Qualitative research is associated with discovery and an aspiration to better understand how people behave, think and feel. W5 designs qualitative approaches that leverage observation and conversation to uncover the key motivations and desires underlying human behavior.
Brand positioning is a strategy to identify competitive advantages and help your brand…
The concept development and evaluation process begins with an idea and ends in…
Consumer journey maps are tools for visualizing how people interact with…
Ethnography is a qualitative research approach that develops a real-world…
Executive interviews are in-depth, one-on-one interviews with professionals…
Focus groups, a moderated discussion held with pre-recruited participants…
In-depth interviewing (IDI) is an intimate conversation between a moderator and…
Before your brand messaging meets the market, qualitative research can…
Mobile ethnography is one of the most flexible research tools available…
Online Discussions are comprised of relatively new qualitative research tools…
Shopper Insights reveals how consumers interact with products and brands…
Consumer journey maps are tools for visualizing how people interact with your company or brand, most often in the case of a retail or online shopping experience. These maps incorporate each interaction into a diagram that shows the key behaviors, thought processes, and barriers that lie between an initial trigger and the final purchase decision.
Qualitative research is instrumental in capturing the defining moments of the process. W5 often designs research to be immersive, incorporating in-person or mobile ethnographic approaches to shadow the consumer during each step in the process.
The learning that comes from better understanding the experience as a whole can help you identify specific pain points and barriers and create a strategy to connect with the customer at the most opportunistic touchpoints.
Consumer journey maps can help your brand or company:
The concept development and evaluation process begins with an idea and ends in your customer’s hands as a product or service. It’s the role of qualitative research to ensure the final result meets their expectations and needs.
Initial exploratory research helps create empathy and understanding of the customer’s specific needs and inspires concept development. From there, the customer can become part of your development team, providing qualitative feedback with each iteration.
By embracing qualitative research, you are embracing a customer-centric design process that will make for more successful product launches.
W5’s concept development and evaluation research can help you:
Brand positioning is a strategy to identify competitive advantages and help your brand connect with the right people, in the right way, at the right time. It assumes your brand and its competitors occupy the same “space” and are positioned within based on subtle differences in audiences’ rational and emotional relationships with them.
Qualitative research, being exploratory, iterative, and interpretive, is ideally suited for understanding these nuances. W5 can help your uncover both rational reasons for brand preferences as well as hard-to-define emotional factors.
With knowledge of your current position and what’s important to your audience, you can clarify your brand’s meaning and adopt positioning strategies that offer long-term strategic value.
W5 can help your brand:
Ethnography is a qualitative research approach that develops a real-world understanding of how lifestyle, culture, behavior, subconscious motivations, and social context influence product selection and brand interaction.
Ethnography is immersive, putting researchers in the consumer’s world to observe how they behave and interact with their environment and how they feel about the experience. W5 ethnographers can expertly evaluate consumer behavior in detail, identifying meaningful patterns and themes emerging from their explicit and implicit attitudes and needs.
Ethnographic research can take place anywhere (home, store, restaurant, etc.) and employ a mix of virtual and in-person approaches to uncover insights.
Ethnography can help you:
Executive interviews are in-depth, one-on-one interviews with professionals, often in specialized industries or roles. Unlike consumer interviews, they require qualitative researchers attuned to industry language and practices who can approach the conversation with an understanding of their specialization and tying their perspectives back to the research goals.
W5 approaches executive or professional interviews with the goal of staying flexible in both timing and means of communication, conducted via telephone, webcam, or in-person to accommodate the participant’s often busy schedule.
Executive interviewing can help your brand or company:
Focus groups, a moderated discussion held with pre-recruited participants, are the most widely used and familiar qualitative research tool. They are an especially powerful approach for conducting exploratory research, messaging evaluations, product development, or brand positioning and strategy research.
Their familiarity does not mean they have to be a tired approach. W5 incorporates creative exercises and activities into the discussion to challenge participants to think critically and creatively about the research questions. There are even new technologies that allow Focus groups to take place online via webcams and feature a host of multimedia tools that allow for creative exercises.
The result is more engaged research participants and more useful insights for you.
Focus groups can help you:
In-depth interviewing (IDI) is an intimate conversation between a moderator and an individual or small group of participants. It is a preferred approach when your research topics are sensitive or when more detailed feedback is needed.
Semi-structured, the approach allows conversations to flow naturally, with the spirit of the conversation guiding the questioning and its order. W5 views IDIs as offering several methodological advantages including building a strong rapport and leading to more detailed answers and evocative feedback. The approach is often direct and focused, with minimal distractions, allowing for more genuine, heartfelt responses.
In-depth interviews can help your brand or company:
Before your brand messaging meets the market, qualitative research can provide valuable feedback to ensure it will be relevant to your target audience. Messaging development research can be conducted throughout the process to develop initial ideas, test individual ideas/campaign concepts, or evaluate campaign material or concepts for consistency.
W5 uses both online and in-person approaches to evaluate messaging. In-person approaches benefit from a flexible forum for developing ideas or exploring initial reactions, while online approaches can incorporate evaluation tools such as heat mapping that help identify positive and negative associations with specific elements.
Messaging development research can help your brand or company:
Mobile ethnography is one of the most flexible research tools available, allowing W5 to connect with a wide array of participants spread across time and geography via a smartphone app or mobile platform.
Mobile ethnography allows researchers to virtually accompany consumers in their natural environment. Throughout the process, W5 integrates mobile-enabled activities into the research to increase consumer engagement and insight generation. This may include exploring product usage, daily rituals, shopping experiences, etc. by capturing media and providing feedback in real-time.
Mobile ethnography is an efficient and minimally invasive way for consumers to share their thoughts and experiences. Its output is a multi-sensory landscape of a consumer’s world and can help clients:
Online Discussions are comprised of relatively new qualitative research tools that can provide broader access to participants (over both time and geographic boundaries) without limiting the quality or type of feedback.
These conversations can take place in Bulletin Boards, Online Journals/Diaries, or webcam-enabled IDIs or Focus Groups. The online platform incorporates rich response and reaction tools that allow participants to communicate with you via text, simple surveys, images, or video. This enables an activity-based approach to asking research questions where participants can not only tell you, but show you how they behave and think.
You, as a client, can also be more involved in the research. You can observe responses in real-time, suggest follow-up questions as they happen, contribute to an ongoing discussion among observers, and tag responses to highlight in reporting.
Online bulletin boards can help your brand or company:
Shopper Insights reveals how consumers interact with products and brands within retail environments, both online and in-store. It focuses on every aspect of the shopping experience from store selection to decision making. W5 views Shopper Insights as a nuanced and complex study of the retail environment, in-store behaviors, in-aisle decisions, and messaging.
Understanding shopper needs and motivations can transform the way you approach products, packaging, displays, promotions, experiences, and interpersonal interactions for both brick-and-mortar and online and mobile shopping. W5 leverages a mix of ethnographic techniques to capture Shopper Insights throughout the consumer journey.
Exploring Shopper Insights can help companies:
