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Ah, a rose by any other name smells just as sweet! Roses? Well, instead of using the phrase Usage and Attitude, you might hear some people use the phrase Habits and Practices. And instead of shortening it down to U&A, they’ll shorten it down to H&P. Whether you’re interested in a U&A or an H&P, we’re generally talking about the same thing. Use the acronym you prefer and we’ll all gain more valuable insights into consumer behavior, attitudes, and usage patterns.

 

 

What is a Usage and Attitude Study?

Usage and Attitudes studies aim to understand a broad range of behaviors and attitudes related to the people experiencing a product or service. It’s relevant for all products like food, beverages, hair care, and electronics, as well as services like healthcare, banking, and education.

 

Most U&As gather information about the brand of interest, as well as competitive brands and the category as a whole. This ensures you gain a full understanding of any behaviors and attitudes that could eventually be relevant and important to the brand of interest.

 

 

Why is a Usage and Attitude Study Important?

U&As create a solid foundation for building a brand. They serve a number of important benefits in a variety of key areas.

 

People: Know your buyer and your consumer

• Create more relevant and memorable messaging by understanding the unique demographic and psychographic characteristics of each segment of users that has been identified in any segmentation research you’ve conducted
  
• Understand purchase drivers associated with each persona, e.g., price, availability, loyalty, packaging, sensory features, sustainability, durability
• Plan for the future by identifying what each segment needs and wants from an ideal product
• Differentiate between the needs of buyers (e.g., availability, pricing) and users (e.g., efficacy, sensation), and ensure the targeted message reaches each audience

 

Place: Know your buyers’ preferred information and purchase channels

• Focus your marketing spend in the most effective channels by identifying the marketing and sales channels and influencers that are most effective and important at each stage of the purchase journey

 

Pricing: Know your buyers’ preferred pricing models

• Create the most effective pricing model by understanding attitudes towards various pricing strategies, e.g., every day low pricing vs sales vs bundling
  

 

Promotion: Know your buyers’ preferred promotion tactics

• Create the most effective promotion model by understanding which types of promotions are relevant for your buyers, e.g., in-store promotions, OOH promotions, door-to-door promotions

 

Product: Know what your consumer needs and wants from your product

• Prevent switching and abandonment by identifying and resolving frustrations, complaints, and pain points
• Encourage purchase by identifying and reminding people of desired benefits and advantages
• Plan product improvements by understanding which product features people love and hate

 

Strategy: Know how to position and plan for the future

• Plan for a more competitive long-term evolution of your brand and potential brand extensions by understanding the competitive space
• Predict the growth and avoidable decline of your brand by maintaining and tracking accurate norms as they relate to current culture and society 
• Create a data-driven baseline that can be used to support strategic decisions unaffected by changes in leadership
• Forecast category and brand growth

 

 

What Questions to Ask in a Usage and Attitude Study

As with any research project, there is an unlimited number of questions that could be asked. The key is to identify the specific research objectives for the imminent research project and focus the questions there.

 

Then, select a set of engaging questions that will keep the entire questionnaire to less than 15 minutes long. Don’t try to do everything or the data quality will suffer.

 

 

Brand Metrics

• Awareness: When you think of this product category, which brands come to mind first?
• Aided Awareness: From this list of brands, which ones have you heard of?
• Discovery: How did you first hear about this brand?
• Trial: Which brands of this category have you ever tried?
• Trial: Why did you decide to try this brand?
• Consideration: When you think of this product category, which brands would you consider buying?
• Consideration: From this list of brands, which ones would you considering buying?
• Preference: When you think of this product category, which brand do you most prefer?
• Loyalty: If your preferred brand was not available in your usual store, what would you do?
• Perceptions: Which 5 of these words reflect your opinions about this brand?
• Perceptions: What 3 things do you like about this brand? What 3 things do you dislike about this brand?
• Perceptions: Which of these brands is most innovative? Fun? Likeable? Effective? Appealing? Different?
• Perceptions: What is your opinion about the effectiveness of this brand? Quality? Appearance? Texture? Taste? Scent? Sound? Durability? Sustainability?
• Perceptions: Overall, what is your opinion about this brand?

