Why not make use of smartphones during focus groups instead of forbidding them? Within traditional focus groups, verbal communication is leading. We, as moderators, perceive smartphones as devices that distract respondents from the subject and that disturb the focus group. On the other hand we all know that the smartphone is our buddy and we understand that people don't like to switch it off or lay it apart. This made us wonder: why not use these buddies as an extra sensor during focus groups, instead of feeling annoyed about them? Could we use this focus on the smartphone-buddy to increase focus on the discussion? Motivaction and Noterik have developed a technology (VisualFocus) that visualises smartphone activities on a central screen. We use this technology to get individual reactions before discussing things in the group, and to spice up our focus groups. VisualFocus is fun for respondents, for clients and for the moderators.
The future is pictures?
The plummeting of response rates figures is a very well-known issue in the Market Research industry. While the possible ways to deal with this issue are plentiful, an unavoidable candidate is engagement, in particular among Millennials. We test the use of two innovative technologies in the field of Artificial Intelligence in order to improve survey engagement: Google Vision API for classifying images and a speech recognition tool to convert voice input to text. The results of both studies are positive and draw a promising landscape for further research.
Sonification is a new way of engaging consumers with the sensorial perception of a cosmetic product through sound and music. Qualitative consumer studies were conducted in Japan and Korea, aiming to examine how sound and music could enhance the product experience with consumers. This study confirmed that sounds and music, in addition to visual images, can be a key medium of communicating sensorial benefits of cosmetics.
In this paper we describe the experiment we conducted using solely pictures, including key learnings from such a methodology, and its implications for future market research projects. We also discuss the need for market research to adapt to new real-life communications methods, such as augmenting pictures using social media apps.
Sonification is a new way of engaging consumers with the sensorial perception of a cosmetic product through sound and music. Qualitative consumer studies were conducted in Japan and Korea, aiming to examine how sound and music could enhance the product experience with consumers. This study confirmed that sounds and music, in addition to visual images, can be a key medium of communicating sensorial benefits of cosmetics.
Automation makes it easy to ask more from our respondents without fully considering the impact on engagement. While video and voice techniques offer hope to increase insight, do these just make it more difficult to engage respondents? We examined the value exchange between respondent and researcher as mobile research pushes the boundaries of privacy. What must we give our respondents in order for them to give to us? We will learn the best way to incentivise respondents to stay engaged with a week-long diary, submit photos and answer our questions using video and voice-to-text. Can we engage our respondents with items outside the research process that might induce greater stickiness with the given task?