The Trojan Horse of Insights: Market Research Online Communities

"I love how actionable this feels. There are real things we can do with this." That’s a quote from a recent client on an engagement that included a Market Research Online Community (MROC). That is tremendously gratifying to hear based on my early experiences with MROCs.

MROCs have been around for 25 years now. Credit where credit is due - Communispace (now C-Space) was the pioneer. The founder of Communispace, the brilliant Diane Hessan, gave a wonderful account of the spark that led to the creation of MROCs on my Rock n’ Roll Research Podcast which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIwqLhbA2bE

It was an insights revolution of sorts and many research agencies were fast followers. They held the promise of providing both qualitative insight and quantitative rigor among consumers invested in the category of interest.

My own early forays into communities weren’t as successful as I’d hoped. My team, my clients and I underestimated the effort it would take to keep respondents engaged. We weren’t getting the depth of insights we had hoped. We should have been much more specific about what we hoped to achieve. The results were more anecdotal than insightful or conclusive.

In retrospect, in addition to some tactical issues, we were looking at the community as a closed, discrete system, solely responsible for the desired insights and outcomes. What we learned from the community was all the data we had. They didn’t quite deliver and I became jaded about what communities could accomplish.

Two recent client engagements here at MarketVision have changed my perspective entirely. I have worked on two highly strategic engagements with clients looking to lead a change in the dynamics of the categories in which they operate.

In each case, we led with an online community of 100-200 category enthusiasts to gain some initial impressions about category beliefs, behaviors and impressions. The community was a starting point that would generate or advance initial hypotheses.

By analyzing the responses of community members, we identified people who had experiences and perspectives we wanted to learn more about. We recruited subsets of members to follow-up focus groups to gain much deeper insight. We then used those groups to actually recruit people for in-home ethnographies that illuminated the kinds of insights that solidified strategies and generated/refined concepts that could be further tested quantitatively.

This process was far better than simply recruiting for focus groups or in-home ethnographies from scratch. We had learned so much about them from the community that we knew they were exactly who we wanted to learn from. This is on top of the rich insights we learned from the original community and the informed direction we gained for follow-up quantitative research.

Success with communities requires a few key ingredients:

1) Clear objectives on what you want to accomplish in the total engagement and specifically with the community.

2) An experienced team to develop and execute activities that engage the community and are attuned to the goal.

3) Strong engagement leadership and seamless partnership between teams responsible for communities, qualitative and quantitative to ensure insights carry through, nothing is lost in translation and the final analysis is synthesized across all the learnings.

I have also really come to learn that designing and managing MROCs is a discipline all its own. Led by someone with deep client-side experience, MarketVision has built a practice with the end in mind, supported by a an excellent team and considerable rigor around hiring, training, growing and empowering the team to deliver outstanding work.

I started out a skeptic but have become a believer that, done right, communities play an essential role in developing the insights that category strategy and new product development require. So go ahead and roll in the Trojan Horse of community members. You will find the right people who give you the insight to confidently drive your business.