InSites Blog

Web 2.0 platforms, social networks, online communities and mobile research are rapidly entering the marketing research landscape. In response to this media evolution ESOMAR has expanded their former Panel Research Conference to tackle these new technologies and the social environments they create, introducing the ESOMAR Online Research Conference.

Yesterday Annelies Verhaeghe, ESOMAR Young Researcher of the Year co-presented our paper on ‘Getting answers without asking questions’ with Dutch broadcaster RTL. A case on the evaluation of a TV programme based on social media. The paper will be online soon!

For more information, contact Annelies Verhaeghe.

We invited members of our online research community, who use Twitter, to take part in this Twitter study and promote it to their followers and friends, on Twitter as well as on other social media. In total 620 tweeters from all over the world took part in the study. And it were the ‘real’ users of the platform as they do 17 tweets a day and are on Twitter for 14 months (on average).

The fully ‘fused’ research study, of which results could be followed in real-time on www.ultimatetwitterstudy.com, consisted out of three main parts that cover the full range of opportunities to conduct market research on Twitter:

1/ Discussions with users of the social media platform via their answers on the tweet/question of the day (during 2 weeks) and 10 in-depth ‘twinterviews’ (consisting of 15 tweets/questions) via the direct messaging system of the platform.

2/ A quantitative profiling survey among the followers of the account we made for the study and their friends.

3/ An observation of what our followers share on Twitter in order to enrich our findings. The Twitter API was used to download the tweets from the site; text mining software for conducting the analysis. In total, more than 52.000 tweets were gathered! As a last step, we discussed the results of the study with some experts via an online discussion group.

Some of the key findings of the study:

• The typical Twitter user seems to be a male in his late twenties/early thirties, who is quit tech savvy and active in IT, media/advertising or the consulting business
• The user generated definition of Twitter sounds as follows: “A social network of friends and/or business contacts where you can share and discover interesting, exciting, inspiring or funny news/links in a very fast way”
• It’s perceived that the people on Twitter are also influential in the offline world in one way or another (industry experts, journalist, bloggers, celebs, …)
• Most people started using Twitter out of curiosity and to stay connected with the people and trends within their industry
• People start following people who are able to make them: curious, smile and/or wonder
• Brands on Twitter should act like humans: listen carefully and talk back in a very personal way! This instead of spamming their followers with advertisement…
• Twitter is the new sharing platform: 20% of the tweets contain a link to a blog, site or movie
• Google, Apple and Amazon are the most discussed brands on Twitter. Followed by a mix of tech companies and strong international brands like Starbucks, Disney and HP
• People really address questions to brands, hoping that they are listening and will answer!

Tom De Ruyck: ‘Twitter is a conversation hive, and it could be very insightful for brands to tap into it and learn from what consumers are saying about them. Secondly, people tweet in the heat of the moment: when they experience something positive or negative with your product. This is never seen before! It’s a threat (negatives comments about your brand are in the open), but also an opportunity for your client services team to take immediate action and make customers happy again. And probably they will spread the word about that too!’

Profile your own Twitter network, take a look at the presentation and the ‘Ultimate Tweet Hall of Fame’ @ www.ultimatetwitterstudy.com!

The presentation with the full results from the study was given at ‘MRS’ Online Research Conference’ in London and ‘Digital Marketing First’ in Brussels. Next opportunity to catch-up with Tom and the results of the study is at the next ‘InSites Smartees’ on the 19th of November in Ghent (subscribe via www.insites.eu/smartees). The presentation will include concrete tips to use Twitter both as a marketing and a research tool within your company!

For more information contact Tom De Ruyck via tom@insites.eu.

Christophe Vergult is Managing Partner and Director Customer Experience at InSites Consulting.

What’s a new ‘buzz’ word in your domain? What does it mean and what do we do with it?

‘Referral value’, as many customers share their experiences with a company with others. And that matters. Positive recommendations generate new customers (referrals) and bring value to the company. Many companies still have a single focus on the traditional, individual ‘value chain’ of customer experience, or how they can decrease churn and cross-sell and up-sell among existing clients. Nevertheless for many companies the true value of investing in compelling customer experiences lies in the potential referral value.

