Relevance and Research Question

Our client – a Swiss wine distribution company - wished to improve its position in the growing non-alcoholic drink category.

They were looking for a step-change in their innovation approach: embracing consumer centricity, digital working & Design Thinking principles.

Budgets were tight, and timing short. Could we help?

Design Thinking is proven and used widely offline – but 100% digital applications are still embryonic.

In this project we demonstrated how a careful mix of online qual tools – real-time and asynchronous – allowed us to innovate successfully, covering both ideation and validation phases in a highly efficient manner.

Methods and Data

Phase 1 involved a DIY-style pre-task to help stakeholders get to know their consumers – talking to friends, relatives about category experiences.

A digital workshop followed: all participants shared their experiences and identified the most promising customer types. Detailed personas were worked up, with a range of core needs.

External experts delivered short pep-talks as inspiration boosters.

Initial ideas were then developed – multiple prototypes visualised rapidly by an online scribbler.

Phase 2 was about interrogating & evaluating the ideas from phase 1.

“Real consumers” (recruited to match the personas) interacted directly with the client groups.

Customers re-joined later on for a high-speed pitch session: As in the TV format “The Dragon’s Den” (role-reversal), client groups presented their ideas to real customers.

Online mobile polling was used for a final voting session – individual voices helping to optimize the concepts.

Results

• A broad, rich range of actionable new ideas was generated.

• The client team was enthused. The desired mind-shift to Consumer Centricity and openness to innovation was achieved – a key step-change hoped for by the innovation manager & company CEO.

• DIY & a fusion of professional online qual research approaches complemented one another well. No quality was lost.

Added Value

• Digital Design Thinking works well and extremely efficiently for online creativity tasks.

• The rules of F2F co-creation success – playful, time-boxed, competitive, smaller groups – were all applicable online.

• Consumers jumping in and out of the workshop day is a new, efficient use of their time.

• Overall: creativity and online can work very well hand-in-hand!

Relevance & Research Question:

As one of the biggest German drugstore brand, the Corona pandemic confronts dm with several major challenges in different areas and units. How political, social and medical developments affect consumers, consumer behaviour, fears and concerns at the PoS, and the image of dm are key issues in this project.

Methods & Data:

dm needed above all fast, timely, reliable insights on current and highly dynamic developments. Weekly trend reports at the beginning of the project could only be achieved through a mix of methods and a highly efficient and flexible research process.

Diversity: we set up a very diverse project team to cover different point of views and lifeworlds.

Intelligence of the Q crowd: internal knowledge management platform collecting weak signals, observations.

Web crawler: capturing, structuring and analysing the web

Social Listening: Tracking, reviewing and quantifying previously found trends

Netnography: content analytical approach to capture, understand and interpret need states

Google Trends Analyses: uncovering linked topics and search patterns from a consumers’ perspective

AI: automated detection of trends.

Last not least: expertise and research experience.

Because of extreme time pressure, we opted for an agile and tight project management.

The project includes special process steps:

Regular editorial meetings between dm and Q to challenge trends and weak signals before reporting and to check relevance for dm.

Extremely open communication between client and agency, which enables a deep understanding of dm’s questions and a quick and tailor-made preparation of insights.

Results:

The results are presented in a customised format. It is suitable for management and includes exemplary trend manifestations as well as concrete recommendations for dm. In addition, the results are embedded in a context of society as a whole:

Overview and classification of all found trends in a trend map.

The reporting cycle has been changed depending on the social dynamics and dm’s requirements.

Q also conducted short-term on-demand analyses.

Added Value:

The results are made available in an internal dm network for the different departments and units and are used by dm branches, communication teams, marketing, product development and corporate strategy.

The reports work at different company levels (granular, concrete vs. strategic) and for the different areas such as marketing, private label development, communication, etc. In addition, the insights offer touchpoints for dm’s keyproduct categories such as colour cosmetics, skincare, washing and cleaning, etc.

Relevance & Research Question:

Videos are becoming increasingly popular in market research when it comes to capturing information (Balkan & Kholod 2015). At the same time, results from studies can be communicated in a targeted manner in form of a video. This is especially true for explainer videos, i.e., short (1-3 min.), animated videos long and convey key messages. Today, different platforms offer to produce DIY explainer videos based on AI (Krämer & Böhrs 2020). However, a key question is whether it is possible to convey information better via explainer video than via slide presentation. Another open question is whether learning effects can be improved through interaction.

Methods & Data:

As part of a customer survey (n=472, March 2021) by simpleshow, a leading provider of explainer videos, in addition to questions on customer satisfaction and ease of use, current results on the topic of home-office were presented as part of an experimental design (randomized 2+2 factorial design). In the test, an explainer video and a slide presentation were used as the format. Both formats were presented once without interaction and once with interaction (additional questions on the topic). Afterwards, a knowledge test was used to check how well the study results were conveyed. In addition, the participants rated the type of presentation and well as subjective effects.

Results:

The explainer video format achieves significantly better results in knowledge transfer than the presentation of the results as a slide presentation. With a maximum achievable score of 7, the explainer video without interaction achieves a value of 5.0, while the slide format achieves only 2.2 points. The differences show a high statistical significancy as well as strong effect size . The interaction only leads to slightly better results in combination with slide presentation. The subjective evaluation of the presentation format also shows similar level differences between the test groups. Taking into account the length of viewing, the explainer video without interaction achieves by far the best result.

Added Value:

The study results firstly demonstrate clear advantages of knowledge transfer through explanatory videos in comparison with conventional slide presentations. Secondly, it appears that in the context of short presentations, interaction (additional questions about the topic) does not significantly increase learning, but it does increase viewing time. Thirdly: Beyond the actual experiment, the study results underline that explainer videos can also play an important role in the presentation of market research results in the future.