Collaborative Innovation: Using Interactive Custom Panels to Drive your Next Breakthrough

Your market challenges are intense. Consumers constantly rethink and adjust their behaviors, attitudes, and spending habits. Competitors keep pushing for your share of the market. And then along comes a downturn in the economy. To ensure your business and brands succeed and that your products and services keep inline and ahead of the market, you need innovation on your side.

Innovation can help you stand out in the market and attract consumers. The question is where do you get those great ideas that will drive your next breakthrough? What ideas will be most appealing in the face of all this change? The answers just might be with your consumers.

Include Your Customer

Consumers play an important role in the innovation process; they ultimately determine the success of your innovation. Their input into the process can help uncover ideas and solutions that could lead to your next winner.

Engaging in discussion with the consumer offers different points of view of how your product or service is or can be used. The discussion can uncover ideas for improving your offering or a better way to position or market your brand. It can also identify gaps, allowing you to develop the next big breakthrough.

The Social Media Edge

The advent of online social networking has been a cultural turning point. MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter are not only affording new opportunity for personal connections to grow online, but also new platforms for consumers to discuss and share thoughts on products, services, and brands.

While for many marketers this is still mostly uncharted territory, there is plenty of opportunity to connect and engage with consumers through social media. Corporate use of social media sites is growing exponentially and companies see this as a more casual way to interact and communicate with customers. So can social media also be used as a research tool? Likely so, but is it the most efficient and appropriate tool? In addition, the resources required to operate a successful research community extend far beyond the technology to include community management functions for both research and marketing staff.

Innovative market research solutions are combining traditional research methodologies and professional expertise with social media concepts and new technology to involve customers in an engaging way. The benefit is a fast track to actionable insights, since everything - from recruitment to feedback gathering and reporting - happens online in real time.

Moreover, dedicated market research solutions and software have the benefit of a confidential and secure environment for new ideas to sprout. They offer the best tools for data collection and analysis while also engaging respondents in a more socially engaging experience. The software lets respondents express their thoughts, feelings and motivations, giving you the full picture of how respondents feel about your idea.

The Custom Online Community Advantage

While there are many social media alternatives for including the voice of your consumer in the innovation process, a customized online research community is one method that offers many advantages.

One of the most important considerations is that all the respondents are pre-qualified to participate in the community. That means that you are in dialogue with and testing ideas with those already engaged with your brand. You also have full control over the process--the community is proprietary and the terms and conditions surrounding content are designed to suit your research needs. Other advantages include:

• the process of building and maintaining the community is structured, professionally managed and monitored to high standards
• higher degree of confidentiality and privacy control over both ideas and participants
• much richer and robust demographic and behavioral data than what is available in a social network
• balanced and flexible approach to both qualitative and quantitative needs
• ability to track response to ideas or input over time, allowing you to identify a greater trend over an extended period, not just at one point in time

Above all, you can be assured that the feedback you are receiving includes high data quality that can easily be analyzed to reveal key insights, regardless of the research methodology.

But do respondents want to be part of the process? The answer is "yes". Research has shown that an overwhelming majority find the tools easy to use and understand and find the experience more enjoyable than other market research methodologies they've participated in. An engaged respondent means a higher quality of data.

Technically Speaking

Your ability to take away insights is also greatly improved with tools specifically designed for content analysis. For example:

• heat maps allow you to visualize respondent behavior in response to stimuli and understand their likes/dislikes in direct context of your concepts
• treemaps, video timeline analysis, and word analysis tools reveal popular and unpopular ideas and can be combined with demographic and segment data to analyze qualitative research
• video timeline analysis lets you look at any given time interval within a video stream and analyze comments left within that time span greatly improving the speed and efficiency of rich media analysis.

All this information can be filtered by demographics, behaviour, and other variables that slice and dice the data and get the results you need quickly and efficiently. The technology has been designed to work with other business tools. Data can be easily exported to applications such as SPSS, Excel, Word or PowerPoint; A key advantage for sharing and distributing findings to stakeholders within your organization.

Custom Online Community Performance: Some Examples

Using a custom community to explore and develop new ideas sounds great, but how does it work in the real world? Ipsos manages over 100 custom research panels and has gained valuable insight into how it works to deliver success. Let's illustrate with a couple of brief case studies.

Case 1.

To stay ahead of the curve, a leading telecom provider needed to gain a deeper understanding of the changing landscape for their business in order to refine the mobile product/service features offered to customers and prospects. They used a custom online panel to engage customers and non-customers in sharing information about their lifestyles and preferences for product features. By applying a segmentation algorithm to the panel they were able to monitor reactions to new ideas by customer segment as well as observe any shifts in segment membership.

Case 2.

A packaged goods company that targets females wanted to focus their product innovation to better meet the needs of teenaged girls and partnered with Ipsos to build a research community focused on this target audience. Ipsos set up not one, but six such communities around the world to gather insights from teenage girls on four continents. The discussion with the girls is continual, allowing the company to conduct ongoing quantitative and qualitative research. Discussions focus on lifestyle choices, products and services being used, and other things that matter to teenaged girls. Having access to this engaged group has provided numerous benefits for testing, uncovering and developing new ideas. For example, the client went to the panel to help design products and packaging that appeals to their tastes and needs. The resulting packaging was designed not only for the girls, but more importantly by the girls.

Going Forward

Product and service innovation and expertise is critical to business success and more than ever before, organizations look to uncommon places to seek new ideas; feedback and input from customers is becoming increasingly important to innovation and having efficient and reliable methods for harnessing input is crucial. Custom research communities offer that, allowing you to ask questions and gather information whenever you need it.

For brands looking to move forward, co-creation of ideas with your consumer is an important initiative. The opportunity to share and reflect on others' ideas and comments is valuable to your consumer and invaluable to your innovation process.