EmergeSmarter Blog

By Darren Breese, Director

The recent Youth Mega Mashup Event was a tremendous opportunity to learn the latest trends in the  Youth and Millennial space. There is considerable agreement among leaders in the field.  This is a new generation of consumers who value the environment and social causes, interaction with each other and with brands,  entrepreneurship, customization and personalization, technology, and above all else—authenticity.  The implications for brands and businesses are vast as this new generation’s spending power becomes stronger and stronger.

One of the most anticipated presentations of the Mashup Event came from Jane McGonigal, PhD, an acclaimed game developer, researcher, and author.  Her research in the field of gaming underscores the idea that gaming produces positive stress which creates “Super-Powered Hopeful Individuals.”  She presented the shocking statistic that human-beings spend 3 billion hours/week worldwide playing video games.  In comparison, 100 million TOTAL man hours have been spent creating maybe the most widely used online resource—Wikipedia.  To ask, “Is it worth it?” is an understatement to some.  But, McGonigal is convinced it is, and she answers the question with the acronym PeRMA (Positive emotion, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment) created by Dr. Martin Seligman, which she contends is a by-product of playing games.   She contends that games can actually solve larger social problems by increasing individuals’ PeRMA.  Her perspective suggests that researchers should be building more feedback loops into their instruments.  We need an approach to this new generation that is less task-based and more game-like to help engage research respondents and, in turn, elicit higher quality insights and feedback.

McGonigal’s keynote was foreshadowed by an earlier presentation by the insights and research folks at MTV that argued “Gamification” is the future of Marketing.   By making a game of Marketing, brands and companies engage and motivate their consumers while also creating lasting relationships with them.  Brands using games as part of their Marketing campaigns are in a better position to create emotional relationships with their consumers. 

Connecting with consumers by letting them create the content of their Marketing strengthens consumers’ perception of a brand’s authenticity.  Doritos and Ford presented ways in which they engaged their consumers by allowing them to create video content and let their voices be heard.  Brands and companies have seen increased success through transparency and allowing their consumers to tell them what they’re all about. 

The use of social media within the generation was a hot topic as well.  Social media allows Millennials  to share their opinions and recommendations and to spread influence.  This new generation of consumers harnesses the power of peer-to-peer relationships to democratize influence and recommendations.  The term “Repfluence” was used to describe this trend in consumer interaction.  To make an even more informed decision, consumers can decide how trustworthy their peers’ influence is by their Klout score, which measures not the quantity of content but the quality with which they spread it.  The younger generation of consumers is more likely to be influenced by their peers than by traditional advertising, which means today’s Marketers are re-thinking the way they connect with consumers.

By Shaili Bhatt, Senior Analyst

It’s Friday night, and I am logging in to check posts in the online community. It’s true that we can find and recruit people who are ready to talk/type in the day (and night), and yet their enthusiastic, sustained engagement can be an issue for long-term communities.

Your opportunity to connect on a personal level with each participant, particularly at a natural time for conversations, is where the magic happens…

One of my secrets is to spend an hour or two to moderate the discussion on a Friday night.

Friday nights are not just for “going out,” even if it’s one of the first warm Fridays of Spring or Summer (like tonight when I began to write this)—For some participants, it’s their time to connect with friends and family, and even other members in the online community.

My secret is to login to the discussion after work and dinner to connect and let them know that I am right there with them. From prior years of experience, the gesture goes a long way, and the connection that forms among us on these nights is often deep and long-lasting.

Share your questions or experiences with online community engagement in the comments!

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

Last week, I saw David Sirota discuss his book, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explains the World We Live in Now - Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything. His thesis is that, beginning in the ‘80s, American society has become increasingly focused on the individual.  He, of course, used words such as “narcissism” to describe this.  One piece of evidence he offered was that the number of people who were members of a civic organization had almost halved over a 15 year period beginning in the early ‘90s. 

Well, we have heard this all before; it’s the “Bowling Alone” argument.

