In search of an honest opinion

Brand owners are being drawn to Web 2.0 like moths to a light in the belief that online community panels will disclose the thoughts of their consumers in a more meaningful way. By David Benady

Online market research is getting communal. Brands including BA, Philips and O2 are launching their own community websites to engage consumers and test their reactions to new products, ads and designs.

The community sites have crashed onto the online research scene and are challenging panels and surveys, which have dominated Web-based research for much of this decade.

Creating online communities for brand research was developed in the US by companies such as Communispace, which has created 30 private Web communities for leading service brands. Now companies in the UK such as Virtual Surveys are following its lead, styling it as “research 2.0”.

Survey addicts

Some believe one drawback of online panels is that they pay respondents a couple of pounds for each survey they fill in and this can attract a small, unrepresentative hardcore of survey addicts who quickly tick the boxes in a questionnaire to earn the rewards. In fairness, such doubts about how representative survey samples plague other forms of quantitative research as well – certain types of people take part in telephone surveys or answer questions when stopped in the street.

By contrast, community sites offer a more engaging way of gleaning information, as they tend to attract enthusiasts of the brands concerned and give users a sense of participation, according to proponents of this new research method. The communal approach uses online discussions, question-and-answer sessions and information sharing. Brand owners also post challenges they face on communal sites and offer prizes for the best solutions. People are prepared to take part in these sites because they find them absorbing rather than for financial gain.

Procter & Gamble (P&G) has a panel with 500,000 regular users it calls “trusted advisers” who can offer up their views on the company’s brands and new products. In the process, the company promotes those brands through its engagement with consumers. Some argue that by encouraging participation in this way, brand owners can influence consumers more strongly than by simply barking messages at them through television ads.

Consumer behaviour

John Kearon, chief executive of research company Brainjuicer – which runs community sites for Wrigley and Philips – calls such an approach “research as marketing” since the sites can help boost sales as well as glean insights about consumer behaviour. “If you feel your opinion really counts and you feel part of the experiment, you will end up doing what the brand hosting the experiment wants you to,” he says.

Kearon believes online brand communities need to be specifically created, but is sceptical of researchers gatecrashing existing communities. “I haven’t seen anybody do it really well. On Second Life there is a virtual market research agency, but the right thing to do is just observe what people are doing,” he says. Separately, he adds: “We are working on another project around using the wisdom of crowds for predictive markets and are creating a widget to sit on Facebook. For instance, you can ask people how much they think shares are going to fall to make your prediction.”

With tick-box online panels accounting for the bulk of internet market research at present, some wonder whether they will be overtaken by more interactive ways of engaging respondents. The big online panel companies are starting to offer their own social approach to interrogating respondents.

Social site

Toluna, one of Europe’s largest online panel companies, has launched its own social site called Panel Portal. The hosted application allows brands to build and manage an online customer community panel. This approach reduces data collection costs and improves effectiveness by collecting instant consumer insights. Toluna’s main panel website is highly interactive and shows users’ comments to stimulate discussion. Users can also share information and pose questions to other site visitors.

Given the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, many brands are dipping their toes in the water to see whether the sites can be mined for insights about consumer attitudes.

Some researchers are sceptical of the opportunities for harvesting information about consumers from the existing sites. After all, people use them for entertainment rather than to discuss their thoughts with brand owners. Researchers are reserving judgement until they see entertaining ways of engaging with social site users.

Pete Comley, chairman of Virtual Surveys, says: “Things like Facebook are interesting, but I am not convinced it is ever going to be a major form of market research. They are good for the odd straw poll but given the sample of people you get, it will never be a replacement for an online panel. You never know how it might morph itself, but it is not there yet,” he says.

Community panels

Virtual Surveys offers to build community panels for brands, where their brand users can take part in surveys and questionnaires and answer questions about new initiatives. Brand owners have been attracted by Web 2.0 like moths to a light, lured by the prospect of being able to communicate with their consumers 24 hours a day and get instant reactions to new packaging, pricing and launches.

Comley says an attractive new aspect of the online world for brand owners is real time research, where questions can be posed and answers received immediately. Respondents can then be further interrogated on the basis of those answers. “Most respondents aren’t doing it for the money: they like having their opinions heard and hearing what other people have to say as well as knowing that they can have an influence on products,” he says.

Some believe Web 2.0 really does open new paths to research. “We are seeing a professionalisation of research which involves talking to experts and partners rather than to the general public,” says Paul Marsden, a director of Brand Genetics.

He points to sites such as P&G’s Connect & Develop where people can suggest ideas for new products. Then there are cross-brand sites such as InnoCentive.com, which bills itself as an open innovation community “to solve some of the toughest problems facing the world today”. Challenges on product development and other business issues are posted by corporations, government agencies and non-profit organisations and respondents give their solutions. They can win cash prizes of up to $1m (£500,000) if their solution is chosen. A similar site is Fellowforce.com.

Meanwhile, Marsden runs a site for consumers of Simple Skincare brands at simplicity.me.uk. By participating in regular surveys on designs and new products, users can earn 70% off Simple brands on the high street. Marsden believes that this “eBay for ideas” approach is superior to standard market research panels and quotes a survey from Comscore, which claims just 0.25% of the online population account for 32% of panel respondents. He says: “Less than 2% of the adult population participates in surveys and they are often desperate, compulsive and lonely. Do you really want to base your business strategy on that?”

However, Comley at Virtual Surveys says researchers should not be too concerned about the small numbers who take part in surveys. “We are a bit hung up on how niche these people are. I’m not sure it matters too much. As an industry, we have looked at our navels for too long.”

Meanwhile, research companies are making use of the advances in online technology to create new ways of measuring responses to advertising and packaging.

Emotional reactions

For instance, Conquest is launching a new online tool called Metaphorix, which promises to measure unconscious emotional reactions to brands by tapping into the metaphors people use to describe and express feelings. Metaphorix uses interactive online animations to plug directly into how good, excited or desirous people really feel towards a brand, rather than rely on what they say they feel. It claims to measure hard-to-assess reactions such as the warmth and intimacy people feel towards a brand, and how happy, excited and empathetic they feel towards it and how “cool and talked about” they consider the brand to be.

Advertising research

Conquest co-founder David Penn says: “Much current research is past its sell-by date. It assumes brand decisions are conscious, explicable and rational. In reality our behaviour and our response to brands is highly emotional. As consumers we say one thing and do another. Our behaviour is not logical, considered, conscious or easily accessed via standard questioning. We can finally explain the success of commercials that fail conventional tests and then go on to become favourites.” He calls it “one of the biggest developments in the industry since advertising research began in the Fifties”.

Online market research is developing as fast as Web technology. But just as social sites may turn out to be another fad, so online brand communities could be a short-term trend. In the meantime, they are attracting brand owners that seek to uncover the thoughts and feelings of their consumers in a more engaging and captivating fashion.