experience matters

Anastasia’s post on June 9 (probably unwittingly) hit on a topic close to my heart.  (Anastasia, the cheque’s in the mail.)

I lead a consumer research group at Critical Mass called Curious that develops cost-effective and time-effective (but still effective) methods of getting to insight to ensure we’re making relevant and meaningful decisions. One of our methods involves the use of MROCs (market research online communities), which Brad Bortner from Forrester Research has written about over the past year.  As you might imagine, I’m all about the use of communities specifically for this purpose.  But unlike Anastasia’s post, Curious works to bring the conversation to the brand (in a more controlled environment) rather than monitoring the other conversations that are going on.  

Great things can happen when you bring people together. We look for those moments when one of our respondents raises an interesting issue in one of our topics and suddenly the community is ablaze with activity around that topic.  It’s something that I personally think of as an extraordinary experience.

One of our communities, ShopTalk, is comprised of a few hundred consumers in the US that have all been screened along various criteria (demographic, attitudinal, behavioral). We have discussions with them every week on topics ranging from buying toothpaste, to how they would define a term like “craftsmanship,” to whether they think the needs of moms are addressed online.  

With our membership base, we’ve well overshot the typical sample size for qualitative research, which many agree often yield the most useful insight because one goes deeper with fewer. But beyond typical qualitative research methods, we get to learn about most of our members over time. Sure we get to learn how an individual will often approach decision making differently among product categories. But we also get to explore in greater detail how that individual’s mood and environment can affect how they make a decision.

Want an a-ha moment?  Just listen.  (And if you want something to listen to, just let me know what you’d love to know about from your consumer audience – I’ll throw it in as a discussion to ShopTalk and share the results here on Experience Matters.)  

Arif Hirani is the Research Director for CM’s Curious division