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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

 

You love your ad concept but does your target audience love it?

 

Advertising is an omnipresent tool that both small and large brands depend on to build and sustain their business growth. But, if your target audience doesn’t like your ads, you won’t be able to achieve the increased brand recall, awareness, purchase, and repurchase rates you were hoping for.

 

By asking people for feedback about potential ads prior to launching those ads, it’s possible to understand how people perceive them and how they will act as a result of experiencing them.

 

 

What are the benefits of ad testing?

Of course ad testing is fun to do but there are important benefits to conducting this research.

 

Safeguard your brand reputation. Rather than launching an ad that annoys or offends large segments of the viewing audience, conduct ad testing to find and fix unexpected surprises before they become problems in the broader market. Keep in mind that, sometimes, things that are ‘offensive’ to customers or consumers are your deliberate choices and won’t be changed. Either way, ad testing will help ensure the brand is represented as intended.

 

Use marketing budget wisely. Though conducting ad testing can seem expensive, the potential cost of a failed ad can be vastly higher. Ad testing ensures that ineffective ads are identified and improved before they are launched in-market so that they will generate the awareness or trial as intended. Further, ad testing will help identify in which channels an ad will be most effective. Finding the channel that is appropriate for an ad is just as important as creating a great ad.

 

Make a good ad great. As one brand among millions, every brand faces fierce competition. Most people see thousands of ads every single day so it’s important to ensure your ad stands out and is memorable in a positive way. Ad testing prior to market launch creates an opportunity to make small or large adjustments so that good ads are even better. Listen to and act on the perceptions of research participants even when they already like an ad. If likeability, uniqueness, or believability could be better, tweak the appropriate components of the ad to improve those metrics.

 

Understand customer personas. Even great ads are not liked by everyone. Use ad testing to identify which personas prefer which ads so that ads can be presented to the right people in the right channel. If you’ve done segmentation research already, you’ve probably identified 2 or 3 personas that you’ll want your ads to resonate with and you can focus your efforts there.

 

Make data-driven decisions. Sometimes, multiple ad concepts will seem promising and a clear winner can’t be identified. Ad testing takes the guesswork and personal biases out of choosing a winning ad. And, getting formal approval to run an ad with a big budget is much easier when the data supports the final ad choice.

 

 

 

What research design does ad testing use?

There is no single correct method for conducting an ad test but most use one of three methods, each of which have unique advantages and disadvantages.

 

Monadic Tests: In this research design, each participant experiences and rates just one ad.

• No order effects. Because people only see one ad, there is no risk that viewing one ad concept before another will have a negative or positive impact on perceptions of the subsequent ad.
• More in-depth results. Because each person spends all their time considering only one ad, you may have the opportunity to ask more in-depth questions about that ad. Alternatively, the questionnaire could remain shorter thereby maintaining engagement throughout the testing period and increasing completion rates.
• Larger sample sizes. You may need a larger sample size to generate reliable data. For example, you might need to sample 300 people for each of 3 ads for a total of 900 people. This could cost a lot more, particularly if your target audience is hard to reach.
• Match group demographics. You will need to ensure that each group is matched on key demographics. For example, you wouldn’t want to discover after the fact that mostly women experienced ad #1 and mostly men experienced ad #2 such that the results actually reflect a gender difference, not an ad creative difference.

 

 

Sequential Monadic Tests: Research participants experience and rate several ads individually.

