Optimize spend: Once you discover which channels people are accessing – or not accessing – during their journey and what the strengths, weaknesses, and pain points of those channels are, you can allocate your spend more wisely. You may discover new channels, realize the need to optimize favorite channels, or decide to eliminate out-of-date channels.
• Innovate: Journey maps will help you identify gaps in product development or processes that can be solved by creating new tools, products, or services.
• Plan for the future: When you understand where your business is today, you can plan for tomorrow. Identify which experiences can be enhanced and improved for everyone.
• Level-setting: When everyone has the same understanding of the journey, it’s easier to ensure that every touch-point meets your high standards and best practices. You’ll be better able to reduce silos and increase efficiencies of functions and tools across the company.
• Understand personas/segments: Every product or service can be represented by multiple journey maps, each reflecting a unique segment of people. As you understand each segment more precisely, you can improve each experience in a more targeted, relevant way.

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How to conduct a journey mapping research project

Set Clear Goals: The most important component of every research project, including journey mapping research, is to set clear goals and objectives for what you want and need to achieve. In addition to creating the map itself, you will need to specify how you intend to use the map once it’s complete. For example:

• Why do so few people use the mobile app?
• How can we better serve omnichannel customers?
• Where are our communication gaps?
• Why do we lose so many consumers after they call our help-line?

Review Secondary Research: Take the time to review any existing qualitative and quantitative research you may have conducted over the last several years. Though it may not directly focus on the journey experience, there are likely to be important tidbits of knowledge that will help you design your data collection instrument – take note of people, processes, and channels mentioned and ensure they are covered in the new instrument.

Detail the Research Questions: As you prepare to build your data collection tool, focus on all aspects of the human experiences – who, what, where, when, why, and how. Let high quality data tell you how many stages there really are rather than trying to fit people into preconceived notions.

• Who: Which personas would benefit the most from journey mapping? Who are the direct and indirect people the consumer could possibly come into contact with? Consider people at the call-center, people answering questions on Twitter, people in finance, operations, and management who may be called in to help with more difficult problems.
• What: What messages and information people need at each stage? What are their motivations? What are they getting or not getting? What are their pain points and barriers?

• Where: Where do customers seek information or products? Are they experiencing the journey from home, work, school, or the retail outlets? Are they experiencing it on a mobile device, a desktop computer, or in person?
• When: Think about how journeys change when they are experienced in the daytime, evening, nighttime, or weekends. Is the journey one day, one week, one month, or one year long?
• Why: Why did customers start or stop each point in the journey?
• How: How do customers feel about each point? How do they perceive each stage? What are they thinking and believing? Where is their breaking point or their moment of exhilaration?

Identify the Research Method: Ideally, both qualitative and quantitative research techniques should be used to ensure you capture all potential aspects of the journey. Starting with qualitative techniques allows you to probe deeply and ensure that subsequent quantitative techniques are properly informed.

• In-Depth Interviews: Whether in-person, over the phone, or virtual, personal interviews are the perfect method for diving deep into every single aspect of an individual’s journey. Not only are first hand accounts great at creating empathy among company stakeholders, the ability to probe with multiple “whys” ensures you can dig down to the inner most held beliefs and opinions associated with a behavior.
• Online Communities: Most journeys last far longer than a few minutes. Buying shampoo could be a ten minute or ten-day journey whereas a house hunting journey could take a year. Online communities are an effective way to bring people together to discuss each other’s unique journeys and discover which steps are common or unique, and why. For consumer goods mapping, you could even ask participants to maintain and share a diary throughout their journey.

• Observational Research: We all know the saying that actions speak louder than words. That’s why it can be extremely beneficial to include observational research as part of journey mapping research. Most commonly, this research is conducted by researchers quietly observing people as they progress through their journey in retail outlets. However, observations can also be made of digital behaviors after first getting permission to record people’s browser activities.
• Surveys: Finally, finishing with a quantitative survey will help ensure your final outcome is not only comprehensive, but also reflective of the broader population.  Remember to build surveys that incorporate data quality techniques and include fun question types that help participants remain engaged during the research process.
  

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What’s Next?

