By: Margie Lane, Research Director

The end of the year came & went, a reminder of how much time flies. So I’m making the time now to reflect on what we’ve achieved and the direction we need to take next year with our online communities.

1. There is always room for more scope to explore market gaps and opportunities rather than simply answering burning questions or sense checking ideas just before they go to market.  We need to help our clients to use our communities much earlier in the product development process when ideas are first on the drawing board.

2. Research shows, and our members tell us, that they’re happy to tell us about their lives and be involved in the cocreation process as long as we tell them how the information is being used.  We need to help our clients provide our communities with feedback so they receive the recognition and feedback they need and deserve.

3. As we continue to develop our mobile platforms we will be including more mobile tasks and challenges for consumers to capture insitu experiences that help identify actual behaviour and can be used to bring the consumer to life in the boardroom.

4. Internal stakeholders benefit much more when they are fully engaged with our communities.  We need to invest more time upfront when our communities are being established to inform and excite stakeholders and provide ongoing dialogue, not just written reports.  Debriefs will be more brainstorming sessions than formal debriefs.

5. Focus more on engagement than be concerned about size.  We know engagement is the key to delving beyond predictable, rational responses and our focus needs to be on continually challenging, inspiring and relating to our members to reveal their true behaviour and attitudes.

6. Ideally we want more time for spontaneous discussions and exploration of issues and ideas as they emerge.  The accessibility of online communities makes it too easy to use them to seek an answer to a question, but answers to direct questions do not always provide an accurate reflection of what the consumer will do.  Far better we learn from consumers’ conversations of how they go about using products and services and making their decisions to guide decision-making.

How do you plan to use your online communities in 2013?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words can a video buy you? As smartphone adoption rises in Australia, it’s only natural for research to have a presence in this arena.

Latitude has recently completed its first qualitative mobile phone study – talking to 22 mums and their kids. Over a period of two weeks we asked mums for feedback, challenged them to tasks, sent them on shopping trips and had them interview their kids (all done with smartphone in hand!). In total they generated over three hundred video clips for the project.

One of the benefits of using mobile for qualitative research is its ability to effectively collect point in time data. Through this medium we were able to observe behaviours as they happened at home, in the supermarket and during usage occasions, allowing us to better understand the decision-making process.

A new innovation for research – keep posted for more learnings about mobile qual!

According to research done by Google recently, there will be more web searches done on mobile phones than will be done on desktops by 2013. In more traditional markets like Australia and the US, a more standard progression in technology has seen the desktop become a feature of most households over the past 15 years. However in emerging markets such as India and China, access to desktop computers was limited during their expansion in the west and now instead of following the trend of western markets, consumers in these countries are skipping desktop computers and the fixed internet connection in preference of mobile devices. Across the world mobile internet usage has increased 3000% in the last three years, largely driven by the access that consumers in emerging economies have to these previously out of reach devices.

It seems only natural that research should take advantage of this shift in reliance on mobile internet usage. Whilst being able to contact a respondent at their desktop at any time at any place has always been one of the foundations of online research’s benefit over traditional methodologies, mobile research takes this one step further and allows us to interact with respondents in their natural surroundings whenever we want.

The convenience of being able to reach for our phones and access the Internet anywhere is something that should be jumped upon by researchers. The devil makes work for idle hands, so why not use time when sitting on a train, in front of the TV at home as a time to undertake research.

A company in New Zealand has done something very similar. After the devastating earthquake in Christchurch, the plumbing to houses has been significantly impacted and residents are having to make do with portaloos installed on street corners. In these portaloos, a firm has begun recruiting participants for research through adverts placed on the walls. Surveys asking for opinions about the reconstruction efforts are sent and in some cases completed whilst…umm…taking care of business.

Being constantly connected through Internet enabled phones presents such a strong opportunity for companies to get an immediate read on their consumers. To take advantage of even the shortest amount of downtime to complete research can easily be seized upon. Being able to get feedback in either a qualitative or quantitative study could potentially take hours, not days or weeks.

Copy of my presentation from Merlien conference in Berlin, MobileMR 2010: Market Research in the Mobile World