This is a story of how dreaming big is helping connect Diageo to the lives and rituals of consumers across five African markets. Demonstrating how an innovative mobile qualitative approach is helping Diageo's African research and innovation teams make better business decisions routed in local culture.
AOL, a leader in digital content and storytelling, and VoxPopMe, a technology platform specializing in qualitative video research, partnered to explore best practices for including and operationalizing video in research.
2015 was a decisive year in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived from war-torn Syria and beyond, walking their way through the Balkans into the EU. The largest mass migration in Europe since the 1940s brought significant changes to the continent's politics, media and public discourse. The Budapest-born financier George Soros's Open Society Foundation (OSF) sought insight into the shifting public sentiment on the refugee crisis in his own country. As the world's media descended on Budapest's Keleti Station, we worked with the OSF to form cogent strategies on Hungary's new 'illiberal' state. Insights from our human-based qualitative approach to social media informed important human rights policy, discovered unexpected threats, and promoted open society.
In this issue of Research World, we provide an update of some of the more noteworthy developments. Whether, with the introduction of new tools for qualitative research, the scope of research is being further stretched or possibly overstretched, could provide an interesting topic for a parley or an industry debate on fair play.
The following paper illustrates a methodological tool that addresses childrens targets, in pre-school (5 - 6 years), and early-primary-school age (up to 8 years). It facilitates the gathering of useful-to-researcher indications, and actually stems from the search into new modes for interpreting the relationship between the child and the product. Kids Eye is a test that uses the characters of the classic fairy tales as archetypes of positive and negative values. The output of the test highlights the specific traits of the relationship, together with the values attributed to the product as such, and the fallout for the young user.
The paper describes key Japanese cultural aspects and the impact these may have when conducting focus group and one-to-one research methodologies. Many Western marketers (and Japanese, too) maintain a strong stereotype that you can't do that in Japan! as regards more progressive qualitative techniques. This attitude is particularly problematic when executing global template research. In fact, many Western qualitative techniques can be utilized effectively in Japan; perhaps more importantly, the environment is ripe for increased usage of such techniques in the future.
Do not panic! The Internet does not mean that traditional qualitative approaches and techniques will suddenly be replaced or supplanted by unwelcome, lower-cost, lower-quality, inferior substitutes from the cyber-realm. Indeed, the Internet-fed growth in the amount of quantitative information, about what people do, will be a major driver for substantial growth in the amount of traditional (or live) qualitative research needed and undertaken. The authors proposition is that the Internet has opened new, additional doors that can complement and extend the answers that can be reached qualitatively. The Internet does not mean that there will be any reduction in the skills needed for qualitative research, online or offline. The authors case is that the additional opportunities created by the Internet require additional skills, if moderators are to fully realise the potential of these complementary techniques.
This paper examines how WGBH and Applied Research and Consulting LLC conducted collaborative research that identified strategies for transforming ZOOM, a highly successful 1970s children's educational television show, into one of the most exciting 1990s children's educational destinations in the world. This paper illustrates how a variety of qualitative research methodologies (designed to uncover specific concerns, attitudes and preferences of the target audience and the ways these concerns, attitudes and preferences had changed since the 1970s) resulted in the merger of new and existing technologies into an integrated, interactive educational media platform that would provide additional learning opportunities through the initial integration and ongoing enhancement of the integrated media offering.
This paper argues that semiotic and cultural analysis is the best and quickest way to first assess what is going on in any marketplace, before embarking on any other kind of developmental consumer research. It shows why this form of investigation is so powerful in providing the groundwork for any form of marketing development and describes the analysis process itself. From this the author outlines the integration of findings into a three-stage programme covering creative and concept development and the final evaluation stage of conventional qualitative consumer research.