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IIEX North America Virtual – Learnings with Online Fun

We recently attended Greenbook’s new online version of IIEX North America, that was postponed from its usual spring time slot and reimagined in a virtual setting— as we are still unable to meet in person in the usual venue of Austin, Texas, due to the pandemic. Our attendees picked sessions that were the most interesting to them, reported back to the wider team on our learnings, and we share them here with you! 

Our Learnings

Our Chief Research Officer, Greg Stucky, dropped in on “Becoming Behavioral Designers: The Journey to Make Behavioral Research Pervasive” with Carlos Navarro (Principal Financial) and Will Leach (Mindstate Group). Session attendees heard about focusing marketing communications on behavioral motivators to gain clear results—something we are big fans of doing here at InsightsNow as well. This talk touched on mental mind states, showcased how to go beyond personalities to understanding decision-making, and discussed communication strategies for target audiences. We have found the areas they covered to be true in our own innovation research—you must go beyond merely “correct” marketing messaging, but also ensure the product or service delivers on the promise of the message. This allows the offering, the messaging and the experience to be in complete harmony. Greg also popped into some planned networking sessions, including trivia night with Women in Research (WIRe). InsightsNow recently became a corporate donor supporting the WIRe organization, and we had a fun night answering trivia questions about famous women making history. 

Kristen Dale, InsightsNow’s Vice President of Client Partnerships, joined the Renee Smith (Gutcheck) session on a “Modern Look at Personality & Consumer Behavior” to take a deep dive into some interesting work within neuroscience. Some techniques discussed included ways to unlock subconscious mindsets and core personas to create effective product engagement and communication, with presentation points on personality measures, eye tracking, language-based assessments and more.  Kristin also went to a “The Future of Insights” session with Phil Ahad (Toluna) and Michael Lancor (Procter & Gamble) where they discussed ways they’ve been helping P&G in their quest for constructive disruption. Research approaches for the brand to stay ahead of the fast-changing market included quick learning techniques, and also what might be a stop gap in the product space. Both her session choices resonated with the consumer behavior and disruptive research that InsightsNow has been focused on for our research studies.

Our business development and membership services associate, Amissa Sugden, decided on “Storytelling with Data” with Jason Alleger (Traeger Grills) for one of her IIEX NA sessions. He started out by comparing the story structure of “The Three Little Pigs” to data storytelling, noting that the fairy tale has an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. The problem with presenting data is many data stories don't bring people along a journey like this. During the talk, attendees learned about storytelling templates, graphs and creating focus, the words we use to describe data, and some great examples for inspiration. Applying some of his tips is sure to make any data presentation anything but dry, and we were glad for Amissa to bring back these tips to the team!

Sarah Kirkmeyer, who is a senior director of client partnerships at InsightsNow, went to “A Winning First Impression:  How to Create Appealing Product Designs by Leveraging Implicit Research” with Quantilope where they showed a platform for pulling in and displaying implicit results. She also popped into “Spiritual Design: Making Room for Meaning” with Dr. Stephen Wendel (Morningstar) where attendees learned about intentionally designing one’s environment (physical, social, temporal) to remove distractions and make room for a meaningful spiritual life.

We gained a wide array of knowledge from the presentations at this year’s IIEX NA, and enjoyed seeing some colleagues, researchers, friends and clients online – and can’t wait to meet up with everyone in person soon.

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Insights Association Open Mic Night

By Greg Stucky

At the end of August, I had the pleasure to take the microphone for a few minutes at the Insights Association, Northwest Chapter's Open Mic Night. It was a fantastic session featuring five “speakers” who had the opportunity to engage with the audience on a wide variety of topics relevant to the market research industry and the work we have been doing lately.

Consumer Behavior at Restaurants

I spoke about the interesting phenomena our tracker study is seeing regarding restaurant behavior right now, where very few people are willing to go into a restaurant to eat, but a quickly growing number are perfectly willing to eat outside at a restaurant. At the event, we had a great discussion about the driving forces behind this behavior: consumer lack of trust and consumer lack of control are generating fear of sitting down inside a restaurant to eat. [Restaurant Behavior]

What Speakers Shared

We also heard more about COVID-19 influenced behaviors from Kaben Clauson at TruePublic where they are seeing some fascinating changes in attitudes toward marriage—and other social behaviors—including how high school and college students really feel about returning to school.

