In 2011, Meredith Corporation wanted to invigorate and transform The Ladies' Home Journal to reach a younger and broader audience. They came up with an innovative idea: allow readers to produce the majority of its articles. Meredith turned to their online community of 300 women who had been providing unique and actionable insights since 2007. They were able to hear directly from current and prospective readers what mattered most to them, while testing and refining concepts. Their ideas provided insights that would lead Meredith to successfully re-launch Ladies' Home Journal in March of 2012. This session will describe how Meredith is pushing the limits of traditional research methods, obtaining continuous inspiration from their customers, and using insights to drive real business growth.
Consumers in BRIC markets account for nearly one-third of the world's online population and experiment with social media more broadly than other consumers. Market researchers hoping to use the Internet to attract, involve, and learn from these consumers need to provide settings and formats that maximize engagement. In this multinational study, we describe differences in engagement, conversation topic, and quality of contribution by country and explore those conditions that lead to the greatest vibrancy and quality. We also identify best practices for recruiting and engaging online community members, implications for generating actionable insight, and specific 'to-do's' and case examples.
Learnings about recruiting, engaging and driving innovation with multinational online communities of consumers who are both creative problem-solvers and representative of GSK's target markets are shared in this presentation. From 2005 through the present, GSK Consumer Health has collaborated with several private, online communities , fueling both incremental and breakthough innovation, from guiding the development of a weight loss behavioral support program to co-creating the ideal mouthwash of the future, from redesigning brochures and signage to devising store-within-a-store floor plans.
The online sharing of health-related information has led a grassroots revolution, with technologies like ListServs enabling physicians to share best practices, and public forums like Diabetes.org enabling information exchange. But until recently, uncertain about remaining compliant with regulations governing adverse event reporting and off-label usage, healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies have been conspicuously absent from the web 2.0-enabled conversation. This presentation shares what Communispace, a provider of private market research online communities (MROC s), and 15 of their pharmaceutical and health care clients learned about recruiting, engaging, and generating business-changing insights from patients and healthcare professionals. while remaining compliant with the myriad of regulations governing privacy, off-label usage, and adverse event reporting.
This presentation summarizes research findings on cultural differences across Communispace-run multinational communities, and extends previous research by exploring how members of multinational communities engage in specific research activity types, how online community members choose to frame their interactions when they do engage, and what kinds of language members use to express emotion. Implications for how companies and market researchers can optimize engagement in online communities are discussed.
Disney sought to solidify its cultural relevancy and apply proven methods to hardwire the voices of their African American guests into the very fabric of their resorts. In 2006 after launching the Ebony Perspectives Community, a small, private, and branded online community, Disney found that its ability to derive quality insight was undermined by low participation rates and lagging engagement in brand specific conversation. In this session, Paul Caswell, Manager, Business Insight and Improvement at Walt Disney World, and Manila Austin, Ph.D., Director of Research at Communispace will share how Disney; through a process of reflection, dialogue and action indentified engagement barriers and adjusted a brand-centric frame of reference to re-engage with African American guests more transparently and authentically. This targeted case study will illustrate and explore how community members's; initial lack of trust challenged Disney to re-examine their expectations and approach. Qualitative and quantitative analyses will show how trust between African American Guests and the Disney brand was a prerequisite for gaining insight into the heart of customer wants, needs, culture, and lifestyle.
Philips has a long-established history of introducing innovative products in the consumer electronics space: from the cassette tape to the compact disc, which it co-introduced with Sony. Sustaining innovation on this scale is challenging, and Philips' market research arm is constantly evaluating new approaches to discovering what consumers want to see next. In 2007, the company wondered whether it was doing all it could to understand consumers. Until this point, Philips had been continuously evolving its traditional methods with new forms of market research. However, the team found that its ability to gather unexpected, game-changing insights from consumers was still limited. The traditional methods they had in place were most useful for testing consumer opinion and sentiments, and the newer methods, while effective in harvesting insightful information, were expensive and time-consuming. Philips wanted to look three years ahead perhaps even further to discover its next breakthroughs and this, it realized, was only possible if it could more effectively harness consumer insights early in the product development cycle. In 2007, spurred in large part by the mandate to more deeply embed consumer-centric thinking companywide, Philips' Consumer Electronics (CE) sector took its first steps toward engaging a private online community, planning to thoroughly test it over the course of one year. Still unsure of how an online community would work and how it would complement existing market research efforts, the company approached Communispace to help build a private online community.