Three Innovations That Deliver More Powerful Insights

Many of our clients have a desire to explore the latest, most innovative tools and technologies for their market research projects. Yet it can be time consuming to sift through all the new options and challenging to determine which of these will deliver real value.

Using the right new solutions can enhance your understanding of your brand’s market and competitive challenges and address the rapid pace of information dispersal across multiple media platforms. From guiding the transition to ecommerce or seamless commerce, to more accurately understanding the impact of media and content, to being immersed and in-the-moment with customers; there are so many exciting new ways to uncover key learnings that keep in step with how people are absorbing and using information today to make decisions.

The key, however, is figuring out which ones are right for your brand and how to maximize the value of these tools you choose for your research project.

The Innovation Evaluation team at Radius has done much of this heavy lifting for you by vetting and testing the full range of innovative tools available today to determine which ones are truly worth investing in and what it takes to get the most out of them.

Here are the three that the Radius Innovation Evaluation Team found to be most valuable in delivering more powerful insights:

1. Video analysis and videometrics

Your brand can collect and analyze hours of customer video to understand trends, help quantify if products are being seen, or uncover relative pain points that people are experiencing in your category.

Video can also be integrated into quantitative initiatives and provide a richer opportunity to deepen the learning from brand trackers, path to purchase or decision journey, segmentation, satisfaction studies, product home use tests, and more.

2. Voice-activated/Voice-tech

This is a cutting-edge technique that will only grow in popularity over the next few years, as Ambient Voice and Voice Tech are expected to grow exponentially across a range of businesses and industries from auto to health care. Research can now be conducted through Voice- Activated Devices (think Alexa and Google Home). The advantages of these approaches include:

• Eliminates the need for respondents to type out responses to open-ended discussions
• Engages customers with surveys in a more natural setting and produces more honest feedback and stream-of-conscious thoughts compared to the more limited depth and self-editing that can come from traditional open-ended questions.
• Matches well with product home use tests, diaries, ethnographies, and regimens such as beauty and health routines.
• Partners well with traditional research solutions to add more depth and breadth to your research.

3. Passive tracking across a range of categories

One concern with traditional approaches is the trustworthiness of claimed behaviors, especially as it relates to digital or ecommerce activities.  Passive tracking is when respondents give their permission for their devices to be tracked. This allows quantitative surveys to be partnered with behavioral data which creates a more holistic view of how customers consider your category and brand.

The true benefit of this approach is the ability to connect behaviors and what people are doing more closely to the whys behind these actions.

There are many ways to capture and analyze passive data to enhance learning, including recruiting respondents that are verified ecommerce shoppers who have visited or transacted on sites of interest. Passive tracking can add value to customer journey, segmentation, competitive landscape, A&U, innovation, or customer loyalty initiatives.

Want to learn more about these and other innovations for your insights work? Contact us.