Speakers: Prabhakar Sundaram, Global Consumer Insights Energizer Holdings & Dan Fleetwood, President, Research & Insights Platform QuestionPro
Top questions & answers from this webinar
Q: In regards to the community, what are the few things that work well during this pandemic other than the weekly survey in regards to your online community?
Answer: There are a lot of advantages to the community and we've seen tangible benefits. Let's say especially in our case, we have an upcoming meeting with Walmart or Walgreens we need to have an understanding of consumer sentiments and how they are behaving in-store. It's easier for us to have a community and a pool of consumers who signed up with a community and engage with them. It helps us to derive quick insights by using a couple of survey questions or even chat with them online and get details. This provides us the ability to get robust insights in a matter of hours - at max a day or two. So if we have an upcoming meeting in a few days, it helps us to elevate our pitch and conversations with the retailer in a better manner and showcase our thought leadership.
Another use case is that business leaders always have varied questions and we aren't conducting full-blown research studies all the time. Even for simple questions about simple consumer products, everyone has their own viewpoint. Being able to elan in the community helps gain consumer insights. Leveraging these viewpoints helps with business decision making. The best part is from a time perspective, it has the best turnaround.
Q: In terms of participation rates in the community during this pandemic, have you seen an increase in response rates?
Answer: Tough to answer because anytime we post a question to our community, we always get quick instantaneous responses in a matter of hours. As we have a pretty robust sized community, in the US itself a few thousand consumers, we've not felt the pinch. For us, the participation rate has largely remained the same. But then again, that's the beauty and power of this research method with opt-in consumers.
Q: What are some of the challenges that researchers should watch out for when moving to more online qualitative methods?
Answer: The biggest pain point of online qualitative methods is that we can't observe the body language as reactions and facial expressions say a lot more, this is the advantage of in-person qualitative work. When we run in-person focus groups, yes we are obviously listening to what respondents say but more importantly, we are keeping an eye out for visual cues and general behavior. Facial reactions and expressions say a lot more than what comes out of their mouth. Obviously you can now do these things even online, within the QuestionPro environment so I wouldn't flag any other major concerns at the moment.
A lot of our qual consumer research is watching how people shop - their body language etc. It isn't the same with self-taken videos of store walkthroughs - that's a little more scripted and we aren't doing well with that. It's a concern but we are doing the best that we can in these tough times where we can't really be in the store. Mystery shopping and online qualitative have to adapt. Why this hasn't impacted us much is again going back to our community - we put out a message that we are looking for this and people use mobile devices and apps to get us rich media content that we can then analyze.
