The market research space is no easy one to explore.
If you are looking to conduct a project, you are not short of options. The decision of what type of market research to conduct often starts with choosing between in-person methodologies (e.g., face-to-face) or virtual approaches.
In this blog post, our market research company discusses some of the drivers of remote technologies and their benefits to help you better understand how to communicate and advocate for online techniques going forward for your organization.
Plus, we'll detail the benefits of reshaping your market research for the digital world over some of the more traditional MadMen-like techniques.
The times they are a changin. Bob Dylan. Smart man. Expert market researcher.
How Market Research is Evolving
As with many industries, the only constant is, in fact, change.
It has definitely been the case in market research over the past 15-20 years since I started my career in the field.
Case in point, take a look at this graphic below from Statista.
As a result of this, market research methodologies such as phone surveys are becoming less and less popular.
In fact, I detailed this topic regarding the collapse of phone surveys, offering 7 significant drivers.
Outside of apparent factors, the death of phone surveys is caused by:
- Increased costs and extended timelines
- Technology such as caller IDs and unrecognizable numbers being labeled 'potential spam'
- Younger generations are online, texting more, and using instant messaging platforms
As a result, many brands and organizations have started looking for and using alternatives to phone surveys.
Similarly, tech has impacted all forms of in-person market research.
Requests for in-person studies have become less common over the years at our market research company, Drive Research.
However, COVID-19 has undoubtedly accelerated the trend away from in-person research in our industry.
COVID Acceleration to Remote Platforms
Before 2020, there were a lot of brands that were holding on to the old way of doing market research.
By old way, I mean traveling the country to visit focus group facilities, observe in-depth interviews, conduct on-site in-store intercepts, and perform shop alongs with customers.
Brands often travel with market research firms to cities worldwide to conduct day-long sessions listening to customers and extracting insights.
It involved months of planning, logistics, travel coordination, and everything else that comes with large-scale market research studies.
However, when the pandemic hit, many wondered if conducting in-person market research was a good or bad idea.
But quickly, we realized in-person wasn’t even an option.
No professionals, brands, or participants were willing to do anything in-person for an extended period. However, at the same time, this was one of the most confusing times for brands.
The COVID pandemic created a ton of uncertainty. Uncertainty breeds a lack of confidence in brand strategy. It created a lot of unanswered questions for brands that could be answered through market research.
Take, for example, a global brand that produces antibacterial cleaning products like Clorox.
If this brand were running a customer attitude, awareness, and usage study leading up to the pandemic, it would have likely heard things about buyers being price sensitive when choosing products and even feeling loyal to specific brands they always use.
However, in March of 2022, stores were cleaned out of these cleaning products, antibacterial wipes, sanitizing sprays, and everything else that could help kill germs.
As a result, when people were shopping for these products in-store or online and stock/inventory was so low, guess what didn’t matter?
Price didn’t matter. 💵
The brand didn’t matter. 🌐
Nothing really mattered. 🤷♂️
Image Source: The Telegraph
Therefore, many customers were introduced to new ways of buying products (e.g., online, Amazon, Instacart, etc.) and exposed buyers to new brands they would have never tried outside of a pandemic.
It changed the course of how organizations conducted business, such as...
- Household name brands like Clorox likely trying to figure out how to recapture market share and ensure their loyal buyers return when the stock/inventory returns to relatively normal levels.
- Off-brands or new entrants to the market with little share seeing increased sales, and trying to figure out how to keep these customers and get them to continue to come back when stock/inventory returns to relatively normal levels.
A perfect storm, in a way. 🌩️🌩️
COVID created a blend of uncertainty and the need for more answers, but the only way to get those answers was through remote studies.
After the dust settled on budgets and brands understood there would be a long-term impact of COVID-19, they revisited their market research budgets and began researching again.
For instance, one study shows 75 percent of consumers tried new shopping behaviors during the pandemic, with many of them citing convenience and value.
Not to mention, brand loyalty went out the window with 39 percent of them deserting trusted brands for new ones.
To adapt to these changes, organizations spoke to market research consultants to determine how to accomplish their goals and objectives through digital means.
It forced brands to get closer to the customer to figure things out—those who understand the customer best win.
It pushed billions of dollars in reshaping market research budgets for the digital world.
Does Market Research for the Digital World Have Staying Power?
The short answer is yes.