• Smaller sample size: In general, the more concepts each person reviews, the smaller your sample size can be. This is advantageous especially when you must test many ads, and even if each participant only reviews 2 or 3 of those ads. For example, if you’re testing 3 ads and each person sees all 3 ads, you might need only 300 research participants.
• No need to match groups. Because people review several ads, each person acts as their own control group. For the most part, this eliminates the need to precisely match groups based on demographic or psychographic characteristics. This makes sampling much easier and potentially much quicker.
• Order bias must be prevented: To prevent order bias, you’ll need to randomly assign ads to each person, and you’ll need to randomly assign the order in which those ads are presented to each person. For example, if there are 4 ads to review, person 1 might review ads A B and C, person 2 could review ads B D and A, person 3 could review ads D C and E, person 4 could review ads C E and D, and person 5 could review ads E A and B. Order bias will still occur but it will be averaged across all of the ads reducing the potential impact on any one ad.
• Longer questionnaire: Because multiple ads must be reviewed by each person in one questionnaire, it may take longer for them to complete and may result in lower completion rates. Do your best to limit the number of ads each person experiences to no more than 3. And, do your best to keep the completion length under 15 minutes.

 

Paired Comparison Tests: Rather than showing ads consecutively as in the sequential monadic design, this method has participants experience and rate two or more ads at the same time.

• Smaller sample size: As with the sequential monadic test, having each participant rate multiple ads means you can use a smaller sample size. If you can keep the questionnaire short, this could result in a less expensive project.
• Order effects are reduced. Because people see multiple ads together, the risk of order effects is reduced. Any single ad simply has to be stronger than its competitive ad. Ideally, ads should still be randomly assigned to sets, and sets should be randomly assigned an order.
• Comparisons create cognitive load. Participants may find they like different features of the ads presented to them and consequently struggle to choose one preferred ad. This can cause fatigue, and decrease engagement and attention.
• Longer questionnaire: As before, asking people to rate multiple ads may result in a longer questionnaire. To maintain engagement and completion, you’ll need to take care to ensure the questionnaire is no longer than 15 minutes. You can also help maintain engagement by ensuring you use engaging question types.

 

 

What are the key metrics for ad testing?

You could ask each person hundreds of questions about the presentation, messaging, and branding of an ad but you’d end up with a two-hour questionnaire and an unnecessarily low completion rate. Instead, identify the key goals of the ad and choose a set of 3 to 5 key questions that directly address those goals. Then, create a secondary set of questions that will support your KPIs and help you identify points of strength or weakness.

 

Potential questions could reflect a range of categories such as the following.

 

 

Questions about the ad overall

• Overall, what is your opinion about the ad?
• How believable is the ad?
• How relevant is the ad to you personally?
• How appealing is the ad?
• How memorable is the ad?
• Compared to other ads about similar kinds of products, how different is this ad?
• How genuine is this ad?
• What 3 things do you like about the ad?
• What 3 things do you dislike about the ad?

 

Questions about the presentation of the ad

• What is your opinion about the images used in the ad?
• What is your opinion about the videos used in the ad?
• What is your opinion about the music and sound used in the ad?
• What is your opinion about the spokesperson / mascot in the ad?
• How well does the ad fit into the Facebook environment? Instagram? TikTok? Snapchat?

 

Questions about the messaging

• What is the main message of the ad?
• How clear was the main message of this ad?
• How did the message make you feel?
• Did you learn anything new from this ad?
• What 2 things did you like about the message?
• What 2 things did you NOT like about the message?
• Which 3 of these words describe how you feel about the message?
• What did the message NOT address even though it should have?

 

Questions about the brand

• How likely are you to buy this product?
• How likely are you to recommend this product to your family or friends?
• How likely are you to visit the website / download the app / connect on Facebook / enter the draw?
• How much do you care about the brand?
• Did the ad change how you care about the brand?
• Did the ad change how you think about the brand?

 

 

 

How to conduct an ad test

 

1. Identify campaign objectives: Rather than simply entertain, most ads attempt to teach, persuade, or invoke a behavior. For example, teach someone about a product feature, persuade them that a product can meet their needs, or cause them to buy something. Be specific, clear, and realistic about what you expect  your ad to achieve.

 

 

2. Identify the target audience: Consider who you intend to target the ad to. Will it be a broad message intended to resonate with a broad range of people, or a very specific message for specific segments or personas? Have a clear idea about the demographics and psychographics of the audience you intend to appeal to. At the same time, you’ll need to confirm that you can actually reach a representative sample of this audience with your ad. If you can’t reach this audience, you’ll need to identify either a new target group or a new channel.