 

 

Product Usage

• In your household, which of these people use this category?
• In your household, who uses this category most often?
• Where in your home is this category used?
• At what time of day/week/month/year is this category used?
• How is this category used?
• What occasions is this category used for? Every day? Holidays? Religious days? Birthdays?

 

 

Purchase Journey:

• Who usually buys the product?
• What are all the places where this category/brand is bought?
• Where is this category/brand usually bought?
• Where do you prefer to buy this category?
• On the next shopping trip, which brands will be bought?

 

 

Purchase Frequency / Recency / Monetary

• How often is each of these brands bought?
• How often is each of these brands used?
• In just the last 7 days, which of these brands have been bought?
• When was the last time each of these brands have been bought?
• What size package of category/brand is usually bought? What size is preferred?
• At what time of the day/week/month/year is this brand/category usually bought?
• The last time this category/brand was bought, about how much was spent on it?
• The last time this category/brand was bought, were any coupons or cost savings used?
• What is your opinion about using coupons? Buying at regular price? BOGOs?

 

 

Personal Details

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, ethnicity, religion, household size, children in home
• Psychographics: Personal attitudes towards relevant category characteristics, e.g., sustainability, early adoption, pricing preferences

 

 

Why Ask About Behaviors that Can Be Measured Digitally?

 

If time and money were no objectives, many metrics could be confirmed visually or digitally. Sometimes, however, it’s faster and easier to just ask people. Sometimes the data isn’t available in a properly formatted, readable database. Sometimes the data isn’t available for purchase. And sometimes, we need to match attitude data with behavior data for specific people.

 

Or, and this is much more interesting, maybe we want to understand what people think they are doing. The way people think about or recall their behaviors is an indirect measure of awareness, loyalty, believability, and likeability. If people can’t remember which brand they buy, whether the name or the logo, that’s not a great indicator of brand loyalty which could permit a premium pricing strategy.

 

 

 

What’s Next?

Most brands are well served to conduct a U&A study. If you’re 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

• Customer Behavioral Segmentation to Support Targeted Marketing – A BFSI data analytics case study
• Increasing Enrollment Through A More Meaningful Brand Purpose – An education survey case study
• Modeling a Consumer Response Hierarchy to Guide Brand Strategy – A personal care survey analytics case study
• Understanding Patient Preferences to Inform Differentiation Strategy – A medical device patient survey case study

 

Learn more from our other blog posts

• Getting started with consumer, customer, and market segmentation
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Journey Mapping from Enigma to Enlightenment: An E2E Research Webinar
• A Brand Manager’s Practical Guide to Brand Tracking

 

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.

Are you launching a start-up? Then I bet you have hundreds of questions about your potential product and your target audience.

 

From conceptualization to market sizing and scaling, innumerable questions must be answered in order to build a solid foundation for a successful business.  Fortunately, a full range of qualitative and quantitative research, primary and secondary research, and data analytics solutions exist to help you discover actionable answers to those questions throughout the entire process.

 

During the initial conceptualization stage, you’ll need to gain a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of the problem and potential solutions. You’ll also need to understand the tangents, side-conversations, and unspoken truths and myths that people won’t necessarily share with just anyone. To gain these types of insights from your target audience, qualitative research will be your go-to method.

 

Numerous qualitative techniques can help you at this point so let’s start by learning about in-depth, individual interviews.

 

 

What are individual interviews?

 

As the name suggests, individual interviews are in-depth conversations between a trained moderator and one other person. If the product or service is specifically designed for 2 or 3 people to use together, dyads or triads with colleagues, best friends, children, partners, or spouses may be used as well.

 

Key to this technique is working with a trained moderator. Although everyone has experience chatting with consumers, customers, or clients on a one to one basis, a research interview is completely different from a “chat” or “conversation.”

