Collective as the focus group
Focus group is a powerful tool in qualitative marketing research. A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people is asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging. Questions are asked in an interactive group setting where participants are free to talk with other group members.
Online focus groups
Online focus group is a survey method to collect the views of users on software products. This marketing method can be applied to software products to understand the motivations of users and their perception of the product.
Online focus groups give market researchers access to superior data quality through means that cannot be accessed with traditional methods, including online anonymity, greater client involvement, immediate transcript access and precise moderator control. Used as a complementary service to traditional focus groups, online focus groups can provide a domestic or international forum more efficiently and at a much lower cost than face-to-face research.
Bulletin Board Focus Groups has the ability to set up online focus group where invited members can respond with information at their convenience (asynchronous), set up a profile page, upload media, fill out a diary, answer opinion polls, respond to or post discussion threads and participate in breakout focus groups, based on their segments or comments. A long range Bulletin Board can last from 3 weeks to 8 months depending on what is being observed, tested, or discussed. The online focus group model does work—but it may be less relevant in a fast-paced online social environment. Focus groups through Social Networking may not be a 100% replacement for focus groups or bulletin boards. There are plenty of good tools available for online focus groups or bulletin boards. A good researcher knows when to make time for the right method, and ends up with the best results.
Collective as the Focus group
Design management enables designers to be involved in all phases of the market research. Design is an integral part of marketing strategy. Analyzing customer needs and market trends are essential competencies for managing complex design projects. Many design-driven projects limit front-end analysis to market research, focus groups, or concept demonstrations. While these approaches are necessary, they overlook the opportunity for designing from understanding the user’s authentic experience. Innovation emerges from truly understanding the fit between product and person.
Design management can address customer and product end-user relevancies in unique and detailed ways, design manager can have a voice in articulating challenges, framing market strategy and designing approaches, thereby influencing outcomes. In tactical context, a design management can enhance product value and influence customer experience. Armed with salient user research, the design manager can offer a unique and valuable strategic perspective to business.
In Google, the organization solely depends on the user needs. Users cannot necessarily articulate to Google, their requirements. Interestingly, this problem gets worse as users become more advanced. Google as part of the user research learned, with too many search features, users suffer due to complexity. Hence, they tend to use Google less for search purpose. Google therefore focuses on providing ease and speed for its users, so that they do not necessarily stay on the website longer , but return to the Google site more frequently for their everyday queries.
Designers tend to focus intently and address deep structural human needs, wants, and desires–a categorical substrate that bridges gender, culture, geography, and time. In Brand design management the brand is the core, which results in a strong focus on the brand experience, customer touch points, and reliability, recognition, and trust relations. It is responsible for the visual expressions of the individual product brand, with its diverse customer–brand touch points and the execution of the brand through design.
With many Web 2.0 applications, companies can now tap into “the collective” on a greater scale than ever before. Indeed, the increasing use of information markets, social networks, collaborative software, and other Web-based tools constitutes a paradigm shift in the way that companies make design related decisions.
The new breeds of leaders in organizations driven by design rely not only on reliable, predictable business-as-usual models. These leaders have also harnessed an ability to be able to interpret anecdotal research, to allow customers insights and comments to influence their product and services design decisions.
Conroy (2008) pointed out that an insight is a statement based on a deep understanding of target consumers’ attitudes and beliefs, which connect at an emotional level with consumer, provoking a clear response .
Design management ensures designers to contribute early in decision-making process of the project. Designers need to make important design related decisions based on insights for consumers. Online social networking communities offer an interactive channel to communicate and develop relationships with customers by engaging them in meaningful conversation through the complete marketing research phases. The collective characteristics are similar to that of online focus group.
As social media continues to evolve, we are seeing a shift in marketing techniques from traditional methods, to interactive techniques. Focus groups are a perfect example of this trend. In the past, focus groups were conducted by companies through gathering together a very targeted group of people (in person, at a physical location) to discuss a brand or product, and then the feedback was then analyzed and passed back along to the company. These focus groups usually took weeks to plan, if not longer, and one of the hardest parts was getting all of the participants together in the same room, at the same time.
Now, with the emergence of social media, more and more companies are turning to social networking tools to create online focus groups, including Walt Disney, Coca Cola, and Proctor & Gamble. Social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook, allow companies to target specific segments of their target market, through demographic profiling.
