Elias Veris
The basic idea behind a successful product or service is straightforward: it should solve a customer problem, remove a friction a customer has. For a consumer to be willing to pay for a product or service to you, in hard cash or time, you should solve the problem either better than your competition, or be available at a lower price.
And now tell me, what problem did your latest market research (survey/interview/community) project solve for your consumer? No, not that one consumer of yours that dwells boardrooms and needs your insights to sell his projects to his boss, but that other consumer of yours, who we quite rightfully so call “the consumer” in most reports. I would dare to say that in quite some instances, this interesting project of yours did not solve any friction for him, except for the chance to win a ‘beautiful prize’ or to get 500 points for his account. The consumer’s opinion is treated as raw materials that we can buy off them, and not as a product that we deliver to them. Why couldn’t we make ‘giving your opinion’ a product that consumers would be willing to pay for, instead of the other way around? Isn’t there a benefit we can offer them? Couldn’t we solve their problems too, instead of only the marketer’s problem?
This is the 21st century, an age where marketers are confronted with a ‘marketing savvy generation’ that is willing to give their input to brands in order to make them better. 66% of consumers want to give input to brands about new product developments for instance (source: The Conversation Manager). We as market researchers have access to something the ‘new’ consumer values: impact on brands. While they mostly have a hard time reaching the boardroom, we have spent years making friends there. Friends that buy our products, friends that have an impact, friends that rely on us to help them have the right impact in their organisation. We are a dream channel for those who want to improve their favorite brand, or bash the one brand that treated them so badly… And having impact on brands is one of the frictions consumers have right now.
So we have this channel, we are this channel, and then we offer ourselves to the consumers to give their feedback to brands… But only to 200 people, randomly selected, representatively spread between gender and age, and not older than 65 please. Not always the right people to speak to. And we decide which 5-point scales we want feedback on, and if we get open comments, we want them coded so they fit in one word and we can graph them. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen a community research project, but if you have, you know that people are willing and able to give great and insightful feedback, if you just give them the right platform for doing so. In all community projects that I’ve seen, almost half of the research questions were answered before they were asked, because people start discussing about the topics themselves. People want to discuss brands, and they know what they want to discuss about too. So why don’t we just let them?
And then we promise consumers to give the feedback to our clients, the brands. But we promise to hide the consumer’s identity from them at all cost. In a world where people are broadcasting their entire lives… This is the age of credit, where you and I want credit for every insightful article we even just read, and where a medium like twitter has given us just that. Nothing is more satisfactory than being rewarded with an influential (re)tweet for the 15 minutes you spent reading something, right? If I gave the next killer idea to a brand, I would love to be rewarded for it too, if only by getting some recognition…
Maybe we should capitalise more on what we have, start valuing the channel we are and helping consumers to see the value too. Maybe we should open up our research projects to anyone that is willing to give feedback, instead of buying opinions from a few of them. Maybe we should give people credit for the time they spend on our projects. Maybe seeing our work as a product that is beneficial to both brands and consumers, could help us get rid of the panel issues we face. And if it doesn’t, it’s worth the try, right?
Elias Veris is a research consultant at InSites Consulting