Roger Straus provided us all with some fantastic tips about coordinating virtual focus groups, including simple things like how to work with your team to manage technical issues and get people focused and conversational.

We all learned more about how low-vision/blind people have organized their technology and thus helped us gain new perspectives on caring for everyone in research with Mary Ann Mendez. She talked about “Being Inclusive of Those Who Are Low-vision/Blind in Research”, we are all going to be using #altext and labeling form fields and elements way more often now! It was great to hear some easy steps to take to be more inclusive.  

Amanda Durkee gave testimony on how she has used mediation and other relaxation techniques to improve her stress levels. Good advice for all of us who are working in newer, and often more chaotic, environments. We can all add simple daily activities designed to help us relax to stay happy and healthy in our new work environments.  

And to top it all off, Brian Fowler provided us all with education we never knew we needed about the ukulele and allowed us to join in a mini jam session.  

It was a great session full of new information and new connections. Looking forward to many more! 

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Disrupting Marketing through Hybrid Research Design

By Kayte Hamilton & Chuck Rodriguez

In most research settings there’s been an on-going battle between which methodology is best suited for the job; do we need something statistically valid in a quantitative environment or are we looking for deep context through a qualitative session?

Many researchers often feel they must choose one route over the other. On top of that; in the last few years there’s been an explosion of new tools that blur the line between what traditional methods mean—things like eye-tracking and neuroscience tools, automated interviews and data tracking. At InsightsNow, we find the highest value to our insight mining comes from our ability to recognize the benefits of certain resources and cherry-pick a custom solution. An agile approach to research design also allows exploration of the data collected in a best use case scenario.

Banner 40 graphic on gray

Disruptive Innovation and Hybrid Research

Disruptive innovation is an interesting concept. To many; innovation means something technology or tech-driven (simply run a search for “innovation” in Google imagesand you’ll see what we mean). However, disruptive innovation is a more basic idea of introducing something new to your processes and that’s exactly what we’re doing here with our hybrid research designs. The tools and resources aren’t new (so to speak), but when they are combined it makes for a unique research solution—solutions driven by the need to deeply uncover consumer behaviors and motivations without adding time to the fieldwork.

In August, we presented a webinar (you can find the recording here) that explored this hybrid quantitative and qualitative research design through the lens of two case studies. While about 70% of the webinar audience admitted to already using hybrid designs, 100% of the audience felt they learned something new from our presentation.

Case Study #1: Message Testing in the Consumer Technology Space:

The first of the case studies we referenced in our webinar focused on a study based entirely on messaging communication. In order to optimize the time our qualitative moderator had with participants across sessions, we uniquely leveraged our initial engagement with these folks—by activating something more powerful than the often used high-level homework primer. After mulling over a bunch of approaches, we decided to go with InsightsNow’s Implicit Test to capture reactions toward the messaging.

The benefit of going this route was obtaining those System 1 and System 2  reactions before participants even stepped into a room with us. These responses were provided in a vacuum, so to speak, which not only afforded us insight related to the messaging but also into our participants’ minds. Learnings could be used for more effective probing to identify key presumptions and gray areas that contributed to those initial reactions toward the messaging.

Leveraging a quantitative resource before our sessions allowed us to:

  • Interpret the measured response times to dig for disruptive components in each message, “What slowed you down?”
  • Create a hierarchy of performance rooted in behavior and the deep dive discussion in the room.