.

3. Identify the key metrics. With the campaign objectives in mind, identify the most important questions that will serve as metrics – your Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. If you’re aiming to build awareness, you’ll want to focus on brand recall. If you’re aiming to invoke a behavior, you’ll want to focus on your call to action, whether that’s purchase intent, connecting on social media, or some other behavior.

 

 

4. Identify success measures. Once you have your KPIs in hand, you can identify the success measures. This could be to generate purchase intent rates over 50%, brand awareness over 90%, or consideration over 60%. Also, make sure to identify specific criteria for how to differentiate ads that perform similarly. Tie-breaking criteria may relate to superior clarity or believability scores. It’s important to identify your success measures prior to running the test to ensure you stick to your principles of what true success really is.

 

 

5. Identify the sample size. Once you know how many target audiences you’re addressing and how many ads you’ll be testing, you can determine an appropriate sample size. Remember, the more segments that will be targeted, the larger the sample size will need to be. For a trustworthy outcome, aim for at least 300 people in each segment to review each ad.

 

 

6. Decide what to test. Ad testing is never an all or nothing decision. Testing could address:

• Several versions of the same ad or several completely different ads
• One or more of the message, image, audio, video, or spokesperson
• General ideas, ad mock-ups, or completely finished ads
• Performance in different channels such as TV, radio, print, OOH, or social media
• Performance against a competitor’s ad
• Performance against an existing or in-market ad

 

 

7. Create 2 to 4 compelling ad concepts. Though it seems like the first step of an ad testing is building the ads, this can’t be done until decisions are made about the ad’s objective, its intended audience, and its intended channel. With those specific details in hand, it’s time to build a set of ads with a clear message that differentiates the brand and speaks to the target audience. Make sure the ads have a clear Call-To-Action.

 

 

8. Create data collection tool: Identify the specific questions that will address the KPIs and allow you to evaluate success. In addition, choose a set of complementary questions focused on the various aspects of the campaign that are most important. This could be related to the messaging, the presentation, the brand, or all of those aspects. Remember, for accurate comparisons, all of the questions should be applicable to all of the ads. For example, rather than asking about the piano in one ad and the violin in the other ad, ask about musical instruments or music in general.

 

 

9. Collect and analyze the data. In addition to evaluating the KPIs to identify an overall winner, review all of the metrics to identify any poor performing aspects. Read through the open ends to identify concerns that weren’t anticipated or were left unaddressed in the questions. Further, review the KPIs within each individual segment. It’s very likely that one segment of people prefers a different ad, or that one ad will be more effective in a specific channel. Take advantage of a data dashboard to help find those unexpected insights quickly.

 

 

10. Fix and retest. A thorough review of the data will help determine whether any aspects of the ads should be corrected or improved before launching. Make those changes and then retest to ensure the ad wasn’t inadvertently weakened. If you’re in a fortunate position that there is a clear winner with minimal to no weaknesses, congratulations!

 

 

11. Launch the test. In order to ensure the results are as reliable as possible, keep the ad test in field for at least one week. This will give a wide range of people within the segment a chance to participate. Closing field after just a few hours might mean that only desk workers contributed opinions and the results won’t generalize to people who work shifts or who can only check their email once or twice per week.

 

 

12. Benchmark the results. One of the great things about ad testing is that a few specific KPIs are generally included in every questionnaire. It’s important to maintain a database of these metrics which serves two purposes. First, when calculating KPIs for a brand new ad, it’s possible to compare it to previous ads for other brands you’ve tested. Those ads will likely be associated with in-market purchase data so it will be possible to predict the financial success of the current ad. Second, since the norms database indicates which ads were successful, it’s possible to create new ads that mirror the attributes of those successful ads. In either case, knowing what success can look like means your efforts can be focused in those areas.

