Incentives paid to participants for qualitative research can be quite generous. Of course, that is what is intended in paying people for their time. Incentives help facilitate the recruiting process as its
attractiveness in amounts motivates participants to:
But incentives can be a double-edged sword. While they may be the impetus to participate in qualitative research, some people may try to do anything they can to qualify for studies so that they can reap the benefits of the incentive provided. Of course, participants must be screened and qualified in order to be invited to a study. Sometimes, the potential participant will try to psych out the recruiter by trying to answer screening questions in a manner that gets them qualified, regardless of whether their answers are truthful. In essence, they will lie, cheat, and do whatever it takes to “get the study.” Therefore, in order to ensure quality participants, the recruiter must be on his or her game at all times. You see, the recruiter is the last line of defense on behalf of the client (moderator) who has hired them to compile a list of qualified participants. Imagine if the recruiter simply went through the motions in the job of recruiting, paying no mind to the possibility that candidates may be lying. The participant recruited under false pretenses will probably not have a clue about the subject matter and, having faked their way into the study, really has nothing to offer the moderator or his/her client in terms of opinions from which insights are culled. At Accelerant Research, our team of recruiters are well trained to be sensitive to these conditions of lying and faking, and require all potential participants to provide anecdotes and even artifacts (photos, etc.) to validate their usage of or experience with the study topic. We pay close attention to their “stories” and probe them to clarify or expand their answers. In the end, we provide quality recruits that are both qualified and articulate. Contact us for more information or request a cost estimate from us as a first step. If we are granted the opportunity to work with you, we are confident that the quality of recruiting service you receive will be a marked improvement. Are you ready to embark on a thrilling expedition through the dazzling domain of market research, where every data point holds the potential to make or break a business decision? We're about to take a wild ride through a world where data quality reigns supreme and our nemesis is the notorious survey bot. But first, dear reader, I would like you to imagine that you have just built a beautiful castle. The architect you hired designed it magnificently and every stone is intricately woven with gold. This castle is your pride and joy. You move in all your belongings and begin living there blissfully until one day, you hear a loud cracking noise. Before you know it, your castle is a pile of broken stone on the ground.
You stare at this heap where your castle once stood tall and wonder where you went wrong. The issue was that despite going to the best architect in the world, you never hired anyone to inspect the ground on which your castle was built. That ground happened to be crawling in survey bots that, like termites, brought your castle (or business) to the ground. In market research, data isn't just numbers on a spreadsheet – it's the magic elixir of organizations and the compass that navigates decisions. If you are familiar with the industry, you know that it can cost a pretty penny to conduct quantitative research studies. When every cent counts, the line between 24K gold and fool's gold can be paper thin. To avoid having your castle built on false pretenses (bad data) and sending money down the drain, you need the proper defenses. So fear not readers! We, at Accelerant Research, will equip you with the formula to fight the uncertainties of data collection. As we navigate these stormy seas, we'll unravel the skills to discern the gems from the impostors. This is what we take with us to the battle of data integrity: The Moat: Fraud Prevention Software Our first mode of defense is software that helps to identify any fraudulent respondents before they even enter our surveys. This system assesses hundreds of data points about the traffic to our surveys and utilizes AI to refine their response removal processes over time. Additionally, this digital safety net catches 235% more fraud than alternate data quality technologies. Unfortunately, this does stop all the bad traffic from getting into surveys. The bad actors will always build a bridge to help them cross the moat. The Traps: Survey Quality Checks If the evil survey bots get past our moat, we have traps lying in wait for them at the foot of our research castle. We take the time to program quality assurance checks within our surveys to catch speedy survey takers not paying attention or sneaky survey bots. These quality checks include:
The Sword: Trained Team Members Comb Through Every Response Finally, our team of trained warriors (Accelerant Research staff) review the responses of every single respondent that successfully “completes” our surveys. We analyze a variety of different metrics and remove responses that do not fit our data quality standards. This is our golden sword and ensures excellent data quality. We invite you to reach out to us for more information about our data quality assurances. Simply give us a call (704-206-8500) or send us an email (info@accelerantresearch.com). With our support and guidance in participant recruiting, technology/logistics management, and full-service quantitative survey development, Accelerant Research can provide you with high-quality and impactful insights. Most consumers consider themselves pretty rational. It follows they also feel that they make their product and service choices accordingly. Ask them why they chose Product A over Product B, and most will offer a fairly rational answer. But these tangible reasons are only part of the story; underlying preferences, personal values, and emotive factors often contribute to consumer decisions as well.
