Business continuity during these unusual times

With social distancing and community lock-down, face-to-face research is becoming near impossible to do.

Online market research can be the perfect solution when focus groups or other central location testing methods are not possible.

Yes, these are strange times, but they do not mean that you have to abandon that piece of research you were planning, whether it is to validate your new design or identify how your brand positions against your competitors. If you are looking for an effective alternative to face-to-face research, online surveys can provide insights that are equally as good, if not better. The benefits of online research are many:

• Data collection can be very quick – it is very common to fill your quotas within a day or so
• Analysis can be done in real-time – you can preview the charts during the survey and then as soon as the target sample is reached
• The flow of the survey can be controlled programmatically so that you can link in different kinds of questions and tools, whether these are qualitative, quantitative, or neuro-implicit methods
• You can screen in your desired target group and screen the rest out
• Online research is much cheaper to do than in a central location – respondent costs are much lower. A large sample size of respondents from the general population, for example, is very inexpensive
• There are many techniques to identify low quality responses –for example, those who chose the same response or make poor or no discrimination at all – and we can report these to panel providers, so they are alerted to such people
• There are many techniques to detect inattention and poor engagement – trick questions, rewording a question and checking for consistency, lie scales, and so on
• Nearly everyone has access to the internet these days, and typically on a desktop computer or smartphone – online research can be device-agnostic
• Online surveys have the advantage of randomization – the order of questions, the order of answer options, and the order of survey parts, can all be randomized or rotated. This reduces any bias caused by order effects
• Rapid download speeds mean that these days, respondents can assess video ads in their own home, they can evaluate lots of images, it is also possible to simulate out-of-home experiences, simulate engaging with a product, and testing respondents in situations where you mimic some aspect of consumer behavior, such as the effects of in-store promotions

Used in conjunction with implicit response testing, online research can provide deeper insights than methods such as focus groups and interviews. When done correctly, they can reveal not only what consumers want to tell you but also what they can’t tell you and what is going on subconsciously – what they know intuitively but are unable to verbalize it. 

How does online research work?