But, as I listened this time, my first reaction, probably influenced by all of the online research C+R has been conducting of late, was to think, “Hey, wait a minute.  What about all of those online communities and social networks?  Aren’t communities both growing and proliferating?  Isn’t there lots of interaction among the members of these communities?  Hasn’t our ‘social capital’ merely moved online?  Isn’t the tendency of people to select their own affinity groups a replacement for traditional communities?”

The answer is yes and no.  It is important for marketers to keep in mind the differences between online communities and physical communities when they plan their strategies and conduct their research.

• Online communities are not physical; they do not have locations.  This observation may be in the category of “Duh.”  But, what does the difference mean?  We conduct surveys that use a “nationally representative sample.”  That sample reflects general population distribution.  Perhaps, it is more important to reflect the density of different self-selected communities.  A traditional qualitative project might be conducted in different markets to achieve a “national representation.”  Might it be better to be in a single market, but reflect different communities — evangelical Christians, environmentalist, and the like — in separate focus groups?  And, most obviously, if online communities are the way people are organizing themselves, shouldn’t we really be talking to consumers online?
• Online communities are more homogeneous.  Members of online communities consciously select themselves.  They seek members with whom they share beliefs and interests.  And, if that is the case, do my samples of members of these online communities need to be as large as a sample of a physical community?
• Online communities are more fragile, less stable.  Recent news suggests that Facebook traffic is declining.  There are a number of ways to interpret this data, but the trend highlights the fact that people enter and leave online communities with much greater frequency than they enter and leave physical communities.  I might have confidence in the results I obtained from a well-designed survey of my town for three years.  But, if I were to rely on a survey of an online community, I might want to revisit my results in half that time.

Online communities are the new reality.  They are indeed a rich, focused source of information.  But, a changed world requires changed methods and perspectives, and C+R is prepared to guide you through this new territory.

By Shaili Bhatt, Senior Analyst

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

A recent article in The Atlantic proclaims that “the mobile payment wars are officially underway.” Visa was the first out of the gate, in late 2010, but a coalition of MasterCard and Google, with partners Citibank, First Data, and Sprint quickly followed. Google’s announcement – just a few days ago as of this writing – has, of course, set the technology world abuzz. Now all eyes are on Apple, which has a filed patent on a mobile payment system but, as usual, is being completely close-mouthed about when the necessary near-field communication support will appear on the iPhone (click here for millions of rumors). And, of course, start-ups, such as tech darling, Square, are appearing around the payment space and clever new applications are showing up to make use of NFC.

Normally, I take a dim view of buzz. It’s just too simple to jump on board every juggernaut and start proclaiming the end (or beginning) of the world. But marketing researchers should be getting excited about mobile payment because it’s potentially the most important thing since “friend” became a verb.

Here’s what Google said in their press release about Google Wallet: “… an open commerce ecosystem that … will make it possible for you to pay with an NFC wallet and redeem consumer promotions … while shopping offline.” Notice: They’re not talking about “payment,” they’re talking about “commerce.” And this is “offline,” not “online.” But the big idea is hidden behind “redeem consumer promotions.”

Here’s what happens when you haul out your Google Wallet – a phone app – to pay for something. First, your phone provides a unique identifier – it tells the system that you’re you – and, of course, it says that you want to pay for your purchase using your credit card account. But in the middle of the transaction the system also handles “consumer promotions.” It takes data it has – maybe the name and location of the store, your name, the article you’re buying, the price of the thing, maybe whether you presented a “coupon” – and it checks to see if, based on all that, you’re entitled to a special price.

You see the magic part? It checks a database in the middle of the transaction and acts on the data it finds there.

You can easily imagine all kinds of marketing opportunities: bank-, store-, or brand-based, maybe neighborhood-based “reward” or “frequent shopper” systems, “Groupon-like” sign-up promotional programs, and programs based on combining your online and offline purchasing came to my mind almost immediately.