 

 

 

What’s Next?

Are you ready to identify your best ads and improve them to match the needs and wants of your targeted audience? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. Let’s turn your ad enigmas into ad enlightenment!

 

 

 

Learn more from our case studies

• Benchmarking Brand Awareness and Competitive Brand Space – A consumer food survey case study
• Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Campaign with Brand and Message Recall – An advertising survey case study
• Tracking Customer Satisfaction Across 8 Countries – A food consumer survey case study
• Discovering Brand Awareness to Identify Effective Channel Development | A technology survey case study

 

Learn more from our other blog posts

• How to conduct a journey mapping research project
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• How to Become an Irreplaceable Quant Researcher: A NewMR Webinar
• A Brand Manager’s Practical Guide to Brand Tracking

What Is Brand Tracking

Brand tracking is a marketing research technique that takes measurements of a brand at regular intervals of time. The goal is to identify those things having positive or negative impacts on the growth of the brand and to make strategic changes that will improve its chances of success.

 

Brand trackers typically fall into three categories. Some focus on financial metrics such as customer, sales, market share, or price data and rely on business intelligence and data analytics. These studies typically use pre-existing, internal business data. Other trackers use behavior data such as website page clicks or search volumes.

 

Finally, some brand trackers rely on consumer metrics such as perception, opinion, and behavior data. These studies typically use questionnaires or user-generated social media listening data. Here, we will focus mainly on brand tracking using consumer metrics as measured by questionnaire data.

 

 

What are the Benefits of Brand Tracking

Brand tracking has many benefits for brand managers, marketers, and business leaders.

 

Trackers help brand managers:

• Understand the perceptions a variety of target audiences or personas have about the brand in terms of what they think, feel, and do
• Understand the pain points of each target audience
• Identify the product features, messages, and channels that matter to their audience
• Improve products and services in keeping with the needs and wants of their audience

• Understand how customers position the brand within the competitive space based on product capabilities, pricing, and channels, etc.
• Monitor the performance of competitors in terms of which ones to pay attention to because they are gaining or losing ground over their brand

 

Trackers help marketers

• Understand how various target audiences as identified through segmentation research perceive and react to a variety of branding and messaging strategies
• Identify and optimize under and over-performing marketing and brand strategies
• Identify under and over-performing marketing channels that deserve or don’t deserve additional funding

 

Trackers help business leaders

• Identify whether a brand is meeting, beating, or missing growth expectations
• Identify concerns about a product, channel, or competitive brand before they escalate into problems
• Discover opportunities for innovation

 

 

Key Metrics for Brand Tracking

Theoretically, there are unlimited questions that could be asked as part of a brand tracker. However, to ensure research participants remain engaged and can generate quality data, it’s important to focus on just a few key metrics. Here are some example questions to consider.

 

Brand Purchase: Brand purchase is one of the most important metrics to track as it reflects recalled behavior over perceptions. This is particularly important when you understand that people regularly buy things they don’t personally like because of cost or availability, or because those items are for other people. Keep in mind that, for some people, purchase could be more accurately described as trial – a one time purchase that they don’t plan to make again.

• In just the last 7 days, what brands of product category have you bought? (Unaided)
• In just the last 7 days, which of these brands of product category have you bought? (Aided)

 

Brand Repurchase: Like purchase, this metric reflects recalled behavior. In this case, it measures purchase of the brand on multiple occasions. Similar to brand purchase, repurchase could be an artifact of cost or availability rather than loyalty or brand love. However, repeat purchase is the goal of most brands.

• The next time you go shopping, which brand of product category will you buy? (Unaided)
• The next time you go shopping, which of these brands will you buy? (Aided)
• Which of these brands do you buy most often?
• Which of these brands do you buy at least once per month?

 

Brand Loyalty: Most brands are keen to create brand loyalty. People who are truly brand loyal are much less likely to switch to competitive brands even when they are more readily available or have more favorable pricing. This makes premium pricing a possibility.