Are you ready to gain a thorough understanding of your customers’ journeys? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

Learn more from our case studies

• Communicating More Effectively with Insurance Customers – A bulletin board case study
• Mapping a Patient Funnel to Mitigate Treatment Barriers – A cancer patient survey case study
• Removing Customer Barriers to Auto Insurance Renewals – An insurance survey case study

Learn more from our other blog posts

• How to Leverage TikTok as a Consumer and Customer Insights Tool
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research
• The Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of Online Insight Communities

Confession time.

I’m addicted to TikTok.

What is TikTok?

TikTok is used by more than 1 billion people each month and, including me, they watch more than 167 million videos every minute. Wow!

If you haven’t used TikTok before, I’ll give you a quick explanation. Anyone, not just the tweens and teens, can set up an account to watch or post videos of up to 1 or 3 minutes.

“Creators” are people who make videos of themselves talking, walking, dancing, or of the world around them. Creators can be regular people with 3 followers, influencers with millions of followers, small business owners, or companies with large social media teams.

Personally, I’m a lurker. I don’t make videos (as you can see on my personal TikTok account) but I have a bunch of favourite accounts and favourite topics that I love to watch.

The topics are literally endless – whatever strikes your fancy, whether that’s cats and cheese or deep social, cultural, and political issues.

TikTok uses an analytical algorithm to decide which videos it presents to you. If you swipe past a video really fast, they’ll show you fewer of those kinds of videos. If you watch, like, or comment on a video, they’ll show you more of those kinds of videos.

The algorithm works FAST so if you ‘like’ a puppy video, you’ll be offered several more of those almost immediately. What it means is that you need to swipe past videos you dislike really fast or you’ll just get more of them – and that won’t make you happy.

Why do I like TikTok?

Even though I live in a city where more than 50% of residents belong to a visible minority community, my neighbourhood, my grocery store, and my social circle are not very diverse. I don’t see a lot of people who don’t look like me. And with the panorama (as I prefer to call it), I’ve been visiting diverse communities in my city far less often than usual.

This is why I love TikTok. I’ve found a Tok for so many communities different from my own. DisabledTok, DeafTok, AutismTok, IndigenousTok…. but I haven’t yet found “ResearchTok.”

Of course, ResearchTok is actually everywhere. You just have to listen carefully.

TikTok for insights

Naturally, TikTok can be used as any other social media channel is used for social listening purposes. Many videos come with automated or manual captions, as well as audio that can be transcribed and coded.If you want to collect opinions about brands, buyers, and businesses, you’ll get a first hand look at those opinions right here.

But TikTok is an invaluable research tool for people who design research, whether that’s quantitative questionnaires, qualitative groups and interviews, or something else. Here’s why.

People with disabilities: TikTok is where I get to actually see and listen to people who are disabled navigate their world. I see and hear first-hand the motivators and barriers they experience as they drive, shop, and consume in their everyday lives.

I see the struggles they face as cars block the sidewalks and ramps making it impossible for them to visit their favorite stores. I see how stores fail to accommodate their needs by not providing ramps or placing self-serve counters out of sight and out of reach. I watch how packages can’t be held or opened or poured because the package designers didn’t account for their user base.

I get a whole new and improved perspective on the types of issues I need to account for when I write questions about accessing and navigating stores as well as choosing and using product packages.

People of different ethnicities: Though I’m sure I’ve experienced some biases because of my specific demographic characteristics, TikTok is where I see the huge biases and aggressions experienced by people who are marginalized every single day, everywhere they go.

I see how hand driers don’t recognize darker skin, how brands frame people who are marginalized as victims, and how code switching means some people can’t be their authentic selves at work, at school, or while shopping.

It reminds me that it’s so important to ensure the research I conduct accounts for and respects people of all ethnicities. It reminds me that sticking to strict census balancing isn’t sufficient – I need to boost and weight sample for Black and Indigenous people so I can truly listen to and understand everyone.

People of different sexualities: Ever wonder what all the letters in LGTBGQIA+ stand for? TikTok has your back. People of all genders and sexualities are happy and keen to share their perspectives about the world around them and how they’re treated in it.

Listen first hand to how binary sex and gender options trivialize, diminish, and ignore their life experiences, and how relieved and heard they feel when they’re able to accurately describe themselves.

