Qualitative research

Online communities provide brands with a resourceful and complex research ecosystem, where they can receive real-time feedback, test ideas or engage in purposeful conversations with their customers. This type of space and interaction format implies a very high involvement of the community members  and a constant involvement of expert moderators who manage and closely monitor the conversational dynamics within the community.

These ad-hoc communities foster meaningful interactions and discussions, providing you with continuous insights into consumers’ perceptions and preferences. This creates the opportunity for permanent, real-time feedback, allowing for various research activities that the participants can be involved in. By tapping into these engaged groups and leveraging the versatility of this research approach, you can refine strategies, innovate more effectively, and be more responsive, always connected to the reality of your customers. Moreover, online communities allow for longitudinal exploration of opinions, perceptions, and attitudes, while providing you with new spaces and forms of customers engagement and co-creation.

Ethnography and, more recently, net-nography, (i.e., ethnography applied to study online groups and communities) provides companies with the opportunity to immerse in their customers’ world and better understand their culture and behaviors. Having a wide range of research techniques to choose from, we can select the most appropriate one for capturing how people act in specific contexts, as well as  how the meaning-making process unfolds for them. Some of the options we’ve used in tailoring ethnographic research designs involved:

• various forms of customer diaries (e.g. text or photo-based diaries, paper or digital ones, mobile/ app-based diaries, prompt-based or event-triggered diaries, creative diaries etc.)
• “slice of life” approach that focuses on capturing and understanding the everyday experiences, behaviors, and emotions of individuals in their natural environments, from shopping , cooking or skin care sessions, to in-home visits with different topics on the radar;
• guerrilla interviews, where the researcher acts as participant observer, communicating on the spot with the consumers, and, thus, obtaining direct information from them in a consumer-to-consumer interaction setting.

Focus-groups (with 4 to 6 participants) that we can now run both online and offline, provide us with a dynamic approach that brings together relevant participants to spark meaningful discussions about their customer behaviors, attitudes, and experiences with brands, products, or services. Our expert facilitation ensures every session delivers rich, reliable results, providing you with actionable data that drives informed business decisions. Allowing for participants to express different viewpoints, needs and experiences, these open discussions bring together resourceful customer perspectives that pave the way to uncovering valuable insights. Used for understanding customer profiles, brand positioning, testing advertising concepts, products or communication messages, focus-groups work as conversational setting that showcase how people express, negotiate and redefine their position towards a topic, unfolding the meaning-making process attached to it.

An evergreen qualitative approach, interviews have been one of the most resourceful methods to grasp people’s viewpoint, understand their experiences, and the meanings they attribute to them. Generally seen as a “conversation with purpose”, these flexible formats allow us to uncover rich, nuanced data that’s often hidden beneath the surface, and, moreover, place and understand data within their context. From in-depth one-on-one interviews that reveal personal perspectives and motivations, to expert interviews that can provide industry-specific perspectives, or ethnographic interviews that capture real-world behaviors in their authentic environment, there is a wide spectrum of interview design we can choose from or tailor to meet different business needs (e.g., B2C in-depth interviews, B2B in-depth interviews, narrative or life-story interviews, family ethnographic interviews etc.).