Now, one of the questions that was posed during this project creation included the strategy behind the idea:

  • If Only Quant = We would have known WHAT metrics, without the why or context in each message.
  • If Only Qual = It would have been difficult to establish a definitive winning proposition; which was one of the project objectives.
  • If Multi-Phase = This would have been costly and time to actionable results would have been considerably longer. We utilized the focus group participants rather than two distinct sets of recruited consumers.
Implicit Test Q
implicit message results

Case Study #2: Market Understanding & Consumer Needs in the Health Care Industry:

For the second case study example, we pulled from another industry entirely, designed to shed some light on consumers within the health care space. Our client was interested in understanding perceptions of health care in their region, both more broadly and among a handful of giants that occupied the space. One of the underlying objectives was to also obtain direction for use in their messaging. As it turns out, the still very current health crisis we’re all so familiar with was having a considerable impact on preferentiality and our client’s brand was seeing a decidedly negative impact. They needed insight to clearly define new messaging, regain lost loyalty and reinforce their mission.

In this research design, we again used quantitative to guide our qualitative discussions…in more ways than one:

  • Helped determine key indicators used to operationalize TWO segments of health care consumers (those who favored our client and those who were apathetic).
  • Provided detail used to determine the ‘short-list’ of services and amenities for exploration among well-curated, target segments.
  • Provided a market-level baseline read on messaging reception for comparison to both segments to tease out key differences and similarities.

While this study began as quantitative first; the bulk of the execution was a five-day online board/short-term community. Throughout the week we rotated quantitative tasks within the qualitative discussion allowing us to deep dive into the aggregate results rather than trying to discern individual results all week. This helped ground the discussion and got the consumers thinking in more detail as they caught on to the design.

To focus the qualitative discussion, we used surveys to quantify large “bucket-sorting” tasks for preferred brands, brand attributes, and InsightsNow Implicit Test again for brand messaging. Those results were tied into group and individual assignments in the discussion by highlighting keep themes in the aggregate. By moving any short-response type questions in the surveys, we could tie back their larger discussions to their customized survey responses (if needed).

Other Hybrid Research Design Ideas:

While we’ve been using our Implicit Test on a wide range of research applications; our executions aren’t limiting to just this resource.

  • Integrate Social Intelligence analysis before you develop any discussion guides or assignments. “What do you already know” >> “What do you want to know MORE of?”
  • Utilize Passive Metering to find out what consumers do, not what they say they do.
  • Complex rankings? Use a Tournament or MaxDiff survey design before or after sessions to better organize the data. Can also use surveys in real-time with digital respondent packets.

When deciding if a hybrid research design is best for your business objectives; we challenge you to consider these types of questions. We’re also available to help you brainstorm your next successful execution!

  • What are you running sequentially that you can combine for more agility?
  • What more information do you find yourself asking after an execution?
  • What do you wish you could learn, yet haven’t been able to decipher?
  • In what situations are your answers too generic?
  • How often do you find it tough to make decisions after a research project?
  • Are you missing a behavior or subconscious cue you need to understand?
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Webinar- Behavioral KPI’s for Identifying Winners -Measuring Human Emotions

Implicit, Explicit, or Prospective Thinking and Measuring Human Emotions

Date:   Thursday, June 13,  2 pm ET

Presenter:  Greg Stucky, Chief Research Officer

Watch Here

Behavioral scientists have identified three distinct modes of human thinking that are relevant to sensory and consumer research.  Knowing these distinctions has value if employing this knowledge boosts product success by improving the accuracy and relevancy of sensory and consumer insights.

What are these three modes - implicit, explicit and prospective thinking? And, how do they impact consumers' food product choices and how consumers internalize food product experiences?

In this webinar, you'll learn:

  • Definitions and implications of the three modes – implicit, explicit, and prospective thinking.
  • Respective sources of response variation and experimental design control points to help sensory professionals understand how to control and account for these models of thinking in the design of sensory and consumer studies.
  • Linkage of these three modes of thinking to a discrete emotions framework called the Emotions Insights Wheel.
  • Case studies will show examples of how this behavioral framework improves measures of product discrimination and success prediction.

Join us to learn !                                 

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Webinar-Going Behavioral with Implicit / Explicit Testing

Implicit testing - Emotions activate decisions

Research Applications of Implicit Measures of Emotions

Where are unique applications of implicit testing that provide the needed insights to speed innovation?

View Here

Date:   Thursday, March 7,  2 pm ET

Presenter:  Greg Stucky, Chief Research Officer

Research participants, as well as most people, want to give "right" answers, especially if asked to predict their future behavior.  With this challenge, how do you dig deeper and elicit honest, accurate predictors of their acceptance of products or ingredients?

