Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The Future Of Brand Research?

This is a quick post, since I missed mine last week! However, the subject is not a small one - brand research. As many of you know Sentient Services believes that the closer research can mimic actual brand interaction environments the better that research is. What do I mean here? Well, if most of a customer's brand experience is with a brand online, then it makes sense to conduct the research online (e.g., an online bulletin board focus group instead of an in-person focus group). Why?
  1. If a customer is telling others about a brand only online, then you want to hear and measure their within "native brand language" 
  2. We love focus groups and love traveling and they are great for a myriad of subjects. However, if normal brand interaction is not part of a group, then it makes sense to measure brand interaction on an individual level and not within a group setting.
  3. If others are receiving peer-group brand feedback online and via social media, the research needs to use the same format. By researching within the format that future communications will take place one can get a better grasp of vernacular, content, and motives to use when making brand research recommendations for implementation.
The idea for this post came about after playing with new social brand site - SocialSmack. This new site allows users to "prop" (thumbs up) or "drop" (thumbs down) different brand experiences they have online and in the real world. These reviews then are shared on Facebook and other social networks. Just like watching a live Twitter stream for brand reactions when news breaks, new sites like this combined with language analytics may start to form the baseline for future brand research.

They won't replace focus groups, back-room M&Ms and the nuances that only having a skilled moderator and 8 consumers in a room can bring (think collages, innovation sessions, white boarding website tasks and all sorts of other stuff that keeps us in business!). However, as researchers we have our eye on these new brand engagement platforms that live beyond the typical measured and researched "customer experience" CE scorecards. The customer experience is now everywhere, and discussed everywhere. Research needs to be the same. What are your thoughts?

Monday, May 10, 2010

A New Way of Asking the Same Question

In the day and age where online surveys have become quite common, there is always a need to keep respondents engaged in the survey process. As you can see in this recent Quirk’s article “How Web 2.0 Made a Long Survey More Palatable,” by Amy Hebard from earthsense, the need to balance getting the information you need and keeping respondents from feeling fatigued is a very big challenge. In this article Amy speaks about how they utilized the latest Web 2.0 techniques in order make sure the respondent enjoys their survey taking experience.

In our own search to keep our audience engaged, we have come across several visual survey formats that allow the ability to ask standard types of questions but in an innovative and captivating way. Take for example Vision Critical’s survey tool within their Sparq online community platform. You can see a full range of abilities they offer in their Respondent Experience product demo, but some interesting capabilities it offers include:


  • Ranking by just dragging text or images on the screen into buckets
  • Visual marking up of images or pictures and then commenting on the highlighted area
  • Other visual type questions such as ordering images to rank and sliders for allocating points or money


Another interesting survey I recently came across is by Ionz. When you go to their site (you must click on the British flag in the right corner for English), an extremely engaging survey pops up. Below are a few screenshots of some questions. You can check out their website to see the full survey.

Instead of the normal radio button question for gender, Ionz used figures of a man and woman that move as you mouse over them.


Another interesting concept they used is displaying other respondent’s answers after you have selected your answer to the question.


Have you come across any interesting examples of using Web 2.0 features to make the survey experience even better? I would love to see them!!!!