While the goal of qualitative research is always to understand the customer better, what happens when a consumer doesn’t have a full grasp of their below surface motivators or, is aware but has difficulty articulating them? In cases like these, it’s worth taking a page from the playbooks of clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts everywhere. Projective techniques, paired with traditional discussion, can be an invaluable tool for peeling back layers and getting at deeper, and sometimes seemingly less rational, motivators for behavior. Accelerant Research has a full-time staff of moderators with extensive experience in moderating and analyzing qualitative data across a wide range of topics, audiences, and qualitative research methodologies. This series will introduce some of our moderator team’s favorite projective exercises, along with situations in which we’ve used them successfully. So, read on for some ideas that might add a couple of fresh techniques into your qualitative toolboxes. (We promise, no inkblots). Dear John: It’s Not Me, It’s You Lost customers are a frequent recruit target for high impact insights, including former customers who have gone on to do business with another brand or prospects who decided to go with a competitive product. When asked directly about their reasons, initial responses tend to be fairly high level: Better service, better price, I just like Product Z better. Any skilled moderator will dig into these responses for deeper context, but a projective exercise adds some real value and helps make the terrain here a little easier on the shovel. For lost consumers in particular, asking the participant to write a one-page “Dear John” break-up letter addressed to “Brand Y,” as if the brand were a person, outlining reasons things didn’t work out, can add real value. The task is fun and therefore easy to pay attention to; role-playing can loosen up respondents and get their creative juices flowing. Who among us hasn’t fantasized about writing such a letter when a company fails us, let alone ensuring that someone is actually going to read it? Not getting asked why you’re going somewhere else makes it feel like you’re undervalued. The “Dear John” assignment itself is specifically designed to help consumers tap into their emotive sides as they frame their letters. No one wants to admit they broke up with someone simply because the price was off, even if that someone is a fictional personification. When participants imagine the brand as a person, they are encouraged to explore underlying personal motivations, beliefs, values, and attitudes toward that person; things that they may not be consciously aware of until they try to articulate them on the page. Having an outline on paper not only creates an excellent exhibit for later analysis and a rich source of verbatims, but also serves as a spring-board stimulus during active discussions. Once the group’s collective big takeaways are shared, moderators can pose the question “What else is in your letter?” It’s a great way to get quieter participants to open up to the group; they don’t need to think of something new on the fly, it's all right there on the page for their reference. If the exercise is assigned as pre-session homework, there’s upfront value as well. Reading through these responses prior to a focus group will give you a sense of topics any given participant will bring up, how strongly they feel, and how much they have to say. It can aid in the final decision when choosing which of your over-recruits in the waiting room you should pay and send and which you should invite in front of the mirror for the richest, most productive discussion. We invite you to reach out to us for more information about conducting qualitative research. Simply give us a call (704-206-8500) or send us an email (info@accelerantresearch.com). With our support and guidance in participant recruiting, technology/logistics management, and even moderating/full-service support, Accelerant Research can provide you with successful and impactful insights. When an agency is hired to develop an ad campaign, the first objective they must achieve is to develop a creative brief that will serve as the foundation for the entire campaign, whether specific ads are executed in video, TV, radio, print, or other. But the question is “on what basis is the creative brief designed?” Just like many large organizations do before leadership decides to allocate large amounts of budget to, say, designing new products and services, market research is conducted among members of a target population to guide and inform decisions about whether new products are ready for market rollout, or need to be revised, or need to be scrapped. This way, research is used as an insurance policy against large budget expenditures that will not pan out in driving revenue for the organization. Ad campaigns also are large expenditures. As such, they should be market tested before their communications are made public. Surely, research studies like storyboard copy testing are carried out, but these “test stimuli” are already based on what the ad agency has delivered as a creative brief. Unless the brief is also market tested, the agency, and its client will begin to develop and monitor executions that may well be based on incorrect messaging strategies, thus rendering any executions sub-optimal. Accelerant Research has designed a quantitative study that directly informs the development of a creative brief by integrating “tried and true” survey construction and multivariate analytic techniques as follows: Informed Ballot and Multiple Regression This technique is borrowed from political opinion polling surveys where the first question is “if the elections were held today, for whom would you vote?” Following this question is a set of intervening questions based on key political issues about which the candidate may be pro or con, e.g., “If you knew that Candidate X was tough on crime, would that make you more or less likely to vote for him/her?” Finally, the first question about for whom the respondent would vote is asked again. With these data in hand, important measurements may be performed. First, a pre-post assessment may be made on comparing the % likelihood of voting for Candidate X. This analysis will show whether the array of intervening survey questions can effectively create more positive consideration toward the candidate, overall. Second, the intervening questions can be used as independent variables in a multiple regression analysis, with pre-post change in consideration as the dependent variable. By examining the relative beta weights of each intervening question, those with the strongest association with positive change in candidate consideration may be identified and cherry-picked to serve as the foundation for the candidates’ foundational political campaign. Adapting Consideration Driver Research to a Creative Brief for Advertising Applying the above outlined techniques to inform advertising campaigns is relatively simple and straightforward. Taking the “who will you vote for” question, it is modified to be something like “how likely are you to consider Brand X when you want to purchase Product/Service Y?” This single question, in this form, will serve as the pre- and post- measures of the amount of change in positive consideration. Regarding the intervening survey items, these are made up of a set of functional and emotional attributes about the brand and its products or services under study. Again, multiple regression analysis can be performed to isolate which functional and which emotional attributes drive the most positive change in consideration. Additionally, regression can also reveal the optimal mix of specific emotional and functional attributes that should be used to inform the foundational creative brief and associated ad campaign, i.e., what to say in an ad. The figure below shows a standard visualization of a Consideration Driver study, based on mock data: Consideration Driver research is uniquely designed to inform creative briefs. Organizations and advertising agencies both can embrace this methodology to ensure that brand messaging will have the benefit of being tested to inform the overarching strategies that become the foundation of subsequent ad executions. Feel free to contact Accelerant Research (info@accelerantresearch.com) for a more in-depth discussion of the ins and outs of this sort of work.
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