As such, marketers need to understand how client conversations contribute to the value of their company. What is the current referral value of the customer base? Which customer touch points matter? What drives positive conversations for each touch point?

What are you most proud of?

Ask me the same question in a year, and I hope I can say we have successfully established our office in the UK. First steps have already been taken, but within a year we want to have moved forward substantially: having built a solid team of experienced and enthusiastic people based in London, being recognized in the UK market for our innovative research beliefs and techniques, and being trusted by major brands as their market research partner on an international level.

What has caught you lately?

Recently we set up a ‘360° video ethnography’ test together with a retailer. With this joint R&D study we aimed to develop a consumer driven alternative for traditional mystery shopping. Consumers were asked to record their store visit with a ‘spy cam’, and tag and comment different scenes afterwards. A large group of consumers were exposed to a selection of those scenes and invited to tag and comment them as well. The data have been analyzed both via text analytics and traditional observational analysis techniques. The results proved to be very insightful and lead to a very actionable level of recommendations.

What did your morning look like today?

To start with I had 1 extra hour of sleep due to the shift to winter hour I primarily introduced new members of the customer experience team at InSites to our beliefs and research offering in this domain. In between regular trips to our London office and client visits in Belgium and the Netherlands it was a relief to be present in our Ghent office for a quite relaxing morning with internal meetings.

Let’s end with a ‘quote of the day’!

I can never remember quotes with more than 2 words… ‘No fear!’, lately often heard in the InSites’ office when we are talking about our plans

Last week Filip De Boeck, Director Innovation Research at InSites Consulting was interviewed by Design At Work on innovation in marketing/market research.

Design At Work (9 & 10 December) is a trade show visualizing innovation, design and product development of materials, products or services.

Check out the full interview online!

An InSites Consulting survey for Getronics shows that one third of Dutch employees are not satisfied with the computer and IT facilities at work. In the Netherlands the speed of home computers and broadband Internet increases rapidly. Consequently people are more critical of computers and other IT facilities.

One of the obstacles in ICT facilities is the system speed. A third of the respondents are dissatisfied with the slowness. 47 % of the respondents also experience their insufficient ICT knowledge as a problem.

The importance of ICT for work and the professional performance is endorsed by almost everyone. Over two thirds is of the opinion that ICT helps them to work more effectively, 61 % thinks that ICT contributes to the employee satisfaction, and 47 % declares that the ICT facilities stimulate their motivation.

Half of the employees indicate being able to work from home. In general they think that companies should do more to encourage telework. Two thirds does worry about the company data safety during telework and agrees this could represent a serious obstacle.

For more information, contact Ramon.pardo@insites.eu

More than 2,000 marketing professionals attended the 4th edition of the Digital Marketing First exhibition in Tour & Taxis. On the agenda of this edition: 75 exhibitors, more than 50 workshops and 8 keynote speakers.

As InSites Consulting, we were invited to present the results of the Ultimate Twitter Study, a recent study on why and how people are using Twitter. People’s motivations for using the Twitter service are very relevant for marketers who want to get acquainted with the ins and outs of Twitter, so we were delighted to provide them with our insights!

Our presentation was scheduled at 5 pm, but we arrived early to follow some of the interesting sessions we pinpointed on the program of the day. We were really looking forward to the presentation of Jo Caudron (ex ONE Agency – founder of Dear Media) on social seeding. Although we did not fully know what exactly to expect, it grabbed our attention so we gave it a try!

Round 3 pm we found a seat to follow the ‘Social seeding’- presentation. As many others were joining us as well, the room was boiling hot in no time. But it was worth the effort since Jo brought a very inspiring story with concrete guidelines for effective usage of social media, calling it a: a unique model to create new ways of relevant communication between your brands and your audience.