• If your preferred brand was not available in your usual store, would you buy a different brand, wait until your brand was available in your store, or go to another store?

 

Brand Preference: Brand preference indicates which brand people would choose if the appropriate situation arose. Remember that even though people may prefer a brand, they might never buy it if it’s not the right price, not available at their store, or disliked by other household members.

• When you think of this product category, which brand do you most prefer? (Unaided)
• From this list of brands, which one do you most prefer? (Aided)

 

Brand Consideration: When retailers offer a large number of brand choices, people may focus their attention on just a few of those brands. Your brand needs to be strong enough to stand out amongst all the competitive offerings to remain in that final consideration set. Again, consideration is not the same as purchase – someone could always keep a well-respected brand in their consideration set but never actually buy it.

• When you think of this product category, which brands would you consider buying? (Unaided)
• From this list of brands, which ones would you considering buying? (Aided)

 

Unaided and Aided Brand Awareness: Unaided awareness occurs when people are asked about brands in the category and they choose to name your brand. Aided (prompted) awareness is typically higher and reflects the percentage of people who recognize your brand in a list of competitive brand names or logos.

• When you think of this product category, which brands come to mind first? (Unaided)
• From this list of brands, which ones have you heard of? (Aided)

 

Brand Recall: Hours, days, or weeks after seeing your brand in a campaign or in the news, do people remember seeing it? High recall occurs when messaging is intriguing or relevant enough to generate notice and retention.

• In just the last 7 days, what brands of product category have you seen advertised on TV? (Unaided)
• In just the last 7 days, which of these brands of product category have you seen advertised on TV? (Aided)

 

Brand Perceptions: Brand perception metrics are far more nebulous than the previous metrics discussed. They generally reflect opinions, attitudes, and emotions people have about the brand, whether conscious or unconscious, and are typically measured via attribute batteries or lists of ideas. These metrics are most helpful at supporting or driving the other metrics.

• Which of these words reflect your opinions about this brand?
• What 3 things do you like about this brand?
• Please explain the differences between Brand A and Brand B.
• Which of these brands is most innovative? Fun? Likeable? Effective? Different?

 

 

 

How Often Should You Run a Brand Tracker

 

The key differentiator of trackers is that they are run at regular intervals over time, perhaps daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Here are a few key criteria to keep in mind as you decide.

 

How active is your brand? Think about whether you launch new campaigns, run webinars, make major announcements, or change product features daily, weekly, monthly or less often. If people see new and different activity from you on a regular basis, you may need to conduct your trackers more regularly so you can identify which items have hit or missed the mark.

 

How active is your category? If your category experiences rapid innovation, news headlines that constantly change, or new competitors constantly entering the arena, you might need to track more frequently. Consumer opinions could quickly and easily change based on any of those and you’ll need to identify and act on external risks to your brand as quickly as possible.

 

What is your measurement tool? Social media data, sales data, online purchase ratings, and consumer generated reviews are easily tracked on a daily basis, even an hourly basis. In rare cases, questionnaires have been used for daily tracking but they’re more often used for weekly or less frequent tracking. If your metrics are best measured by social media data, you could choose more frequent intervals as long as they don’t eat up someone’s time unnecessarily, (e.g., manual preparation or analysis).

 

Remember, just because you can track and measure something more often doesn’t mean you should. Track your metrics as often as is necessary to be proactive and reactive in your category environment.

 

 

How to Conduct a Brand Tracker Study

 

1. Identify your brand purpose, mission, and vision. In order to know what to track, you first need to know what your brand stands for, and what you want your consumers to think, feel, and do about your brand. With this information, you can ensure your data collection tool addresses key concepts and can generate relevant results.

 

2. Identify your target audience. It’s easy to think only about your own customers but that will generate an incomplete picture of your brand. Also consider people who might eventually purchase your product whether for themselves or for a friend or family member. With this information in hand, you can ensure the questions you write will make sense to both users of the product and buyers of the product.