Even post-pandemic, brands who were forced to switch to digital methodologies stuck with those approaches in 2021 and 2022, and will likely continue into 2023. We’ve seen that with our own market research firm’s clients.
For example, Drive Research offers a full-service focus group and interviewing facility in Syracuse, New York.
It opened in 2018, so we had about 1-2 years of requests to use the facility before the world shut down.
We also offer full qualitative recruitment services for projects not only in Upstate, NY but across the country, so we had a measure on that pulse as well.
For every 10 qualitative recruitment or focus group requests pre-2020, likely 8 or 9 of them were asked for in-person sessions.
Focus group client viewing room at Drive Research
Now going into 2023, that has virtually flipped. As businesses start reshaping their market research for the digital world, we're seeing a lot more requests for online focus groups and online surveys.
It’s rare to have an in-person market research request these days to host sessions in Syracuse or for our team to get a recruitment request for other in-person sessions in different geographies in the U.S.
Several reasons are driving the switch from in-person to virtual market research.
Recommended Reading: Traditional Focus Groups or Online Focus Groups: The Choice is Yours
Reasons Driving a Change to Virtual Market Research
The pandemic is not the sole reason why we're seeing a shift to remote market research methodologies. Rather, it was the catalyst for the change.
It showed organizations the many alternatives to in-person market research and their benefits, such as the reasons outlined below.
Reason #1: Cost savings 💸
It will cost you when you hire a market research firm to conduct 4 focus group sessions with B2B decision-makers in San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and New York.
The expenses are driven by many factors with in-person market research, including:
- Travel expenses. Flights, car rentals, hotels, meals, etc., for both the brand traveling to view the sessions as well as the market research team and moderators assigned to the study.
- Facility rental fees. Expenses to rent the facility for 1-2 full-day periods and all of the A/V charges, equipment needs, recordings, transcripts, etc.
- Recruitment costs. The cost per recruit is driven up in these studies because you are limited to recruiting participants who live within a drive time of the facility vs. a virtual session that can be conducted with B2B decision-makers nationally.
- Incentives. Getting someone to drive and come in person to a session requires a larger reward than asking them to sit on their couch and join via Zoom on their mobile device.
You can access inexpensive platforms for qualitative and quantitative research with virtual options.
Many of which have grown and evolved in recent years. You spend nothing on travel expenses or facility fees.
You can eat a bowl of cereal from your cabinet while watching a Zoom session.
The recruitment and incentive costs are also generally lower than what is required for in-person sessions.
Reason #2: Timeline savings ⏰
Similar to the greater investment in costs, there is also a longer timeframe associated with in-person research.
The sessions must be spread out accordingly when you must account for travel time to and from sites.
Another option is hiring four separate focus group moderators to run the sessions in the same week. However, that is never a great idea because it does not allow the research to evolve (learn from group 1 and apply to group 2).
In many cases, the brand sponsoring the study wants to view all of the sessions, which means they need to be spaced out.
All of this means the time from start to insights is further delayed.
With remote technologies and approaches, the turnaround time can be much quicker. In these cases, the technology works in your favor, creating a more efficient project.
Reason #3: Greater access to quality participants 🌎
I alluded to this point, but when you are relegated to recruiting consumers or business professionals in a specific market, your brand is forced to deal with a limited pool.
Expanding that universe to consumers or business professionals anywhere in a country or the world allows your brand to be much pickier about who to recruit for market research.
This is also a massive trend in the HR/talent recruitment industry.
With so many companies jumping into remote work from the pandemic, those organizations and recruiters are no longer limited to finding talent within a 1-2 hour radius.
In fact, since 2020 people have been meeting by video calls 50% more. The same pattern can be said for in-person market research studies.
It's just another reason to consider reshaping your market research for the digital world.
Reason #4: Ease of doing business ✅
Participants are not required to travel for in-person sessions, but it creates a much better work-life balance for the brand sponsoring/viewing the sessions and the market research firm.
It creates more time to ponder the insights and manage multiple priorities and projects, rather than being jet-lagged, traveling the country, or checking into the next hotel.
Some moderators thrive on that chaos, but market research is all about analyzing. The more time you have to analyze, the better the outcome.
Alternatives to In-Person Market Research
What are some real-life examples of how dinosaur market research methodologies have reshaped to better adapt to the digital world?