Two interesting learnings:

• Think about your real influencers: possibly famous bloggers and/or social media guru’s aren’t relevant for your business. Your employees are your real influencers!

• Do not overdo: don’t kill the power of your network by over posting !

After a short stop at the keynote session of Emakina on brand experiences, by Brice Leblévennec, we moved on to room 4 in order to get things done for our own presentation ‘To tweet or not to tweet’.

At 5pm sharp Tom started his speech on the Twittersphere and along the way more and more people hopped in to dive into the results of our study!

And it seemed that the audience liked it, according to the tweets we’ve picked up during and after the presentation:

We are glad to notice that our study resulted in useful take-aways for the attending marketers. We left the Digital Marketing First event shortly after our presentation with a satisfied feeling.

Download the full results of the qualitative phase here.

It seems that we missed the female stripper in the end, who was hired to promote an online reputation firm. But well, the room was hot enough already!

We’re already looking forward to DMF’10. Hope to meet you there as well!

On Thursday 8 October, Saartje Van den Branden and I represented our Health research team at the second Health Care Marketing Congress of Stichting Marketing “HEALTH… yes we CARE!”.

The House of Marketing kicked off with a very interesting survey among health care marketers. The findings of this survey were the building blocks of the other presenters. Interesting to see for us was that:

• It was confirmed that health marketers feel that we are more and more moving towards stakeholder organizations instead of physician centric organizations. From our European patient survey 2009, we already knew that the power of the patient is increasing. Now we learned that also the power of hospitals and pharmacists is growing at cost of the influence of the GP.

• Also, a need for an efficient segmentation of the market is deemed among the top marketing challenges. Marketers should choose the right target groups even more. Indeed, our 2009 survey revealed there are different groups of patients which require a completely different approach. Some of them are very open towards medical communication, whereas others are not. One group we identified, the health experts (26% of Belgians and 29% of Europeans), have a healthy lifestyle and are very involved in collecting health information. These people are more than others looking for info on diseases and medication and require special attention.

• The budget of health marketers is decreasing and the health marketer trust index is on a very low level. This results in an increase of direct marketing, online marketing, lobbying, price promotions and patient support groups. This is mainly at cost of sales visits. Again, efforts are expected to be more and more in favor of patients. The reach of the Internet as an information channel is very high and satisfaction about the information found online is almost as high as information provided by pharmacists. Health marketers should therefore really consider this medium and they should know what information patients and care givers are looking and what they are telling about their brands online.

• Leveraging valuable customer data is still a challenge. So we, market research agencies, have also challenges to overcome!

Interested in more information about our Health Research team? Click here

Are you looking to understand the latest techniques in marketing research that will put you ahead of the game? Sign up for our FREE Consumer Insights Smartees on Thursday 22 October (2pm – 6pm) and hear how marketers are using new research techniques to gain new consumer insight.

Nanno Palte, Director Marketing Insights will co-present the Danone WaterWorld Community case with Michel Rogeaux, Senior Expert Consumer Science Danone. The case shows that fusion research is a successful and innovative recipe for gathering in-depth insights.

Want to find out more, check www.insites.eu/smartees

The ‘Relationship Monitor’ is a pan-European research realized by InSites Consulting in collaboration with Peppers & Rogers Group. The survey’s objective was to discover the main factors for strong customer relations. In the telecommunication sector specifically, consumers attach the most importance to their telecom supplier’s services offer, the telecom service’s quality and the communication they receive. The comparison between the countries shows that consumers in different countries often have different expectations where the level of customer service is concerned.

Check out the full article here

A few months ago Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner InSites Consulting received the nomination ‘Best Conference Presentation‘ for his Pecha Kucha session at Research 2009. We are delighted to inform you that our paper Join the research: participant-led-open-ended questions has now been selected by the IJMR (International Journal of Market Research) Executive Editorial Board as one of this year’s finalists for the IJMR Collaborative Research Award. Congratulations to the entire team involved in the development of this project!

The winners will be announced on Monday 14 December 2009 at the MRS Research Awards in London.