 

3. Identify the key brands. You might be tempted to include every product your company makes in your tracker but that will lead to an unfocused and disorganized questionnaire that people can’t answer accurately. Focus on one brand in one category. Then, identify the key competitors of that brand, including the brands you admire, are jealous of, and worried about. This will give you a baseline metric to understand whether you’re over or under-performing in your category, and to identify which brands you’re taking share from – or which brands are taking share from you!

 

4. Identify the key metrics. As previously described, there are literally hundreds of potential metrics to choose from. Identify the ones that are most relevant in identifying the success and failure of your brand. Don’t let your ego or chasing KPIs prevent you from seeing the negatives. Without those, you won’t know what needs to be fixed in order to achieve huge growth.

 

5. Identify what success looks like. You need a clear definition of success to prevent confused interpretations of the data and to keep yourself honest. For struggling brands, status quo might be success. For huge brands, 3% growth might be success. But, fresh brands might only find success with growth higher than 35%. Decide on the success requirement for each key metric prior to data collection.

 

6. Identify the sample size. Once you know what your metrics and your success measures are, calculate the sample size required to accommodate them. For example, if success for you is an increase in purchase rates from 5% to 25%, you might only need a sample size of 100. But, if success is an increase from 5% to 8%, you’ll need a much larger sample size to be able to reliably detect it, perhaps up to 1000.

 

 

7. Build the tool. Now that you know what your metrics are, build the tool to measure them. That could be a questionnaire, social media listening data, click stream data, or sales data. Using a combination of two or more methods will allow you to cross-validate your findings so your conclusions and recommendations are more trustworthy. As you build the tool, make sure to measure both positive and negative aspects of the brand. Chasing positive KPIs rather than understanding your brand means you won’t be able to prevent or fix problems and the brand will suffer in the longer term. And, take the time to create an interesting tool that will help participants remain engaged and pay close attention.

 

8. Collect data. Take care to not add bias to your data by insisting on extremely short field times. Collecting data over 2 weeks ensures that shift workers, weekend and evening workers, technology avoiders, and people traveling all have the opportunity to participate. Without these people, your data could be biased towards people who are at their keyboards at the moment you launch the survey, a small minority of people.

 

9. Analyze the results. When brands take small or few actions throughout the year, tracker results can be stable and minimally useful. As a result, in addition to basic frequencies and averages for the total sample and subsamples, use dashboards to search for unexpected or unusual results. Those serendipitous results could be random chance never to be seen again, but they could also be an amazing discovery. Be prepared to conduct ad hoc research to confirm or deny those discoveries.

 

10. Act on the results. Based on your data analysis, change your branding, messaging, advertising, marketing, or business processes to improve negative aspects and leverage positive aspects. Remember that consumers need adequate time to notice, remember, and truly internalize the messages you’re sharing so don’t worry if you don’t see the numbers you hoped for after the first wave. And, if you notice issues or flaws in the data collection tool, improve those as well. Remember, you CAN change a tracker.

 

11. Repeat. You won’t need to completely repeat each stage each time, but you should at least review and consider whether any stages need to be updated or improved.

 

 

What’s Next?

Are you ready to take proactive steps to understand your brand and make strategic changes to improve its chances of success? 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

• Monitoring Blockchain Adoption Over Time | A survey case study
• Tracking Customer Satisfaction Across 8 Countries – A food consumer survey case study
• Tracking Physician Perceptions of Diabetes Pharmaceutical Representatives – A physician survey case study
• Tracking Retail Attributes to Identify Gaps for Improvement | A retail case study

 

 

Learn more from our other blog posts

• Getting started with consumer, customer, and market segmentation
• How to conduct a journey mapping research project
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.

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!

