There is a group of new, more affordable consultants in town ready to advise: your exclusive consumer panel. Leveraging ongoing consumer insights collected from exclusive brand panels to inform business decisions is nothing new. They have always been invaluable to the co-creation process and painting a 360-degree view of marketing personas. But panels have also always had their limitations. While traditional panels can be forced and logistically complex, their biggest limitation has been the fact that there hasn’t been a process in place to organize and streamline the collected consumer insights from multiple research sessions that unfold over weeks, months, or even years. Mounds of insights are great, but futile if they can’t be organized, analyzed, shared, and preserved. So how do you overcome these challenges and best leverage new qualitative research technologies to optimize the value of panels?
First and foremost, for a panel to truly be effective, you need to take the consumer out of an artificial research setting and into his or her own living room. As enticing as engaging consumers wherever convenient for you may be, consumers are less likely to focus and share in depth (let alone over multiple sessions) when this translates into a logistical nightmare for them and interrupts their day. But with the right technology and methodology, you can get consumers to open up in their own element and time, away from peer and environmental pressures. Today, you are empowered to more efficiently engage panels online and on the go through mobile devices, and empower consumers to share their unadulterated feedback at their convenience from the comfort of their own home, at work, or on the go. New video technologies enable you to literally watch as your consumers’ moments of truth naturally unfold over time; watch them grow and evolve; watch their tastes develop and change; watch them when they are happy, sad, or angry; watch them after a big event in their life. And when you observe someone uninhibited over an extended period of time, you develop a more intimate relationship with them without ever interrupting their natural flow – gaining a more accurate and comprehensive view into your consumer’s life, persona, behavior, and attitudes.
But great research through consumer panels goes beyond insights collection; it is really about being able to take the mounds of collected digital data and organize, analyze, share, and preserve them. To truly overcome the limitations of traditional ongoing panels, you need to empower your research by leveraging the right online research platform to create a “library of truth” that can be mined and shared; to build a streamlined online data set and customized knowledge base you can always refer back to; and to be able to uncover new insights in old data, all while enabling knowledge syndication and preservation.
The value of panels goes without saying. They offer invaluable insight into the consumer like no consultant can. But to really take full advantage of all a panel has to offer, you must create the right environment and platform for collecting and organizing incoming data. And by leveraging proprietary mobile video technologies and an online asynchronous video platform, you are now empowered to gather richer, more relevant insights organized into an easy-to-access digital resource library that you can forever reference – creating long term value by ultimately guiding and inspiring your business decisions for years to come.
To learn more about how you can tap into an online research panel specifically designed to your needs and strategic goals, request a demo!