Implicit testing leverages context to measure emotional and rational reactions which motivate decisions and behavior, especially acceptance vs avoidance behaviors.  This has a particular application with Clean Label Enthusiasts, providing insights into acceptance or avoidance of ingredients or component materials.

In this webinar, you'll learn:

  • How implicit/explicit testing works and examples of analytical and interpretation methods.
  • food avoidance behaviorWhat questions are best suited for this approach.
  • How to differentiate products quantitatively based on their emotional impact profile.
  • How you can amp up your research with implicit testing.

Please join us for 30 minutes and bring your questions.  Imagine where you can apply this research approach to your innovation and marketing challenges.

We hope to see you there,
The Team at InsightsNow                                           

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Webinar 9 – May 2018 “Accelerating Innovation through Agile Techniques-Part 3: Commercialization Sprints”

Thursday, May 3, 2 pm ET   “Commercialization Sprints”

 

 Hosted by InsightsNow: Dave Lundahl, CEO, and Greg Stucky, Chief Research Officer

Register Here

After the fuzzy front end and defining a product design, commercialization steps become more agile with consumer behavior insights.

You now have a great product design explicitly and implicitly communicating benefits for a consumer target.  How do you successfully sprint to the finish line?

This will be the subject for part 3 of our WebinarsNow series on research techniques for agile innovation.

We will address how to rapidly iterate to avoid three major pitfalls for innovation teams.  The first is to rapidly learn through cost rationalization with a constant focus on the prize – maintaining the important cues that signal the benefits your brand will promise to target consumers.  The second is to apply rapid, iterative behavioral techniques to validate pricing and how your consumer target will react.  These techniques will address the importance of including the context of competitive sets to understand price sensitivity, and to ensure you do not alienate existing, and in fact gain new, brand fans as a result of your new product introduction.  We will discuss how to integrate these techniques into learning sprints that are validated through various kinds of test market.

This third webinar will discuss consumer research approaches that uncover consumer insights regarding the areas of ingredients, packaging, pricing, and promotion.

View the first two presentations HERE

# 1 - Thursday, March 8:    “Clearing Up the Fuzzy Front End”

#2 - Thursday, April 5, 2pm ET :  "Translation through Iterative Design"

The essential need for speed-to-market response in today’s consumer-driven marketplace has compelled a shift from traditional step-by-step development processes to innovation approaches that incorporate a lean mindset, design thinking, and rapid prototyping. But being lean and agile to support successful innovation efforts does not mean cutting corners, it means you are being smarter in getting to market faster with lower investment.

How do you do shift your research and innovation efforts to be agile, fast and affordable, while still effectively exploring, ideating and executing on your idea, product or service?

In this three-part series of WebinarsNow, you’ll learn about:

  • Agile approaches to innovation and how these differ from classical processes
  • Iterative, cooperative research
  • Case studies delving into these behavioral research approaches
  • Beyond Design - Commercialization Sprints (May 3)

Innovations in research methodology have been proven to help innovation teams more quickly know how to target, design and develop for a more rapid market response. Join us to be inspired to shift your mindset and revisit the way you drive your innovation pipeline to success.

 

See how you can accelerate successful innovations through behavioral research in this video.

Register Here
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Webinar 8- April 2018 – “Accelerating Innovation through Agile Techniques – Part 2: Translation through Iterative Design”

Presented Thursday, April 5, 2 pm ET   

 

 Hosted by InsightsNow: Dave Lundahl, CEO, and Karen Lynch, Director, Qualitative Services

Watch Webinar

The essential need for speed-to-market response in today’s consumer-driven marketplace has compelled a shift from traditional step-by-step development processes to innovation approaches that incorporate a lean mindset, design thinking, and rapid prototyping. But being lean and agile to support successful innovation efforts does not mean cutting corners, it means you are being smarter in getting to market faster with lower investment.

How do you do shift your research and innovation efforts to be agile, fast and affordable, while still effectively exploring, ideating and executing on your idea, product or service?