 

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 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

 

 

Researchers love conjoint analysis. It’s a handy statistical technique that uses survey data to understand which product features consumers value more and less, and which features they might be willing to pay more or less for.

 

It allows you understand how tweaks to combinations of features could increase desirability and, consequently, purchase price and purchase rate. Essentially, it asks, “Would you buy this product configuration if you saw it on the store shelf right now?”

 

Technically, there are numerous ways to present conjoint questions but all of them invite participants to compare two or more things. For example:

 

• Would you rather buy this in red or yellow?
• Would you rather pay $5 for a small one or $4 for a large one?
• Would you rather buy this one or the competitive brand?
• Would you rather buy this one or keep the one you already own?

 

The comparisons can get extremely complicated as you strive to create scenarios that mirror the complicated options of real life, in-store choices. This is because no two products are have the exact same features. There are always multiple tiny or major things different amongst them including brand, price, color, shape, size, functionality, etc.

 

As you see in the example conjoint question below, participants are being asked to select from among 5 different entertainment bundles, each with a different price and selection of options. Even though this question is nicely laid out, perhaps even nicer than what you might see in a store, it’s not a simple choice!

 

 

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Quick Conjoint Dictionary

First, let’s cover some quick terminology commonly used with the conjoint method so that the tips we will offer make sense.

 

• Attribute: A characteristic of a product or service, e.g., size, shape, color, flavor, magnitude, volume, price.
• Level: A specific measure of the attribute, e.g., red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet are levels of the attribute color.
• Concept: An assembly of attributes and levels that reflect one product, e.g., a large bag of strawberry flavored, red, round candy for $4.99.
• Set: A collection of concepts presented to a research participant to compare and choose from.
• Simulator: An interactive, quantitative tool that uses the conjoint survey data to help you review consumer preferences and predict increases or decreases in market share based on potential product features and prices.

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Conjoint Analysis Tips and Tricks

3 to 5: Across all attributes, levels, concepts, and sets, 3 to 5 is a good rule of thumb. With so many possible combinations of attributes, levels, and sets, the ask we’re making of participants could get overwhelmingly complicated and create a lot of cognitive fatigue. That’s why we suggest aiming for no more than 3 to 5 attributes, 3 to 5 levels per attribute, 3 to 5 concepts per set, and 3 to 5 sets. By ensuring that participants enjoy the process and can take the time to review each concept carefully, we can generate much better data quality.

 

Meaningful Levels: Choose attribute levels carefully. Do you really want to test 3 shades of blue or 3 flavors or apple? No. While you could choose price levels of $30, $32, and $34, they aren’t meaningfully different and wouldn’t create a lot of indecision on the store shelf. They wouldn’t create variation within your data. Try to include edge cases – options that are as far apart as you can make them while still being within the realm of possibility.

 

Be frugal with combinations: You already know there are combinations of attributes and levels you would never offer in-store so don’t waste people’s time and cognitive load testing them. Think carefully about which combinations of attributes and levels you would never offer together and exclude them from the test. For example, don’t waste your budget testing the least expensive price and the most expensive feature. Similarly, don’t test the value of adding an extra battery for a version of the product that doesn’t run on batteries.

 

Minimum number of shows: When testing a level, use it in at least 3 concepts for an individual person. Think of it in terms of a ruler – for quantitative metrics (e.g., price, length, volume, weight), you need to see whether the difference between Level 1 and Level 2 is perceived the same as the difference between Level 2 and Level 3.

 

Include competitors: The real market includes competitors, often many. People don’t shop for single brands in isolation and neither should they answer your conjoint questions in isolation. Include at least one key competitor in your test, and preferably at least two. Further, if your brand is relatively unknown, you may wish to incorporate a competitor that is also relatively unknown.

 

Include an opt-out: Sometimes when you’re shopping, you discover they don’t have what you’re looking for and you leave the store empty handed. Generating realistic data means we must do the same in our simulated shopping trip – let people select “None of these” and leave without choosing anything. Otherwise, people may be “tricked” into selecting options they would never choose in real life.