MR-related applications, like in-the-moment short surveys, possibly incented by a discount calculated on the purchase, become straightforward. What if a marketing research supplier acted like the operator of a “preferred shopper” program and collected shopping behavior from a panel, making possible not only accurate in-the-moment research but also day-after, week-after, or month-after follow-ups, or instantaneous online qualitative with purchasers of newly introduced products or low-incidence products?

Accurate, individualized, real-time purchase data has always been available for web commerce, but now the same kind of data could be available in the offline world. Mobile payment makes the real world work more like the web.

Let’s take this a bit further: have a look in your wallet, and make a pile of all the things that could be represented as data records. Everything I carry, with the exception of a compact emergency car key, is nothing but data carried in a wallet-size form factor. Every single piece of it could be on my phone, and all of it could be added to a “mobile wallet” (which won’t be confined to payment for very long). Your membership card at the gym. Your driver’s license. Gift cards. Preferred cards. The pictures of your kids and dogs. A system for sharing those pictures with your “friends” and only your friends.

If you drive a newer car, the spare that activates its keyless ignition is also just a string of data sent via an NFC link. If my car wasn’t so old even my emergency key would fit nicely in my phone.

A mobile phone is nothing but a pocket-sized computer that can communicate with various kinds of networks after providing a unique identifier that identifies you, its owner, as having network privileges. Mobile “payment” or “wallet” systems put databases at the other end of those communications, and take action based on that data. Visa, MasterCard, Google, and Apple all want to control those databases, which will be the most important in the world in a very short time. Ambitious marketing researchers should be planning how they will play in this arena, and doing it sooner rather than later.

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

C+R started moving online in the late 90s, and the trickle became a flood in 2000 when we launched www.kidzeyes.com, our first online panel. From that point on we always had the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in our minds. The result was that an awareness of online privacy and security issues got baked into C+R’s DNA.

We were lucky because we were prepared when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act made companies re-think their risk management strategies, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act drove our financial clients to focus on privacy, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act changed the focus in healthcare. And big public privacy gaffes – most recently, the disclosure of customer data connected with 77 million Playstation accounts – brought the importance of protecting customer data to the fore for almost everyone else.

As part of our regular SAS70 review we recently re-drafted our Privacy Policy and website Terms of Use statements to make them easier to understand and to bring them up to date with changing technologies and methods.

We have a procedure in place for reviewing our data collection partners’ data handling policies and practices to determine whether we can trust them to receive protected data, such as personally identifiable financial or health data. We’ve scored phone rooms and focus group facilities for a while now, but until recently hadn’t considered online community platforms, bulletin board systems, journaling sites, webcam focus group facilities, or other suppliers catering to the skyrocketing online qualitative arena.

We’ve realized two things: one is that we have to be prepared for the explosion of MR methods that’s going to turn the field upside down in the next few years and expand our supplier review to cover new methods as soon as possible; the other is that the MR industry hasn’t gotten the message.

I’m not going to name names; that’s not the point of this post. But having recently scoured suppliers’ websites for Privacy Policies and formally requested documentation from vendors ranging from major software providers to online start-ups, we’ve found an industry that’s at least 10 years behind the curve.

The major MR organizations, such as CASRO, of which C+R is a member, have spoken loudly and clearly about these issues for some time. Any number of conference presentations have been given. Leading edge clients have demanded proof and audited results from us. But we found that minimal steps, such as a well thought out privacy policy, are above the reach of many vendors. And more serious programs, such as security audits and regular penetration testing haven’t generally been so much as considered.

Will it take a Playstation-sized data fiasco for the industry to finally understand what we are risking – for ourselves and our clients – by our cavalier attitude?

By Shaili Bhatt, Senior Analyst

Event coverage of the following session from the 2011 IIR Technology Driven Market Research Event (TDMR) in Chicago, May 2-3, 2011 #TDMR: “Crowdsourcing Your Research as Co-Creation” presented by Kevin Lonnie of KL Communications and Miguel Ares of Bloomberg.