Here are a few top-of-mind examples of methodologies that have shifted in the past few years.
Intercept surveys ➡️ Geofencing surveys
This is a trend we continue to watch in the industry.
In recent years, we have seen more requests from new brands asking to conduct in-person intercept surveys. Why?
Many brands no longer offer this as a service due to staffing shortages and the struggle with hiring quality workers for a short-term engagement like a 2-3 day on-site survey project.
A potential answer to conducting intercept surveys is for the market research firm to fly its staff to locations across the U.S. to complete these, but that is often not feasible or cost-effective.
You’ll be sure to get higher quality and trustworthy team this way, but for the above reasons, the cons often outweigh the pros here.
We have conversations with organizations weekly about shifting their old way of thinking with intercept surveys to newer age approaches.
After understanding their objectives and what they want to learn, sometimes even simple online surveys can act as a great alternative to intercept surveys. However, in many cases, geofencing surveys can be a great solution.
Our geofencing survey company can survey respondents anywhere in the U.S. that enter or exit a digital geofence.
They are notified through their panel app that a survey is available based on their entering or exiting one of our geofenced areas. They are taken to an online survey to answer questions on their mobile device without ever needing to interact face-to-face with an interviewer.
These work great for any type of retail store market research needs.
Feasibility can often be challenging, so your brand either needs to have 400-500+ locations across the U.S. to generate enough sample, or you have to be willing to extend the timeline a bit to allow more traffic to enter or exit your geofence to collect feedback.
Another great option is location-based data offered by our mobile analytics market research company.
This report pulls secondary research and data based on your location(s) of interest.
It can draw complete demographic profiles of visitors to:
- The geofenced site
- Drive time
- Their place of residence
- Other locations visited during their shopping trip
- Other insightful personas
This is all leveraged through third-party data by using their mobile ID. It does not allow you to ask your audience custom survey questions but provides a wealth of other data.
Focus groups at facilities ➡️ virtual/online focus groups
Over the past 2 years, our market research firm has completed our focus group and in-depth interviewing projects virtually.
We use a variety of platforms to help us do this, but even some simple sites like Zoom do an excellent job for online focus groups.
Virtual focus groups do run differently than in-person sessions.
With in-person sessions, you could get away with a group size of 10-12 people in a room and still navigate the conversation over 1-2 hours.
However, as a good virtual focus group best practice, we recommend limiting the group size to 4-6 maximum.
Since the discussion does not flow as well as an in-person group and is more compartmentalized from person to person, it takes additional time to wrangle the participants and create a good conversation.
Additionally, it’s easier to be distracted at home vs. sitting in front of a group of people and a moderator.
Hence, there are extra precautions to take with ground rules, and we have even had some sessions where we required participants to join via laptop in a private/quiet setting, vs. joining via mobile on their couch.
Advantages of remote focus groups
Zoom sessions allow you to record, and the auto-transcripts created by the platform are reasonably accurate, creating further cost savings and providing a good document for reporting purposes.
Clients can still join and observe the groups, and we often ask them to hide their video feed, and we can change the setting in Zoom not to show non-video participants entirely.
So the clients can observe without anyone knowing or seeing them there. The clients can chat privately with their group or send a direct private message to the moderator.
Overall, the benefits of online focus groups far outweigh any drawbacks of missing out on non-verbal communication, in-person rapport, and other dynamics.
Recommended Reading: Conducting Online Focus Groups [Ultimate Guide]
In-depth interviews ➡️ online bulletin boards
In most situations, our market research team favors in-depth interviews (IDIs) over focus groups regarding qualitative research.
The advantages of IDI over focus groups include:
- More time per participant to chat
- Eliminate any group bias
- Create much more flexibility to schedule time with interviewees vs. trying to get many people to attend at once
However, online bulletin boards take those benefits to a whole new level.
When you think about online bulletin boards, think of them as a forum managed by a moderator who asks questions, controls the conversation, and addresses core objectives for the market research.
Some also call these online focus groups, but I view an actual focus group as more of a video session we described above.
The board piece is the critical differentiator in that everything is written, and conversations are had through text.
Many platforms allow respondents to upload audio or video clips, and it may make sense to require that for specific parts of the objectives. Or even upload pictures that support the project goals.
The transition from IDIs to online bulletin boards is especially true for hard-to-reach B2B audiences.