 

Easy to read: Remember that conjoint is trying to simulate decisions that would normally happen in-store. Part of the in-store experience is in-store messaging. You’ll rarely see long sentences and paragraphs in the store so avoid them in your conjoint questions too. Use words and phrases that are as close as possible to what someone might see at the store.

 

Use imagery: We already know that a conjoint task can be cognitively demanding. That’s why imagery helps. Not only does it help people to visualize the product on the shelf amongst it’s competitive brands, it also helps to create a more visually appealing task (mmmmm cookies!). If you can’t provide an image of your product, find other ways to incorporate visuals in the questionnaire.

 

Plan for a hold-back sample: When product development work is extremely sensitive or is associated with life and death decisions, e.g., medical or pharmaceutical research, don’t let your budget determine the validity and rigor of your work. Spend the money to get the sample size you truly need to test each attribute and level with the appropriate rigor. And, build time into the fieldwork and data analysis schedule to permit preliminary analyses and test the model. You might need to tweak attributes, levels, or sets prior to running the full set of fieldwork.

 

Don’t let the statistics think for you: You wouldn’t create an entire marketing strategy based on gender differences just because a statistically significant t-test said 14% of women liked something and only 13% of men liked it. It’s not a meaningful difference. The same thing goes for a conjoint study. Review the model yourself, carefully, regardless of how “statistically significant” it is. Think about the various options suggested by the data. The simulator might reveal that there is a set of attributes and levels that would take over the market but that doesn’t mean you must produce that combination. The human brain is mightier than the spreadsheet!

 

If you’re curious to learn about the different types of conjoint that are available, this video from Sawtooth Software, presented by Aaron Hill, shares details about a few types of conjoint. E2E Research is pleased to offer all of these types to our clients.

 

 

 

What’s Next?

Are you ready to find out what configuration of your products and services consumers would be most keen to purchase? We’d be happy to help you work though the most suitable combinations of attributes and levels and build a conjoint study that meets your unique needs.

 

Please email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com.

 

 

Learn more from our case studies

• Optimizing Trade Promotion Spends with a Pricing Simulator
• Ensuring Optimal Inventory with SKU Level Demand Forecasting – A consumer products forecasting analytics case study 
• Identifying Optimal Set of Flavor Variants for Incremental Reach – A Survey, MaxDiff, TURF analysis case study 
• Understanding Relative Importance of Healthcare Imaging Features for New Product Development – A survey + MaxDiff 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.
• 8 Reasons to Invest in a Hybrid DIY Market Research Team

Research Objective

• A company needed to evaluate customer satisfaction and purchase drivers for a bread product available globally.

 

Scope & Methodology

• A cross-country, online survey was designed to identify purchase drivers and track weekly, monthly, and quarterly changes in satisfaction over time.
• A minimum of 300 completes were gathered per country, per wave.
• The survey identified ongoing changes in consumer opinion, consumer satisfaction, and purchase drivers among 8 countries over an extended period of time.
• In addition, a derived importance analysis was conducted to assess the strength of relationship between overall satisfaction and key driver.
• The client learned that satisfaction is most highly correlated with discounts/offers (r=0.7), product composition (r=0.5), and availability (r=0.5). They also learned that about 66% of participants are satisfied with the product, where as 10% are dissatisfied. By market, customers in France have the highest level of satisfaction at around 80%.

 

Value Delivered

• The client was able to understand how satisfaction related to price points, product composition, and availability. They also benchmarked product satisfaction rates and learned how countries ranked in terms of their levels of satisfaction.

 

 

Check out other food case studies

• Measuring Consumer Preferences for Successful Ready-To-Eat Development | A Sensory Research Case Study
• Benchmarking Brand Awareness and Competitive Brand Space – A consumer food survey case study
• Sentiment and Content Analysis of Qualitative Consumer Comments – A food survey + text analysis case study