Sure, I might have decades of hard coded memory telling me that gender is binary, but I need to cancel that narrative and recognize that gender is a construct not a fact. I need to make sure demographic questions are accurate, respectful, and all-encompassing.

What’s the impact of TikTok on research?

As a relatively privileged person, TikTok has further opened my world to the rainbow of people who exist in it. My personal experiences may be common but there are millions, billions of people whose experiences I could have never imagined without the help of TikTok.

My questionnaires are better written. Not only am I far more careful and knowledgeable about how I write demographic questions, I’m more careful about how I write questions about brands, retailers, and product usage. I’ve always used my own experiences to write those questions, but now I am better able to consider a much broader range of experiences.

If you’re interested, here are a few of my favourite accounts. These folks are well-informed, educational, funny, and eager to share their personal experiences so that people like me can do better. Learn lots!

• Deaf community: patrickandbigbenv, smartguy85, djdeaftunez, deafinitlygary
• Blind community: asfvision
• People with other disabilities: peetmontzingo, laceyrichcreek, journywithcerebralpalsy, summershirtproject, colbycam722
• LGBT+ community: mrwilliamsprek
• BIPOC community: clarabellecwb, therealoverloadcomedy
• Indigenous community: brettstoise, itzeaglee, asinaabe, isapadeau

What’s Next?

Are you ready to discover top quality insights about your buyers, brands, and business? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

Learn more from our case studies

• Face-to-Face On-Site Medical Leader Interviews – A B2B interview case study
• Communicating More Effectively with Insurance Customers | A Bulletin Board Case Study
• Sentiment and Content Analysis of Qualitative Hiring Data | A Qualitative Research Case Study

Learn more from our other blog posts

• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research

Collision 2021 was a four-day, North American tech conference that drew more than 38 000 attendees. I was fortunate to be one of those attendees this year thanks to a ticket kindly donated by ESOMAR. This year, the Collision Conference hosted more than 600 speakers from all walks of life. Just a few of those people included:

• Celebrities: Cindy Crawford, Meaningful Beauty; Maria Sharapova, Therbody; Ashton Kutcher, Sound Ventures; Ryan Reynolds, Mint Mobile
• CEOs and CMOs from global companies: Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto; Ukonwa Ojo, Amazon; Fiona Carter, Goldman Sachs; Martin Wildberger, Royal Bank of Canada
• Local and global community leaders: Jagmeet Singh, Leader of Canadian New Democrat Party; John Tory, Mayor of Toronto; Katie Porter, Representative at US House of Representatives; Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago
• And 13-year-old whiz kids whose expertise and speaking skills rivaled the most experienced speakers in attendance!

With hundreds of sessions running simultaneously (and literally colliding with each other!), it was easy to create a personalized stream of content, particularly since no matter the time, a great talk was always just beginning. The stream I created for myself focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, and innovation. Here are the key themes I took away.

Technology Leaders Must Prove Their Trust

People love their devices. We trust them to help us discover and buy products, make and take phone calls and text messages from our loved ones, and remind us about confidential meetings and doctor’s appointments. We trust our devices will work as expected when we need them to work. However, there is a trust problem and it doesn’t lie with the technology itself. It lies in the fact that we don’t trust the people behind our devices, neither the people building the devices nor our government leaders, to create and hold appropriate boundaries around privacy and security.

Companies build trust by having clear values and a clear mission grounded in being authentic, empathetic, transparent, and relatable. We learn to trust companies that shape our experiences in ways that are personalized but at the same time not creepy. We also learn who trust by witnessing which companies hold themselves fully and immediately accountable when they make mistakes. Companies that abuse these expectations will quickly find themselves speaking to a declining audience. A great way to think about trust is that every interaction a company has with a consumer is either a deposit or a withdrawal. You do good or you do bad. There is no neutral.

Robot, Cobots, and the Inevitable

Did you realize you already have robots in your home? If we follow the strict definition that any automatically operated machine that replaces people is a robot, then your electric toothbrush, your toaster, and your vacuum cleaner (even if it’s NOT a Roomba) are robots. We’re slowly getting used to the idea that robots don’t have to take a human shape to be called robots.

