Online market research real-time emotions a true source of insight

Online market research has long laboured under the impression that it is a quick and cheap way of collecting large volumes of responses to surveys of limited scope. But as the online environment becomes a more important part of people’s lives, its research potential increases to give marketers access to a much deeper understanding of consumers.

Perhaps the greatest scope for innovation lies in the ability to capitalise on real-time information. The online space offers an immediacy of response unrivalled by any other platform. And with the convergence of mobile and computer-based technologies, this can only increase.
One burgeoning real-time trend is immediate customer feedback that is relayed to brand owner and consumers simultaneously. A number of brands are using this information to demonstrate their engagement with customers and collate information about brand perception.

Clothing retailer ASOS has developed ASOSreviews.com with web design agency Thrudigital to aggregate all mentions of its brand online and in real time. The data is then reproduced on the review, changing colour to denote whether it is positive or negative.

Because the data is presented in such a simple way, both consumers and employees can use it, argues James Hart, ecommerce director at ASOS.com. “It will be visible to our customers and our colleagues at ASOS HQ. It’s a great feedback tool.”

Charles Dalton Moore, chief executive at Thrudigital agency, believes having positive and negative feedback so publicly displayed can help a brand. “It’s a key thing for marketers to be able to view the essential learnings of all that data in just a few minutes,” he says. “That’s why there is a real focus on visualisations.”

Online and telephone bank First Direct has taken a similar approach to show what is being said about the brand in real time. It is using a word cloud display where words featuring heavily in comments are larger than those mentioned less frequently. “All three of our widgets were created as a way of visually expressing the data we were harvesting from all the blogs, forums and other websites, in as engaging a way as possible,” says First Direct head of brand Natalie Cowen.

Although Thrudigital was not involved in the creation of First Direct’s word cloud microsite, the agency did an experimental project on parent company HSBC. Dalton-Moore says: “Instead of the things we were expecting around bank charges or the economy, the biggest negative reaction we were seeing in real time was reaction to the chief executive’s recent appearances in the press. I doubt that if you had set out with a particular research brief about the impacts on the HSBC brand, that you would have returned such a result.”

Social media isn’t just being used as a quick method of communication between brand and customer, it is also providing a much richer seam of information on the basis of customer co-creation, or crowdsourcing. Francesco D’Orazio, research director of co-creation and digital research agency Face, calls this “adaptive research in real time”.

Accessing consumers online creates a sample group that benefits from qualitative insight and quantitative size, he believes. “The research approach is being turned on its head. Instead of starting with a small group and widening the research group, we start by listening to what people are saying on the internet.”

From this initial wide pool of opinion, crowdsourcing initiatives are set up with thousands of people before the group is whittled down to single face-to-face co-creation. “It makes the whole process faster,” D’Orazio claims.

Engagement with the consumer at the outset makes the research process fresher, D’Orazio claims. “Rather than filtering, you are curating.”
Much of the benefit delivered by emerging real-time technologies appears to be the ability to acquire information from consumers at their point of interaction with the brand. Increasingly, companies are looking to facilitate ways for consumers to feed back to the brand in situ.

Online research agency BrainJuicer has been working with HSBC to provide real-time feedback in branch via its Face Trace technology, which analyses facial expressions. In-branch kiosks have been installed that allow customers to choose a facial expression image based on how they feel about their interaction with the bank.

Agency founder John Kearon explains: “If the customer picks ’surprise’, the application asks them to repeat the action according to three degrees of surprise and then to articulate why that might be. This is all you need to determine a customer’s response to your brand.”

This project is nearing the end of its pilot stage and Bhavya Shah, manager of group customer experience at HSBC, reports: “Face Trace has allowed us to get some very interesting insights, not about the consumer’s gross emotions relating to HSBC, but on a very granular level. By getting rid of the need to translate emotion into the previous mechanic of the five or ten-point scale of emotion, they can tell us exactly how they feel.”

One of the key elements in moving online research away from the purely quantitative into the qualitative sphere has been to explore the consumer’s unconscious mind.

Online research now has the ability to unlock consumers’ unconscious feelings about a brand or campaign, argues Rob Ellis, chief executive at research agency Prism and MRS Partner. “We have developed ways of asking questions which access that unconscious mind and deliver the unstated feelings that relate to consumers’ emotional connections with brands.”

The ability to understand below-the-surface emotions has motivated facial disfigurement charity Changing Faces to experiment with neuroscience rather than conventional research methods. “Anecdotal evidence suggested that people with facial disfigurement were discriminated against because they were thought of asof subnormal intelligence or less friendly, for example. However, conventional studies asking for people’s reactions to those with disfigurement always threw up the same responses, that it made no difference to them,” explains Winnie Courtinho, head of campaigns and communications at Changing Faces.

A system based on the Implicit Attitude Test (also known as the Implicit Association Test) was developed for this project that invited participants to click on “normal” and “disfigured” faces in relation to key stimulus words in sets of positive and negative language, such as happy or sad.
The responses established whether someone genuinely had no preconditioned prejudice to the disfigured face or whether they were really hiding their true reaction to conform to socially acceptable responses.

Prism’s Ellis says: “The depth of insight provided by surveys backed up by neuroscientific information is helping to develop reliable and deliverable but easy and quick insights.”

Neuroscience and any similar developments always generate interest within the marketing community. For a discipline that often bemoans its lack of measurability, the appliance of science is attractive for its promise of absolutes and visibly academic approach. Taking it as far as using EEG technology - the head caps with an impressive array of receivers and wires - and mentioning tactics such as brainwave tracking are “very sexy”, according to TNS’s Suzanne Moorey-Denham (see Agency Comment, page 31).

However, “sexy” projects that bandy around scientific terms and equipments don’t convince Tom Wood, chief executive of online research agency Foolproof. “I am concerned about the rigour of using neuroscience and technologies such as EEGs,” he says. “A lot of case studies have produced inconclusive results.”

Although neuroscience is becoming more fashionable, robust surveys need at least 30 people to take part, says Wood. “That incurs costs of up to £40,000, so I worry about businesses investing so much in something that could prove to be little more than window dressing.”
True innovations in online research certainly deepen the understanding of a consumer, but clients should be wary of the “next big thing” in case it turns out to be a case of the emperor’s new clothes.