A holistic look at social media and its core shows a tremendous amount of value in leveraging its conversations for engaging consumers and cultivating rich insights in the qualitative setting. Rich and candid insights provided in real-time via digital ethnography and social media engagement.
Another benefit to using social networks to develop focus groups, is that by engaging your potential customers, you are not only gaining valuable insight from them, but you are forming a relationship with them, which increases customer loyalty, customer lifetime value, and decreases attrition. Customers are providing ample feedback for the engagement from the companies they purchase products and services.
Another very valuable and growing capability for social media is identification of digital influence and recruiting potential. By thorough observation of conversations, comments, responses, retweets, “likes” and other engagement metrics, designers can begin to identify individuals or groups, portraying influence in the social media channels. Designers look for needs, not solutions. Needs last longer than any specific solution. Needs are a road map for development that make research and design management seamless.
Service Design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service, in order to improve its quality, the interaction between service provider, customers, and the customer’s experience.
The activity of service design is analyzed not only from a functional perspective with the aim of optimizing flows and resources and reducing time of operations but also from the emotional perspective which creating meaningful events, motivating customers, communicating the service.
A customer experience in a service context is an ongoing relationship defined by multiple touch points. These touch points, must engage all senses, evolve over time, and contain both functional and emotional elements. Customer experience design shall use well-articulated brand values for the customer experience. This should be expressed in terms of a customer need, not a business need. Gaining empathy hinges on good observation skills and understanding not just fundamental use and usability needs, but also the customer’s meaning-based needs. Social media enables designers to obtain candid insights and probe further among “in the moment” thoughts and reactions to various stimuli from the collective. Social media monitoring and engagement offered new ways to mine insights that have never been available and provided valuable information to help build and design products and services.
Listen
There are so many ways to listen to what is being said about your company, product, brand, service and most importantly, related passions. There are a number of tools like Radian 6, Collective Intellect, or Nielson Buzz Metrics, which will uncover and analyze what people are saying both inside of communities and on the open web. For recently launched Pampers Village community, Critical Mass collaborated with Live world, which helps us both listen to and moderate user interactions in the community. Trending topics on Twitter can also be used as an indicator for what people are talking about is called social sniffing.Designers might use ethnographic research techniques and tools like digital cameras and video recorders to capture insights.
The active participation of customers and other actors traditionally considered as external to a firm’s boundary emphasize the need for a proper design activity that organizes the interaction among those actors, thus planning sequences of events, material and information flows. Listening through the life of a campaign or initiative yields insights toward attitudes and identifies who has influence and where the most fertile grounds are to engage consumers digitally.
Google is now conducting focus groups to gather information about consumers’ social habits. The questions focus around social networking as it relates both to real life (offline) and online. Interestingly, this line of questioning also seems to reflect Google’s social strategy and analysis that was unveiled by Paul Adams, Google’s lead user-experience researcher. Other questions in the survey ask which search engines the participant uses and how often, which instant messaging platforms they use, and which Google products they use.
Learn
Pilot initiatives can be quickly launched using prototype methodologies. We will typically perform “rapid design labs” engaging multiple stakeholders across multidisciplinary teams. Designers can prototype new service delivery methods like an interactive map or questionnaire and test them early when failure may not have massive cost impact. In a class of 53 startups presenting at DEMO’s spring 2011 conference in Palm Springs, Gut Check do-it-yourself qualitative research company took home the People’s Choice award and $1 million in winnings. The startup’s mission is to make focus groups more accessible and affordable. GutCheck customers draw from the service’s pool of five million participants for targeted questioning. Then they interview respondents in a traditional question-and-answer survey format, or something more free form. Interview transcripts are stored and can be shared with co-workers.
Adapt
In order to glean both strategic and tactical insights organizations have to be nimble enough to measure what is working, what is not and make adjustments. Analytics play a big role in this—again throughout the whole process. From helping to identify sentiment to measuring the effectiveness of a campaign or initiative, the science behind marketing provides insights into how to move forward. Real Time social analytics is performed for faster insights and more focused customer engagements. In order to adapt properly the team needs to think like “digital anthropologists” sifting through the quantitative data that analytics can provide and pulling insights from the qualitative inputs as described in social sniffing.
EVANGEL, The Design Evangelion 