Early 2018, Henkel was challenged to find a disruptive way to tune market research to the needs of their Game Changer Innovation team, a team with the challenging mission to come up with new concepts fast, to match the fast-paced reality. In order to support this, the Henkel Consumer Insights team was looking for research solutions that embraced agility, iterative testing and fast cycle times, whilst being consumer-centric and fully hybrid.

To serve the various research needs in their innovation cycle, an online network gathering 1,500 USA participants was set up. This network connected both NYC residents (n=500) and consumers reflecting the general population of the US.

Using the proprietary Square® technology, hybrid studies were conducted in multiple innovation domains. Qualitative challenges were launched among the NYC sample, which mainly consisted of innovators and early adaptors, while the quantitative challenges, focusing on screening and validation, were launched among all Square members. All studies were customized to Henkel’s needs and then scaled up to deliver the required speed.

This new approach to innovation research proved to serve the need for speed: in just four months, 24 different studies were conducted. Moreover, the iterative and fast testing resulted in over ten high-quality concepts, ready to enter the next stage in the innovation funnel. Lastly, this new approach led to a high satisfaction amongst the Henkel teams, with those involved evaluating it with a score 9 (out of 10).

In this fast-paced reality, many organizations are challenged to move towards a more agile approach to innovation. Yet research is often not tuned to this new reality. The installment of network-based research to structurally collaborate through iterative research tasks has proven to entail many opportunities. Apart from being tuned to Henkel’s new, agile way of working, this new online research approach also increased consumer centricity at Henkel. Iterative testing forces the integration of consumer feedback in every step of the process, resulting in better-quality consumer insights and concepts. We believe this case study could inspire many researchers and marketers who experience this common challenge.

Today’s technology is disrupting consumer expectations, how they shop and interact with brands. Consumers are more empowered and have more choices. In Telecoms, the shift to digital is already long underway: Online channels are key for the consumer acquisition and retention game, with consumers purchasing their subscriptions on either providers’ or comparison websites. To understand and predict consumer choice for telecom subscriptions, traditional conjoint is a widely used technique. However, it is crucial to replicate consumer choice in the most accurate way to understand and predict market reality as good as possible. Traditional approaches are stretched to their limits when it comes to mimicking online decision environments or in markets where the number of product choices is high.

In order to address the above-mentioned challenges in the context of telecom subscriptions, SKIM has replicated an online comparison website for a recent conjoint study in collaboration with VodafoneZiggo. Respondents repeatedly chose their preferred telecom subscriptions, from a large set of subscriptions offered by various brands. They could use filters and ranking variables, just as they would be able to do on an actual comparison website. On the back-end, a conjoint design was used to vary the subscriptions shown in each task. At the same time, a more traditional conjoint survey was run, allowing to compare results between the 2 approaches.

A comparison of both approaches proves that the online comparison website exercise is bringing us one step closer to reality and allows us to more accurately predict consumer choice. As hypothesized, preferences of respondents are more in line with actual market shares and switching rates between brands are much more realistic. Furthermore, the usage of filters and sort functions in the exercise gives us insight into how consumers simplify their choice process in a world of infinite options.

This new methodology allows for a more accurate understanding and prediction of consumer choice in an online world. In consequence, companies can make better decisions what products and prices to offer to help consumers choose their products over the competitors’.

Relevance & Research Question: Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) was planning on optimising their spending on the regional parts of their print edition for 2018. Thus, specific parts of the content needed to be analysed with regard to its relevance for subscribers. Therefore, this study was aimed to measure how extensively certain parts of the newspaper are read, if they meet subscribers’ expectations and how important they are to customers when it comes to the decision to keep or cancel the SZ subscription. Consequently, the focus of the study was to develop a measurement that shows the probability of terminating the subscription if a certain part will be removed from the newspaper.

Methods & Data: To answer these questions an online survey was conducted among subscribers. To ensure a reliable recognition and assessment of the several newspaper parts, one newspaper edition was displayed on screen by using the LASSO Software, a special method to measure reading behaviour within an online-survey, developed by DCORE. This software enables scrolling realistically through the newspaper and thus, measuring the key performance variables with high validity. To quantify satisfaction for each part, the “KANO model” was used. According to this, each part of the content has been defined with respect to its relevance / dispensability based on users’ evaluations. To take into account all relevant variables, the so called “Reflection-Score” for each part of the newspaper was calculated. This score provides a basis to predict the percentage of subscribers who could eventually terminate their contract, if a certain part of content is removed from the print edition.

Results: Based on the Reflection-Score the analysis showed clearly which parts of the SZ appeared to be most relevant and thus, were recommended to be kept as they seemed substantial to customer satisfaction and which parts were irrelevant with respect to the continuation of the subscription.

Added Value: The developed measurement of the study brought valuable insights to SZ on how to optimise the allocation of their resources to the respective newspaper parts and content. Additionally, the study can make a contribution on how subscription marketing can be optimised.