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…
Segmentation, the identification of different consumer groups in the market, is a powerful tool for designing products and services that meet consumers’ needs and is ideal for identifying target audience characteristics beyond basic demographics and category behaviors.
W5 views segmentation as the study of consumers’ responses to specific attitudinal, behavioral, psychographic, and category- and brand-related questions. During analysis, consumers with similar attitudes and thought processes are bundled together to create an audience segment.
Segmentation is beneficial to company’s seeking a reliable understanding of their consumers based on stable, real-world criteria. W5 leverages a mix of applied approaches to ensure resulting segments are actionable and capable of informing product and service refinement, brand positioning, and communications strategies related to specific consumer groups.
W5’s approach to custom, strategic segmentation research will:
Strategic tracking research monitors a brand’s perceptions and marketing communications over time through industry-specific metrics. Through a periodic or continuously-fielded quantitative survey, consumer insights are measured and compared to one another to track changes and guide decisions based on past activity and predictions for future activity. Strategic tracking supports decision making by examining market changes from one measured period to another.
W5’s approach to strategic tracking goes beyond measuring brand and advertising awareness to explore an evolving marketplace, bringing depth and context to consumer behavior and attitudes. By conducting strategic tracking research you can understand the relative health of your brand and scratch below the surface to determine its perception and fit in the marketplace.
With this in-depth “state-of-the-brand” understanding, W5 can help you:
The message testing process begins with creative stimuli and copy and ends with a refined message to share with consumers. Quantitative research plays an important role to ensure message effectiveness by eliciting consumer feedback on appeal, relevance, and call-to-action.
The W5 approach to message testing provides multiple viewpoints on stimuli through a proto-monadic survey design where copy variations are assessed independently and randomly before comparative questions are asked. The result is dual perspectives on clarity, appeal, relevance, and call-to-action of each stimulus providing context and support for winning concepts.
The goal of message and copy testing is to illuminate the best path forward for marketing and advertising. Armed with this insight, you and your company are better positioned to:
Product and Positioning Concept Testing provides insight on how a product, service, or branding can cut through competitor offerings to best fit consumers’ needs and desires. Thorough and strategic testing of proposed concepts will ensure their success in the marketplace, identifying consumers’ rationale for specific likes and dislikes.
There are many ways to accomplish a concept test – monadic testing, paired comparison, proto-monadic evaluation, concept screening, etc. – however, not all techniques are applicable in every situation. W5 builds a custom approach based on the number of concepts, depth of presentation, selected audiences, and needs for comparative insight.
A custom, strategically designed research study will reveal resonant winners and relative losers among a set of concepts. Product and Positioning Concept Testing can help you:
Conjoint analysis explores the value consumers place on your products or services and their specific features. Through a series of conjoint (two or more parallel) questions in an online survey, consumers evaluate different sets of attributes (and the various attribute options, or levels) and make “trade-offs” between services or features.
Response across the scenarios generates a robust data set that is processed using sophisticated modeling techniques. From there, W5 can gauge your consumers’ priorities, identify optimal bundles with market relevance, and explore demand and price sensitivity related to variations in marketplace offerings.
Conjoint/trade-off analysis can help you:
Audience Identification and Profiling research paints a detailed picture of a core market – their demographics, basic category behaviors and attitudes, the psychographics underlying those behaviors and attitudes, and their opinions of the competing marketplace. This method is a critical step when introducing a new brand or product to market and can be a cost-efficient alternative to a segmentation.
Beyond basic statistical profiling, W5 explores the relationship of consumer lifestyles, life stages, beliefs, and habits to enrich consumer understanding and define their potential engagement with the brand and/or product. Audience Identification is best used to identify a target audience for a product, service, or message. This strategic market insight will help your company:
Attitude and Usage (A&U or AAU) research answers essential questions of “what?, “where?”, “why?,” and “how?” regarding consumers’ product and services decision making both within and across market categories.
A&U studies provide a robust and reliable snapshot of consumer sentiment and behaviors at a moment in time, but can also be conducted to inform future strategy. They are a valuable tool for exploring market hypotheses, exploring brand and product appeal and opportunity, and identifying the impact of recent or forthcoming marketplace changes.
With a comprehensive knowledge of what consumers do, think, and value – and understanding why – W5 can provide insights to address consumer needs and desires, enhancing your market position.
Attitude and Usage research can help your brand or company:
Concept Development begins with an idea and ends in your consumers’ hands as a product or service. Concept development research ensures the final result meets their expectations and needs.
Initial exploratory research helps create empathy and understanding of consumers’ specific needs. 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 competitors occupy the same “space” based on subtle differences in audiences’ rational and emotional preferences. Exploratory, iterative, and interpretive, qualitative research is ideally suited for understanding these nuances. W5 can help you 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:
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:
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:
