They Need It Yesterday!
The Market Research Department of a major packaged good company was faced with a dilemma. How could they set up meaningful research on a large number of new concept ideas which would allow marketing to both gauge results to the ideas on a meaningful basis, but also allow marketing to modify elements of the ideas if necessary?
On-line research could have answered these objectives. However, the clients were high energy, hands-on types who would feel that on-line interviewing was remote and impersonal. They wanted to see the consumer up close.
We set up a series of sessions with target consumers in three markets over 5 days. In each market we ran two sessions.
- Initially, each session comprised 50 target respondents. Each respondent was given a small keypad on which to record their opinion of each concept as well as various elements of each concept.
- Based on their reactions to various key concepts, we then selected two smaller sub-sets of consumers (8 to 10 people) among whom we conducted “focused” groups.
- Company researchers and their internal clients watched the evaluation of the concepts in “real time”. That is, they were able to see how each concept was rated immediately as people gave their rating. They were then able to choose how participants were selected for the qualitative sessions based on the results from the earlier quantitative exercise.
- As the project progressed, Marketing was able to hone in on the concepts most important to them – looking to refine even more the most appealing ideas, and seeing how weaker ideas might be strengthened.
