Picture This: A Faster Alternative to Day in the Life Research

The Challenge

Over the past decade, Day in the Life research has become a popular form of market research, providing organizations with deep insights into how their customers live their lives and interact with brands and products. Usually, this type of research is conducted as qualitative research and may employ a wide variety of approaches such as anthropology, ethnography, diaries or more traditional approaches. Done properly, Day in the Life research is foundational work that can inform many years of business decisions.

But Day in the Life research is also typically time consuming and expensive. There are times when organizations need these sort of insights but do not have the time or the budget to engage in a rigorous assessment of customers' lives.

Recognizing this need, Ipsos Healthcare has developed an approach that can be completed in as little as one week that still captures a rich database of moments in customers' lives when they are interacting with a specific product or category.

Solution: Life Moments Research

Our solution - Life Moments Research - was to harness the power of mobile technology along with a truly qual/quant hybrid methodology. Respondents are asked to go about their day and when they interact with a product or category or disease state, to take a photo with their smartphone. They then upload this photo and are asked a few simple questions about their emotional state when they took the photo and why that photo was meaningful to them. The sequence of questions is designed to create the specific stimuli that the final open-ended questions probe. Respondents are typically recruited to do all of this for four days.

The result is a large longitudinal database of Life Moments described both visually and with detailed text explanations of each respondent's behaviors and emotional reactions at those exact moments. This database can be mined in a large variety of ways for a large variety of purposes.

This approach is truly a hybrid methodology that, like great qualitative research, leverages the power of respondent specific stimuli and actual Life Moments, and also approaches the problem with a quantitative philosophy by creating a large database of captured Life Moments. It is neither truly qualitative nor truly quantitative. It's something new.

A Case Study

A leader in the eye care industry reached out to Ipsos Healthcare to conduct a multi-country segmentation of their consumers. Given the available timelines, a rigorous Day in the Life study was not feasible to help design the questionnaire with new and emerging customer behaviors and needs. We employed our Life Moments approach in three countries, recruiting 10 consumers per market. Within one week we had created a database of over 350 Life Moments from these participants, in plenty of time to help develop the customer behaviors and needs we would assess quantitatively. This database continues to be used beyond its original intent as a rich source of longitudinal customer insights.

We are truly excited to be able to provide our Life Moments approach as a new and powerful alternative to Day in the Life research.