A newer take on robots is the idea of cobots. Unlike a lot of robots that run behind the scenes, collaborative robots are designed to interact directly with or next to people. While you may be nervous that robots or cobots will take your job, there are many good reasons to be excited about working with them. Not only do they easily take on jobs that are dull, dirty, and dangerous, they augment our skills and abilities and help us do our work better and with more agility. Robots make us physically stronger and mentally more agile. If we let them, they help us make truly better decisions.

As in the case of robots and cobots, if something is inevitable, get enthusiastic about it.

The Language of AI

One of the main complaints about artificial intelligence comes when it’s used as a substitute for people. For instance, researchers are actively working on building AI tools intended to serve as personal companions for people who are elderly or disabled, and counsellors for people who’ve experienced trauma. Isn’t that impersonal? Isn’t that disrespectful? Well, let’s consider it from a different angle.

Think about people who’ve experienced a life of trauma, a life wrecked by abuse, trafficking, trauma, or addiction. A life where people have repeatedly let them down and shown that they can’t be trusted. Those who’ve experienced trauma may find it particularly hard to trust new people and may be far more comfortable beginning their healing process by working with AI.

Think about people who have experienced a brain injury or deal with communication disabilities. Or people who aren’t using their native language. Or people who feel more comfortable communicating via email or text. We constantly hear that people should be treated in the way they want and prefer to be treated. That we need to increase accessibility. This could easily be AI.

Regardless of the initial need, we need to ensure that these AI communication tools demonstrate empathy and show respect. AI can’t replace human judgement but it can and should reflect good judgement.

What Does It Mean For Researchers

The research industry talks about trust all the time. We need research participants to trust us enough to share their most personal opinions, their most private click-paths, and their most unusual purchase behaviours. We need research tools that can effectively automate dull and error-prone research tasks leaving us with more time to do our jobs even better and make better decisions.

And we really need to focus on language. So much of our work revolves around language – writing questionnaires with respectful wording that everyone can understand, moderating focus groups that accommodate every participant, making the research space accessible to all.

I may not have attended a single market research talk but I did indeed come away with new perspectives that will make me rethink how I have conducted research in the past, and what I will do in the future.

Research Objective

• The pharma company needed to optimize channel effectiveness by understanding physician/sales rep interactions, in particular related to what their product does, how it can be best used, and physical aids used.
• They also needed to understand pain points that physicians face during interactions to improve marketing materials and prescription process.

Scope & Methodology

A survey was used to measure:

• Product knowledge displayed by sales reps
• Preferences for Type 2 diabetes treatments
• Marketing messages of GLP-1 treatments for Type 2 Diabetes
• Reasons for not prescribing GLP-1 treatments and brands

Value Delivered

• The research helped the pharma company understand marketing messages recalled by physicians for each product and how it impacted their prescription patterns.
• They were able to understand the pain points physicians experienced during interactions with their pharma reps with particular regards to Type 2 diabetes treatments.

Check out other patient case studies

• Optimize Treatment Pricing Strategies For Multiple Patient Segments – A pharmaceutical survey analytics case study
• Mapping a Patient Funnel to Mitigate Treatment Barriers – A cancer patient survey case study
• Understanding Patient Preferences to Inform Differentiation Strategy – A medical device patient survey case study

Research Objective

• A home appliance company needed to understand the pain points their sales representatives experienced when interacting with customers throughout the sales process.
• They also needed to understand the ideal product features customers desired so that representatives could properly recommend a purchase.

Scope & Methodology

A survey was designed to understand a variety of aspects of the sales process from the point of view of sales representatives. This included:

• Recent and past interactions they had with target and competitor brands
• Marketing messages and features associated with various brands
• Brands the representatives tended to recommend
• Recency and sources of training received by sales representatives

Value Delivered

The client gained a better understanding of how their brand was perceived in relation to other brands and product features. They were able to better understood how sales representatives interacted with customers to interpret their needs and make product recommendations.

Check out other related case studies

• Increasing Customer Acceptance For Controversial Pet Food Format – A survey case study
• Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Campaign with Brand and Message Recall – A consumer media survey case study
• Identifying Optimum Price Corridors to Predict Volume Share – An advertising price simulator case study