 

Trained moderators have unique skills which include understanding and responding to the body language of the person they’re interviewing. They have learned how and when to use specific language to encourage someone to share more detailed and personal insights. And, most importantly, they actively strive to prevent bias from unconsciously creeping into a conversation.

 

Interviews are an excellent way to deeply connect with your target audience and get a first-hand look into their emotional and physical real world. Interviews will allow you to:

• Spend meaningful time with them such that they open up about their personal habits, behaviors, needs, drivers, emotions, and opinions.
• Watch and listen to them struggle using unsuitable, existing products and services in their real world, whether that’s in their home, school, office, or gym.
• Watch and listen to them as they attempt to shop for alternative products using both online and offline channels.

These observations will guide you towards a thorough and unbiased understanding of what the problems and required solutions really are.

 

What follows are key questions that an interviewer might address during the initial, conceptualization stage.

 

 

How are people emotionally connected to the problem?

• How do you feel about this situation? What types of emotions do you have dealing with this situation? How strong are those emotions?
• How does this situation interact with different aspects of your life – at home, at work, with your kids or parents?
  
• How do you feel about the available alternatives or lack of alternatives? How do you compensate for the lack of easily accessible alternatives?
• What is your emotional state when you really need an alternative and can’t find one?
• How do your personal finances and resources fit into finding alternatives?

 

 

Who are the primary and secondary stakeholders?

• Who uses or needs the product? Who else might use it if they saw it lying around? Who would do the shopping for it? Who would approve and pay for it? Who would ensure the product gets used? Who would help you use the product and how would they help you use it?
• What frustrations and pain points do you have during the situation? What are the pain points of people who must find alternative options and pay for alternatives for you?
• Who is negatively and positively affected by this situation being unresolved?

 

 

What alternative solutions are being used now?

• What compromises do you make regarding this situation?
• What do you wish you could do? How would you solve the situation?
• How do you find and learn about potential alternatives?
  
• How do you physically manipulate or use current products? What other items do you use the product with? What do you buy to support using the current product?
• Where do you use current and alternative products? How do you use them?
• Where do you store current products and packages? What are your fears about storing them?

 

 

 

What’s Next?

During the conceptualization stage, your main goal is to listen and understand the problem without bias. You need to truly hear people and learn about their personal experiences so that you can identify both major and minor problems that may need to be solved. Individual interviews are the perfect solution for understanding people’s most intimate perceptions and behaviors. You’ll build a broad and deep baseline for what the key problems are and the range of major and minor issues that need to be resolved.

 

If you’re ready to deeply understand your target audience with individual interviews, please get in touch with us. We’d love to help you grow your start-up into a successful business! Email your questions about gathering information to support your startup to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com.

 

 

 

Learn more from our case studies

• Building a Strategic Business Plan Grounded in Industry Data – A pharmaceutical data analytics case study
• Creating a Beverage Launch Strategy in a Competitive Market – A beverage desk research case study
• Developing a New Nutritional Pasta Product – A survey + desk research case study
• Identifying Optimum Price Corridors to Predict Volume Share – An advertising price simulator case study

 

 

Podcasts You Might Like

• Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
• The Tim Ferriss Show
• Business Wars with David Brown
• How I Built This with Guy Raz

 

 

Books You Might Like

• What It Takes: How I Built a $100 Million Business Against the Odds Hardcover by Raegan Moya-Jones
• The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: It’s Your Turn to #Jointheride Hardcover by Darren Hardy
• What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 – 10th Anniversary Edition: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World by Tina Seelig

 

 

Conferences You Might Like

• CES Consumer Technology Association (January)
• AWE (June)
• Collision Conference (June)
• The Startup Conference (May)
• SaaStr Annual (September)

 

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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Demographics	Psychographics	Profession	Category
Age, gender, income, education, marital status, household size, children, religion, where they live	Personal life goals, personality traits, values, motivations, goals, pain points, information seeking Hobbies, interests, sports, music, arts Publications they read, channels they watch, use of online and offline media	Industry, company, company size, job title, job level, skills, qualifications, decision-making role, technology used	Brands they like and dislike, related categories they use and don’t use Favorite influences and channels Typical challenges, barriers, and pain points with the brand and category Consideration and purchase motivations, messaging preferences

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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

What is an insight community?