As a fellow Fantasy Sports enthusiast, Kevin Lonnie and Miguel Ares’ TDMR presentation on the use of crowdsourcing a new fantasy football platform for Bloomberg Sports was like getting a backstage pass into the locker room of a big game. (Bloomberg is apparently a resource for much more than financial news!)

Crowdsourcing is an iterative ideation quali-quant method where a crowd is challenged to solve your problem, allowing market research to provide “illumination” rather than “support.” (This invalidates a quote by David Ogilvy involving drunks and lampposts).

Crowdsource the Issue, Weave the Narrative

With crowdsourcing, Kevin encourages the use of “crowdweaving”— the action of weaving the voice of the consumer into collaborative, challenge-solving initiatives.  An exemplary innovation model for crowdweaving is “Idea Sculpting,” where members are first asked to articulate their understanding of the challenge before they present their ideas for solving it.

As Kevin described it, “the race starts with everyone.”  They select the top 3-5 entries, and the challenge is to improve the concepts over a six-week process.  Good ideas transform into better ideas, until they find themselves at the threshold of a “Great Idea.”

Superior analytics have been the foundation for Bloomberg’s tools, including its Fantasy Baseball tool in 2010.  According to Miguel Ares’ from Bloomberg, however, player engagement and retention was not as high as expected.  The question was, “What is the level of satisfaction that the customer is really looking for in the world of Fantasy Sports?”

For Fantasy Football, the objective was to create a new platform to improve the user interface and experience with constant consumer feedback.  Crowdsourcing during game play was right on target!  Kevin also stressed that it is critical to involve all key stakeholders in the process so that the resulting ideas are shared and jointly owned.

Who is crowd-worthy?

This begs the question: “How do we identify who we want to speak with?” Miguel suggests not to pick professional experts, per se, but instead to pick people who think highly of the brand and really want to make a difference.  The crowd works directly with the programmers and developers—an important step for the literal metamorphosis of the ideas—in order to articulate the final product.

The researchers were able to use the crowd to tell them what they needed, and the programmers streamlined the app and the Fantasy Sports experience with this real-time feedback.  According to Kevin and Miguel, “It was a bulletin board on steroids…  In this world, the crowd rules,” and in the end, Bloomberg wins and the customers win.

By Steve Stallard, Senior Vice President

When I look at all of the new technology-driven methodologies, it seems that technology and research are finally in sync.  The explosion is unmistakable and the excitement is palpable.  I have to say that using mobile technology to get feedback from customers at the moment of purchase or upon their first use of a product has me stoked.  No phony research setting, but in-the-natural-moment!  I mean, C’mon!!!!  OK, it’s true – perhaps only a geeky researcher could get excited by this, but it’s so cool!

It’s easy to get caught up and blinded by the new technologies and the excitement around them.  It’s not uncommon to be so enamored with a sexy new approach that it becomes the only approach you turn to.  I have a faded quote from Kaplan’s Conduct of Inquiry that’s been on my bulletin board for 20 years, “…the logician becomes so absorbed with enhancing the power and beauty of his instrument that he loses sight of the material with which it must work.”  This can happen to the best of us so be wary.

I belong to a polling website with a simple premise:  the more questions you answer, the more points you accrue.  And, with points you get to pose questions to other users. Not a bad idea leveraging online technology and rewarding business people with something of real value—information.  The website recently had a contest and I entered on a whim.  My entry was an essay critiquing the site.

The problem was that the questions asked by non-researchers were horrible.  Double-barreled, leading, incomplete response categories, you name it.  I suggested that a “tips page” be offered so that poor questions would not lead to misleading results.  Hah!  Go figure, I won an iPad!  We do ourselves well, by keeping a constant eye on the point of our inquiry and the foundational research aspects that remain relevant.  You might even win an iPad or better yet, generate good research.

By Anne Wall, Senior Vice President

The research/consumer insights industry has developed a slew of new tools that harness both technology and the ways people currently interact with one another, with products and with media.  We have been buzzing about online communities, mobile surveys, crowdsourcing, video journals, neuroscience, social media, text analytics, social gaming and more. 

