Online research: is the future brighter and better?

The Online Methods Research Conference held last week (#mrxonmeth), promised to be both engaging and educational, and lived up to the bill.

Ray Poynter, Executive Vice President at Vision Critical and the conference chair, opened proceedings by encouraging delegates to reflect on both the title of the conference (is online research even a topic in its own right?) and whether online is allowing the research industry do anything new or better.

One definite conclusion was that online is allowing us to do new things.  For example, we’re now able to find insights from consumers without necessarily asking them questions.  Paul Child, of agency Join the Dots, argued that with online communities, insights sometimes just emerge in-between the asking bits. Community members voluntarily and frequently upload thoughts and content of their own which allows the researcher to “get off the hamster wheel of asking the same questions again and again”.

Fishing for the best insights

Tom Woodnut, a Conversation Strategist, echoed this sentiment, making the point that social media research is naturalistic and not coerced.  The problem with traditional survey research, Tom argued, is that the questions asked are the ones the client wants the answers to.  The conversations that people have online, however, are entirely on their own terms.

Tom urged researchers to think of themselves as fishermen and women wading around in a sea of conversations looking to serve them up with the finesse of a chef, e.g. in enlightening and interesting ways.  According to Tom, traditional online survey research can still satisfy but social media research is more fulfilling and insightful.

Measuring emotional brand associations

T-mobile and Decode have developed a powerful online survey technique to discover people’s intuitive brand associations. Drawing on principles from behavioural economics and neuroscience, their simple and effective online survey technique measures consumers’ speed of responses when associating a brand logo with a set of brand personality attributes.  The implicit brand associations (those that are more speedy and automatic) are then correlated with a dependent variable such as satisfaction, to help determine the brand proposition.  T-mobile showed how they used this technique to transform their advertising strategy with huge commercial success.

Seven Seas and Brass Agency

Along with Tony Parkin of Seven Seas, we showcased the Joint Age Calculator, our innovative online survey used to engage Seven Seas’ target audience in conversations about joint care (typically a low engagement category).  Although starting life as a marketing project, the design of the survey gave lessons applicable across all forms of survey research, such as providing respondents with personal insight, making them more than just a passive responder to questions, and allowing them to socialise their survey answers via Facebook and other platforms.

Is online research always better?

Both the Seven Seas and the T-Mobile case studies pointed to the fact that online research can offer something both new and better.  This wasn’t necessarily the experience presented by BDRC and Ofcom however, who discussed the attempt to transfer the Ofcom media tracker from a face to face methodology to an online one.  The differences in response were ultimately too different to warrant the change of methodology.  With cost effectiveness a pressing issue for all public sector organisations, the investigation was rigorous and worthwhile but just goes to show that face to face is still an important method too.

The survey environment has become portable

Alex Johnson from Kantar Operations discussed the importance of researchers considering the devices which consumers are using to take surveys.  Consumers are increasingly taking web surveys on portable devices such as smartphones and not always getting the intended experience as a result.

Another side effect of increasing portable device ownership (iPads, tablets, e-readers, smartphones etc.) is the growth in consumers taking surveys on the move.  These ‘environmental’ impacts are something we need to be mindful of when designing our surveys.  As device ownership grows and fragments, the researcher’s ability to control the survey-taking environment diminishes.  Although there are some solutions to this (writing shorter surveys is one), there’s work to be done.

So, have online methods changed research?

It’s safe to say that online research is a thriving space that offers agencies and clients alike the chance to do different and, in some cases, better types of research.  However, online research will always be yet another aspect of the researcher’s toolkit and cannot be a panacea methodology on its own.  Ultimately, we must always use our professional judgement to choose the appropriate solutions for answering our clients’ objectives.