Qualitative research is one of the most effective ways of understanding the major issues facing society. However, in the race to generate instant insight and technological solutions, researchers are at risk of overlooking the fundamental strengths of qualitative approaches depth of insight and understanding of social context. Without these, the explanatory power of qualitative research will be weakened and the method will lose credibility. This presentation examines how this risk can be addressed through discussion of a best practice case study from recent work informing the UKs prevent counter-terrorism strategy, demonstrating why ditching depth is dangerous.
A company marketed a product which had the highest volume of scripts in the Canadian prescription market for years, dominating its category. With post publication of safety concerns, promotion of the drug was discontinued for several years. With several innovative drugs in the pipeline for the therapeutic category the company needed to know how to re-enter the market. The research study uncovered strategic and deeply motivating consumer and physician insights to position the new drugs to be successful. The result of the research was that the brand team and marketing had a clear direction as to the strategies that were needed to be in place pre-launch for a successful launch. These guided the development of the product label, communication platform messages and tonality, and the brand positioning.
Traditional interviewing is heavily reliant on recall and reporting accuracy by a subject. New technology such as wearable lifelogging camera technology allows ethnographic information to be captured passively and over long periods of time. This passive capture information creates a more pure, detailed and accurate record of what happens in people's lives than has been available to researchers in the past. The exploration and analysis of this new data set creates great opportunities for client innovation against a template of existing behaviour and unmet needs that was previously much more difficult to access and use.
This is a story of transformation, of a company set on transforming healthcare and research that focused on uncompromising intimacy to deliver transformational insight. 23andMe is a personal DNA service that costs just $99. The company is set on empowering individuals to make better health decisions & building a DNA database to accelerate scientific discoveries & improve global health. However most people are still unaware of the service & DNA testing is rich in misperceptions and concerns. This presentation shares the journey to discover who is most likely to be drawn to this service and the clear, compelling consumer proposition that helped 23andMe take its business to the next level.
The dark side of human motivation is explored in this presentation which postulates that the most powerful drivers are primeval human passions. Brands that understand and position themselves sharply on these are able to influence and connect strongly with consumers. The assumption that in the "Seven Deadly Sins" lie primeval forces powerful enough to drive behaviour is addressed in this presentation, and used to build a construct to understand motivation and brand positioning.
Qualities are always looking to increase their range of eclectic sources of inspiration, and that's why we want to share our new tools and insights from the worlds of education, policing & the legal profession, TV interviewing and Experimental Philosophy. Why these areas? Educators spend their time engaging students and have many tools qualities can benefit from; the police have adapted their witness/suspect interviewing techniques to take account of developments in brain and memory science; TV interviewers from entertainment to journalism are adept at creating insightful interview theatre; experimental philosophy is providing new and radical, empirically based accounts of personal identity and human motivation.
As open as qualitative research is, it is hard to take a really good look with an open mind, without any presumptions. On top of that, for clients it is difficult to see their own hidden views, the prejudice-without-knowing. We present a narrative method that is inherently and radically open, and enables the client not only to look deeper into their consumer, but in the mirror as well. The method helped our client to transform the view on their business (consumer loans) and was integral in cultivating a healthy organisational identity and supported this view.
In order to achieve radical innovation, companies require an increasingly deep understanding of consumers’ wants and needs. Three challenges that consumer insights teams are faced with are detailed, and a design-driven approach offered that uses a combination of theory and hands-on experience. Specifically, the approach outlines how to capture truthful consumer needs through emotions, how to structure and prioritize them using consumer goal conflicts, and how to maintain and communicate insights throughout a project with narratives. This approach was applied in a large-scale innovation project that recreated AlaTurca, a salty snacks brand of PepsiCo, Turkey.
The qualitative data landscape has shifted considerably. The relevance of traditional forms of qualitative research seems to be in decline; e.g., a number of large and leading client companies are moving to reduce or eliminate focus groups. At the same time, there has been an explosion of alternative qualitative data types, such as those obtained by listening to the social media. There has also been a push to better integrate disparate forms of data to provide greater strategic impact. This integration has often itself been qualitative in nature; e.g., meta analyses and convergent validity. This presentation creates a generalizable but formal framework for the inclusion of qualitative data in a way that is likely to increase the strategic impact of qualitative data.
Gamification is normally associated with technological tools and there is little guidance on its use regarding face-to-face quali surveys. A comparative experiment with gamification versus the traditional qualitative approach is addressed in this presentation. Techniques and findings differences are presented to support future decisions on the most appropriate and effective methodology.
Three experienced international qualitative practitioners (two from Germany and one from the UK) across two research agencies draw inspiration from a classic Spanish novel to put forward a transformation agenda. A new and more collaborative model for international qual is advocated for in this presentation, while challenging the underlying assumption that the same approach everywhere will yield the same level of insight. We should learn the lessons of Don Quixote who to his detriment exported his own point of view (an outside-in approach); rather we should adopt the more pragmatic and clear-sighted approach of Sancho Panza to achieve far greater insight when working across borders.
Positive affect has been shown to increase creativity and problem-solving (Isen et al, 1987) and interventions developed from positive psychology, the scientific study of well-being, have been shown to increase engagement, verbal fluidity and creativity in clinical and nonclinical populations (Frederickson, 2004, 2008). In this new study, the author demonstrates how using positive interventions at the beginning, during and at the end of focus groups and individual depth interviews increases engagement and creativity for research respondents, netting deeper and richer insights for innovation and foundational research. Additionally, this approach drives engagement and enjoyment of the research process for both respondents and backroom observers and creates high-caliber experiences for all.