In the market and consumer research industry, online communities are often called Bulletin Boards, Insight Communities, Market Research Online Communities, or MROCs. Though they can incorporate quantitative activities like questionnaires, insight communities are mainly considered a qualitative research technique.

 

Whether it’s a group of 5 people who chat with each other over several days or thousands of people grouped into segments engaging with each other over several months, insight communities exist within a dedicated digital space to allow people to share their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors about a common topic or goal. These digital spaces normally support the community with features like polls, surveys, image mark-ups, chat rooms, bulletin boards, video/image sharing, and more.

Insight communities aren’t just really large or long focus groups. Unlike focus groups that are often conducted in-person over a couple of hours with 4 to 10 people, communities are nearly always conducted asynchronously and virtually over several days, and with far more participants. (In the research world, asynchronous means that the researcher and the participants aren’t necessarily using the tools at the same time. A participant might share their comments in the middle of the night, and the researcher might respond to them the next day.)

 

Insight communities are generally NOT open to anyone with a pulse and an email address. While E2E Research has a Facebook page and a community that likes to read our posts, that’s not the kind of community we’re talking about. Using Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to listen to consumer and customer needs and opinions, and elicit feedback from groups or individuals doesn’t make a social media network an insight community.

 

There are no written in stone rules about how communities must be run. However, here are answers to some common questions that will help you think through the process more completely and figure out whether a community could be a wise choice to meet your specific research needs.

 

 

What is the purpose of research communities?

Like any market or consumer research project that intends to generalize valid and reliable findings to a broader population, every insight community needs clear planning, goals, and research objectives that lead to specific outcomes. “Signing up” or “finding lots of members” are not acceptable goals, nor is “getting lots of comments every day.”

 

For insight communities, clear goals could include working to:

 

• Understand how the psychological value people place in your brand changes over time
• Learn why some brands become stagnant over time
• Learn how people interpret and act on advertising campaigns and communications from specific brands or in specific categories
• Track detailed perceptions of brands’ marketing tactics over time
• See how the use of a new product evolves over time
• Gain insight into how world events or life-stages affect product usage throughout the year
• Understand how local retailers design their outlets throughout the year
• Gather ideas for new products and gain feedback on a variety of concepts and prototypes

 

 

Why are asynchronous communities valued over synchronous tools?

From focus groups to questionnaires, researchers have many data collection tools to choose from, each with their own benefits. However, insight communities that allow people to log in and out at their own convenience have many benefits for participants. They:

 

• Give shy or anxious people an opportunity to become familiar and comfortable with the research process before having to share their opinions publicly
• Allow people to share opinions as they arise rather than feeling pressured to perform on-demand
• Give people a chance to rethink and change their opinions over time
• Allow people to remain anonymous to the group and share their truths while still remaining known to the researcher
• Are not disrupted when someone has to join late or stop participating early
• Allow people who work rotating, weekend, or night shifts to participate
• Are more accessible to marginalized people who may only have internet access intermittently or at third party locations

 

 

How are insight communities moderated?

Communities aren’t a quick alternative to groups or interviews. Even if a community is planned to run over just a couple of days, it requires extensive pre-planning, moderation during those days, and lots of post-project analysis and identification of next steps. Without planning for this investment of time and resources, everyone’s efforts will be lost.

 

Once participants have been recruited and understand the guidelines they need to follow, moderators are still essential to:

 

• Engage with every participant daily so they know their contribution is desired and valuable
• Introduce daily and weekly tasks and assignments
• Ensure everyone participates in every task and meets all the task requirements
• Prompt and probe participants to share as much detail and insight as possible
• Identify and convert emerging issues into new goals, tasks, and outcomes
• Keep discussions focused on the important topics
• Ensure participants remain respectful to each other

 

 

Who participates in insight communities?

Most insight communities are private and more secure than public communities.  A dedicated community recruiter carefully seeks out participants who have the ideal characteristics and offers them appropriate incentives to complete the agreed upon tasks.