Take IT decision-makers for an example.
- Are you trying to nail down an ITDM for a 2-hour focus group at a specific time? That’s tough.
- Are you trying to nail down an ITDM for a 1-hour block of time for an IDI? Easier but still challenging.
The true benefit of online bulletin boards is that they allow a participant, or in this case, an ITDM, to pop in and out throughout the day when they have time.
Typically the moderator will post a few daily questions and ask the participants to join for a specific amount of time each day (e.g., 15-30 minutes).
The participants must answer the moderator questions, review others’ answers, and comment on those.
While this is happening, the client can observe these conversations on the platform and private message the moderator to follow up on specific comments. This is also a benefit for the client or brand sponsoring the research because they can often join when they have time to review.
Shop-alongs ➡️ mobile ethnography
Shop-alongs were a unique and popular form of qualitative market research, particularly for retail locations.
Years ago, I moderated dozens of shop-alongs at a local grocery store with shoppers as they navigated the aisles.
It was part of a larger project that also included eye-tracking research where shoppers wore backpacks around the store, and their eye movement to shelves, products, etc., were recorded using goggles.
It was a fun project that also included intercept surveys in-store where interviewers stopped shoppers at specific endcaps and asked them 5-questions.
Shopalongs are an insightful methodology but let’s face it. They are strange.
The researcher follows the shopper around the store and tries to be as non-disruptive as possible. They have a series of questions they ask the shopper about purchases, engaging with shelves, etc., as the trip continues.
With social distancing in place and the creep factor of shop-alongs, these can often be a tricky approach, especially during the pandemic.
Mobile ethnography and mobile missions are excellent substitutes for shop-alongs.
With mobile ethnography, respondents are still required to go to the store and complete tasks.
However, rather than someone shadowing them during the visit, they are asked to answer questions with written text, take photos, and record videos.
The video portion of the mobile ethnography and mobile missions is often where the golden nuggets of insights reside. As a researcher, it feels like you are with the shopper without being there.
From an efficiency standpoint, you can complete hundreds of these mobile missions in a short amount of time. If those sessions were required to be in-person shop-alongs, you would be talking about weeks or months of data collection and travel expenses.
The Case for In-Person Market Research
Although I’ve spent most of this article talking about the reasons for the transition from in-person to remote methodologies, some examples of replacements and other benefits of virtual - in-person research isn't dead.
There will always be brands and organizations that want to do in-person research for various reasons.
They might feel like they can dive into the participant and generate deeper insights live in person than they ever could behind a screen.
Others will argue that building rapport in person and understanding non-verbal cues are essential to good qualitative market research.
Although it may not be stated as the main driver, some agencies and brands just like to travel and the perks that come along with corporate travel (nice dinners, top-notch accommodations, etc. - all on the company dime).
I understand those perspectives and appreciate them.
But, my argument is the benefits of virtual market research still outweigh some of those advantages that can only be acquired through in-person sessions.
When it comes down to less travel, participant convenience, researcher convenience, sponsor convenience, ease of recruiting participants, cost savings, etc., it’s hard for me to think the industry will return to where we were in 2019, 2015, or 2010.
I remember the days of traveling the country for interviews and focus groups, where my weeks were consumed with flights to Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, and other cities.
Thinking back to those projects and the insights generated compared to a series of IDIs conducted over Zoom, there is not much difference.
In both scenarios, we can apply a skilled and experienced moderator to develop a guide, recruit high-quality participants, and write an impactful report that answers all of the research objectives in the kickoff.
Final Thoughts
The path from objectives to insights is forged by the quality of the research team you hire to conduct your study, not the vehicle or platform used to generate feedback.
Both can exist separately, but for the reasons I stated above, in-person market research is evolving and reshaping for the digital world.
And as a nearly 20-year veteran in market research and having a team that appreciates the benefits of virtual market research and a work-life balance, I am 100% okay with its passing.
Contact Our Market Research Company
Interested in discussing a new market research project with our team? We are a full-service market research firm working with national and global brands on qualitative and quantitative studies.
Our market research firm offers a unique and fresh approach to market research. Feel free to shoot us a question.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
George Kuhn
George is the Owner & President of Drive Research. He has consulted for hundreds of regional, national, and global organizations over the past 15 years. He is a CX-certified VoC professional with a focus on innovation and new product management.
Learn more about George, here.