These are important and necessary tools, but, they are only tools.  The community needs to continue to design research around business objectives and not around cool new tools. The recent Technology-Driven Market Research Conference was an ironic illustration of the ways in which we’re not there yet.

Conference attendees saw PowerPoint presentations that were nothing but pages of numbers and text – no audio, no video — in fact, no movement on the screen at all.  Continued failure to engage our audiences is providing our competitors from outside the research community with opportunities to move right in.

Our insights and implications need to speak to the heart of the business decisions being made.  It’s been said before, and for many years, but I’ll say it again: pages and pages of research results don’t cut it.  And, a “technology-driven” conference should have been a showcase for presentations demonstrating a visually engaging, interactive, multimedia approach. 

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Google’s recently +

released report, “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” was that it really didn’t seem surprising. Still, I believe that this research, done in partnership with Ipsos OTX MediaCT and included 5,013 U.S. smartphone users between the ages of 18 and 64, will be seen as a watershed event for MR. If anyone, anywhere harbored the slightest shadow of a doubt about the sea change that will engulf both the matter and the means of marketing research as a result of the widespread ownership of smartphones, that doubt should now be as dead as the recently deceased bin Laden.

Some complaints and caveats first. Yes, the study covered only smartphone users, currently something less than a third of cell users. Yes, there are many questions to be asked about the differences between this first third of smartphone adopters and the eventual segments that will emerge from the remaining two-thirds. Yes, the onslaught of a gazillion mostly Android smartphone models, at every conceivable price point, may well bring a lot more diversity to the demographics and habits of the smartphone segment. And, yes, a study that bases so many of its conclusions on questions of the form, “Have you ever used something/done something …” is at least guilty of hyping its findings. On that basis, every motorist who ever needed directions is lost.

But still. Slide after slide drives home the same conclusion: an overwhelming number of smartphone users are using their smartphones while … doing pretty much everything you can think of. Certainly Google has evidence of smartphones being used, regularly, in the midst of every conceivable “consumer” activity.

I choose that word deliberately, because it was clearly Google’s intent to focus on smartphone-owners-as-consumers. But whether it is thinking about, being entertained by, learning about, comparing, pricing, locating, getting to, or buying something , the stats pile up. Smartphone owners use their phones in the midst of … everything.

I feel as though some measure of surprise is due upon reading all this. (OK, I’m surprised that 43% of smartphone owners would give up beer in order to keep their phones.) But, as I read on, I find myself saying, “Of course, of course.” And, small sample though it is, every smartphone user I’ve spoken to has had the same sort of non-reaction. Because we’ve all seen this, all done this, all talked about this. We knew it all along – Google just provided proof.

Everything we’ve known about communication channels between commerce and customers is outmoded once people own smartphones. Or, better, is outmoded once the smartphone meme breeds and grows in the minds of smartphone owners. A year after your first smartphone and you’re using it in the midst of practically every aspect of your life. Not all the time, perhaps, but there’s almost no activity  where your smartphone hasn’t found a place. (Only 8% report taking theirs into the shower, but 39% take them into the bathroom. Sex was not asked about, apparently.)

Every model we’ve ever had about consumers interacting with brands is now, inadequate if it doesn’t include smartphones. All of the research we do simply has to be cognizant of this massive, immovable fact.

And every mechanism we use, as researchers, to contact people suddenly seems a bit … clunky. We want to know what’s going on in all of those thinking about, being entertained by, learning about, comparing, pricing, locating, getting to, or buying occasions, and we’ve almost invariably done that by getting people somewhere else, sometime when they’re away from all that, when they’re “free to talk” with us.

That may be fine. Fine for many things. But how can it be “fine” when we know full well that there is an open communications channel in the pocket or purse of every smartphone user? How can we continue to be marketing researchers unless we find ways to be there with people, in the moment, using, monitoring, assessing, and evaluating what’s going on right now? We can’t. It’s simply inevitable.