 

This careful recruitment ensures that generalizations from participants are relevant to the issue, category, or brand, and will lead to valid and reliable insights and outcomes.

 

Here is one example of a local government body recruiting for an insight community to better understand the needs of their constituents.

 

In addition to having digital, internet, and email capabilities, participants may be required to:

• Have specific demographic details, e.g., a child under 2 years of age, live in a rural area
• Own, use, or buy a specific brand or product category, e.g., use body lotion, buy Froot Loops
• Demonstrate specific behaviors, e.g., run at least twice per week, attend a music festival in the last year
• Hold specific opinions, e.g., strong feelings about the environment, clear ideas about gender roles
• Have a minimum level of written skills in a specific language in order to accurately express their opinions

 

 

What are insight community members required to do?

Insight communities also have clear rules for participants who wish to join and remain part of the community. They may include requirements to:

 

• Spend a minimum number of minutes in the community each day
• Answer at least one moderated question in detail every day
• Comment on other people’s posts at least once per day
• Participate in at least one poll or survey each week
• Share at least one image or video each week
• Be respectful of others’ opinions and refrain from using profanity

 

How do insight communities benefit participants?

Communities don’t just benefit brand managers, marketers, and researchers. There’s also a lot of good for the participants too. For instance, participants:

 

• Feel pride in knowing their contributions will help other people through the development of better products and services
• Feel a sense of accomplishment for their contributions
• Discover new products that might enhance their lives
• Discover unknown features of the products they already use
• Learn how to use their favorite products more effectively
• Learn innovative, alternative uses for their favorite products
• Learn how their peers have solved problems they might encounter in the future

 

 

How do communities speed up the path to insights?

Insight communities can take many forms. Sometimes, they’re just a few days long and focus on one or two specific products. Other times, they can last several months and focus on broad categories.

 

Longer-term communities offer researchers the capability to ask consumers questions about anything at any time. As such, when an urgent research question arises, there is no need to spend a week or two recruiting a selection of people – those people are always at the ready. Further, such communities run by companies with multiple brands may leverage those communities to learn about different brands and categories throughout the year.

 

In other cases, when unexpected issues arise, perhaps because of societal issues or emergencies, a great community moderator can have new questions and tasks lined up for their members in mere hours and have results flowing in by the end of the day. This speed can ensure that small issues are quickly resolved rather than letting them balloon into huge issues that destroy a brand.

 

 

How do insight communities reduce costs?

Online communities help lower costs in different ways. First, longer-term communities can take the place of multiple ad-hoc projects. This eliminates the need to recruit participants multiple times. Further, participants are already ‘trained’ in how research works and need far less time and guidance to navigate the software and complete the tasks.

 

Second, insight communities have a benefit of allowing marketers and brand managers to understand reoccurring issues customers are having. This early information gives them a chance to understand and fix small problems before they become large problems for their customers outside the community.

 

 

What’s Next?

As with any research technique, there are a lot of intricacies to learn and implement. Fortunately, a good partner will make the process easier for you. If you’re ready to leverage an insight community 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

• Communicating More Effectively with Insurance Customers | A Bulletin Board Case Study
• Sentiment and Content Analysis of Qualitative Hiring Data | A Qualitative Research Case Study
• Understanding Teenage Needs, Lifestyles, and Communication | An online community case study

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Great Reads About Qualitative Research

Most research methodology books cover online communities as a chapter in more comprehensive books about qualitative research. Here are a few of our favorites.

