A story of how discomfort leads to innovation
Last year, a lot has changed with the unprecedented disruption of the COVID-19 virus and its impact on, well, everything at the moment.
The combination of budget restrictions, travel bans, quarantines, the lack of face to face communication, and in general, the need to do more with less, are going to shape the next few months hugely for all of us.
We would like to share with you our methodology which was born out of the current circumstances.
Earlier in March 2020, we had planned to start Qualitative Discussion Groups and Face-to-Face interviews in a number of facilities all over Europe, recruiting very specific car owners in urban locations – among them Milan, Paris, and Madrid for one of our Automotive clients.
Around 200-250 potential participants were recruited, some for the group discussions and some even screened further for our 100-minute in-depth interviews. However, as you can imagine, we could not invite them to the facilities, and neither could we attend the interviews ourselves.
It would have been a huge waste to give up all these recruited targets. So together with our client, after weeks of looking into solution after solution, we decided to apply a special approach.
We have managed to conduct all the interviews online, via a unique engaging platform – in which we can better explain the questions and visual materials to participants. This platform also enables us to collect and monitor various open answers, and even have a free discussion with the participants at the end of the interview.
ADK INSIGHTS’ LIVE INTERVIEW methodology allows us to view several windows on one screen, where we can:
- view the INTERVIEWER
- view the PARTICIPANT
- view the QUESTIONS on the participant’s screen and HOW THEY ANSWER the questionnaire
- plus a hidden window for us to chat directly with the interviewer, which makes it easier for us to MONITOR the process start-to-finish.
Responses have been great and participants have provided a lot of qualitative input.
Though there are a lot of uncertainties for the moment, we believe it is still key for you to keep in touch with your consumers and further identify potential opportunities, as well as to anticipate potential emerging issues. Our role as researchers, now more than ever, is to help provide clarity on business questions in ways that are aligned to the new business realities.
We would happily discuss with you how rich, in-depth, and high-quality qualitative work can continue even in the current climate, ideally generating deeper discussions with consumers which may help us identify new strategies to navigate in these challenging times.