In this three-part series of WebinarsNow, you’ll learn about:

  • Agile approaches to innovation and how these differ from classical processes
  • Iterative, cooperative research
  • Case studies delving into these behavioral research approaches
  • Beyond Design - Commercialization Sprints (May 3)

Innovations in research methodology have been proven to help innovation teams more quickly know how to target, design and develop for a more rapid market response. Join us to be inspired to shift your mindset and revisit the way you drive your innovation pipeline to success.

 

View the other two presentations in this Accelerating Innovation series HERE

# 1 - March 2018  – "Clearing Up the Fuzzy Front End”

# 3 - May 2018:   “Commercialization Sprints”

See how you can accelerate successful innovations through behavioral research in this video.

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Implicit Testing and Product Acceptance

Implicit testing finds biases that impact buying decisions

Approach or Avoid: Implicit Testing

Research to help companies make faster, more informed clean label decisions requires accurate prediction of behavior reactions—approach or avoid—to branded products with given claims and ingredient labels. Asking a research participant to directly predict their behaviors in response to a brand, claim or ingredient is known to be a poor predictor of actual behavior.

Implicit testing avoids the inaccuracy of direct Q&A responses to yield a more accurate predictor of behavior. Through our simple context-based implicit questions, we capture native emotional (system 1) reactions as well as rational (system 2) thinking. As emotional choices are faster, measuring time to make a choice adds a valuable, new dimension for more informed product and brand decision making.

Avoid or Approach

Where does this help me?

Therefore, it is an excellent technique to help researchers determine:

  • What ingredients to display to achieve a cleaner label?
  • What claims will result in the greatest approach reaction for an anticipated moment of use?
  • What contexts of use are associated with brand use among various segments of consumers?
  • How to screen consumers based on brand attitudes and/or behavioral predictions of “approach or avoid” reactions?

Implicit Testing Rationale

Implicit testing leverages context to measure emotional and rational reactions which motivate decisions. For example, within a breakfast occasion the behavioral reactions of participants may differ if the context for choosing a food item is a “convenient grab-and-go moment” or a “normal sit-down breakfast moment.”
Implicit testing measures not only approach or avoid, but the speed of response. This measure of response time quantifies whether an “approach or avoid” reaction is based on emotional (fast) or rational (slow) thinking.

Implicit test response quadrants

Slow responses represent attitudes about brands, claims or ingredients which are poorly formed, or where the presented context is new to a participant.  This forces the participant into a slower more rational thinking process about how to behave.

Fast responses represent well developed attitudes and strong memories within the presented context. This results in quick reactions based on pre-formed memories and emotions.

For examples of applications and data interpretation, view the recent webinar

"Going Behavioral with the Implicit / Explicit Test " 

Download the sheet
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Accelerating Innovation!

See how you can accelerate successful innovations through behavioral research in this video.

The essential need for speed-to-market response in today’s consumer-driven marketplace has compelled a shift from traditional step-by-step development processes to innovation approaches that incorporate a lean mindset, design thinking, and rapid prototyping. But being lean and agile to support successful innovation efforts does not mean cutting corners, it means you are being smarter in getting to market faster with lower investment.

How do you do shift your research and innovation efforts to be agile, fast and affordable, while still effectively exploring, ideating and executing on your idea, product or service?

In this two-part series of WebinarsNow, you’ll learn about:

  • Agile approaches to innovation and how these differ from classical processes
  • Iterative, cooperative research methodologies functioning as “learning sprints” and “feedback loops”
  • Case studies delving into these behavioral research approaches

Innovations in research methodology have been proven to help innovation teams more quickly know how to target, design and develop for a more rapid market response. Join us to be inspired to shift your mindset and revisit the way you drive your innovation pipeline to success.

Original Presentations:

Thursday, March 8, 2pm ET : “Clearing Up the Fuzzy Front End”

Attend Live!

Thursday, April 5, 2pm ET : “Translation Through Iterative Design”

 Hosted by InsightsNow: Dave Lundahl, CEO & Karen Lynch, Senior Director of Qualitative Insights


See the Webinars!