• Qual-online the Essential Guide: The Essential Guide – What Every Researcher Needs to Know About Conducting and Moderating Interviews Via the Web, by Jennifer Dale and Susan Abbott
• Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, by Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick
• Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging, by Carrie Melissa Jones and Charles Vogl
• Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation, by Sharan B. Merriam and Elizabeth J. Tisdell
• Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches Paperback, by John Creswell
• The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research: Tools and Techniques for Market Researchers, by Ray Poynter
• The Indispensable Community: Why Some Brand Communities Thrive When Others Perish, by Richard Millington

 

Conferences focused on Qualitative Research

• Doing Autoethnography Conference: Virtual, January 3 to 5, 2022
• The Qualitative Report Conference: Florida – January 19 to 21 2022
• QRCA: Virtual – January 12 to 13, 2022; San Diego, January 19 to 22, 2022
• WCQR: Virtual – January 26 to 28, 2022
• Qual360: Washington – March 8 to 9, 2022
• International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry: Illinois – May 18 to 22, 2022
• Ethnographic & Qualitative Research Conference: Virtual – March 21 to 22, 2022
• Qualitative Analysis Conference & Couch-Stone Symposium: Newfoundland, June 22 to 24, 2022
• Thinking Qualitatively: July 5 to 9, 2021

 

 

Research Objective

• A retail owner needed to understand issues related to inventory, order times, costs, and logistics to identify service gaps and improve stores over time.

 

Scope & Methodology

• Using survey data, various store attributes were tracked over time. Data analytics were used to identify gaps and barriers related to price, quality, and demand which impacted sales.

.

Value Delivered

• The client was able to monitor drivers and barriers over time so they could make appropriate changes to their business and improve sales and service.

 

 

Learn more from our case studies

• Building a Strategic Business Plan Grounded in Industry Data – A pharmaceutical data analytics case study
• Communicating More Effectively with Insurance Customers | A bulletin board case study
• Creating a Beverage Launch Strategy in a Competitive Market – A beverage desk research case study

Research Objective

• A new food delivery company wished to understand consumer perceptions of online food delivery services in an Indian market.
• They needed to understand:
  • Why consumers choose online delivery services
  • Perceptions of online food delivery portals
  • Barriers to using online food delivery services
  • The competitive environment including expansions, new product launches
• They also needed to understand key drivers, challenges, and perceptions of pricing.

 

Scope & Methodology

• A structured questionnaire was designed to identify which food delivery websites consumers are using and why, and focused on key drivers, pricing, and trends in the online food ordering and delivery market.
• The target audience included students, self-employed people, homemakers, and service employees.
• Secondary data sources included news articles, company annual reports, a variety of websites, press releases, and other relevant, trusted documents.
• Key analyses included:
  • Understanding customer satisfaction with ordering and searching for specific food items
  • Identifying more suitable restaurant selections given the desired food item
  • Understanding desires for offers and discounts
  • Understanding concerns about on-time delivery needs and customer services
  • Understanding customer needs and wants for improving the online food ordering process.

 

Value Delivered

• Our expert analyses enabled the client to better understand customer desires in product offerings, customer satisfaction, and regional presence of all major food delivery competitors.
• Comprehensive findings and insights allowed them to make more strategic decisions grounded in data to facilitate the expansion of their business.

 

 

Check out other retail case studies

• Optimizing Trade Promotion Spends with a Pricing Simulator – A food business analytics and price simulator case study
• Launching a Fast Food Franchise In A Competitive Market – A retail survey + competitive analysis case study
• Improving Operational Effectiveness at a CPG Company – A retail B2B survey case study

Research Objective

• A medical device client needed to understand the market and consumer preferences for different medical treatments to inform and customize product messaging and product differentiation.
• They also needed to understand unmet needs and barriers hindering treatment choices.

 

Scope & Methodology

A survey was designed to measure a number of key metrics including:

• Market leaders in medical device technologies
• Brand switching patterns
• Changes in restriction levels
• Change in usage of two treatments as a result of new device guidelines

The data showed patients had clear preferences for specific brands of medical devices. In addition, patients differentiated the brands based on their perceptions of clinical performance, training programs, range of treatment options, and how much the brands invested in clinical trials.

 

Value Delivered

• As a result of the research, the client gained a better understanding of their market position relative to their competitors, and was able to gauge market shifts in the treatments used by patients. They also were able to better understand drivers of switching and the key decision makers involved in those switches.
• The client was better able to differentiate their product and create more impactful messaging to help their patients.

 

 

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