I was recently invited to present at the 2011 Mirren New Business Conference, which is a forum for exchange of ideas and training that can help advertising agencies to win new business.

The Mirren Institute has been predicting that the future of advertising agencies will depend on their ability to translate consumer insights into creative solutions that will have an impact on clients’ bottom lines. I couldn’t agree more.

Nonetheless, in a presentation by Andrew Deitchman, the founder of Mother New York, he cited an “unscientific” survey the agency conducted, in which the results indicate that 67% of the agencies and clients rely on gut-feeling and intuition. If this is true, at the exclusion of market research and consumer insights, that’s a sad fact.

Intuition and what is called “gut-feeling” are really products of accumulated experiences that allow individuals to recognize patterns and make decisions without being aware of how they arrived to them. The key word here is experience. For gut-feeling-made decisions to be right in the advertising world, it is required to have in-depth industry and category experience and knowledge of the target market and the client’s business issues. How can we get a real understanding of the target market without market research and customer insights?

More and more clients are asking for the data behind recommended marketing and advertising strategies. Agencies  are likely to increase their odds of winning an account by explaining the rationale, for their proposed advertising campaign, with the help of something more than intuition and gut-feeling. 

Most advertising campaigns have one or more of these goals:

• Inform, position
• Call to action
• Change or reinforce attitudes
• Change or reinforce behaviors

To reach any of these goals, it helps to think as clients think about the purchase cycle for their products/brands. There is always a target market that needs to be aware of our products/brands, consider them, try them and keep buying them.

CONSIDER THE PURCHASE CYCLE

Marketing or advertising campaigns are likely to increase their effectiveness in achieving any of the above mentioned goals if they take into account the different phases of the purchase cycle. For each of these phases, agencies often face questions that can’t be answered with “gut-feeling,” and call for market research and customer insights.

Whether to invest in research to answer questions like these while preparing a pitch it is always a difficult decision for ad agencies since it is hard to justify the cost when it is uncertain they will win the account. Luckily, thanks to technology, there are many new qualitative and quantitative research techniques that can be used to gather rich consumer insights, faster and cheaper than ever.

I urge advertising agencies to give them a try if they want to win a pitch and go beyond gut-feeling or intuition, which are often confused with personal taste and strong biased opinions.

Qualitative research is going beyond in-person focus groups and experiencing a revolution for the better. Jim Bryson, president of 20/20 Research recently did a great presentation at the Fort Worth monthly luncheon organized by the DFW AMA about the latest online qualitative research techniques.

Thanks to the development of new online platforms, the qualitative research field have seen an explosion of new online qualitative research techniques that makes it possible to collect data in ways we couldn’t before.

Among the new online qualitative research techniques, we now have:

• Bulletin boards
• Immersion IDI’s
• Mobile qualitative
• Quantitative-Qualitative hybrids
• Real time chats
• Research blogs
• Research communities
• Social networking monitoring
• Video journals
• Webcam focus groups
• Web-Intercepts/chats

These new online qualitative research techniques have often made qualitative research better, faster and cheaper (not always). Studies using these online qualitative research techniques can be deployed pretty quickly and provide immediate access to transcripts or videos for review.

As for making qualitative research better, Bryson rightly points out to the advantages of most of these methods:

• Geography: it allow us to reach a wide-range of people across different regions without travel
• Candor: due to the privacy and confidentiality of online, many participants feel more comfortable to discuss sensitive topics
• Convenient access: both clients and participants can participate whenever is more convenient to them and their locations
• Longitudinal capabilities: studies can be extended over time as long as needed to understand the groups of interest

Below are some of the most often used online qualitative techniques, their advantages, disadvantages, and applications according to Bryson:

Mobile qualitative research, according to Bryson, will definitely be part of  market research’s near future. This can be easy and comfortable for the participants, although for now is limited to text only. This technique can be used for reaching to difficult groups, send reminders about “homework” given to study participants, and do research at the point of consumption.

Another approach getting traction is hybrid research, where quantitative and qualitative research are combined in one data collection opportunity. 20/20 Research recently launched a new service called Quallink where participants start in a survey and then are enrolled in a qualitative study. Hybrid research can also be done using SurveyGizmo, which has the capability to integrate online surveys with chat sessions from iModerate.

The main advantages of a hybrid approach are:

• Immediacy: there is no lag between quantitative and qualitative data collection
• Can be very cost effective since cost incurred in recruitment, travel and focus group facilities can be eliminated
• Ability to do a deep-dive on the story behind the numbers
• Ability to segment qualitative data together with quantitative results

There is no question that qualitative research has come a long way and that all these new techniques make this field exciting and promising, but before you get carried away by all the excitement, don’t forget to have clear research objectives and evaluate if these techniques are a good fit for what you want to accomplish.

To learn more about our consumer data service visit Consumer Shopping Behavior Insights. To request consumer shopping behavior data and insights don’t hesitate to contact us.