Qualitative research is all about people. To conduct qualitative research, researchers must do a dee p dive into the life and lifestyle patterns of consumers for daily life mapping, product evaluation, ethnography, and innovation research. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger which have become widely accepted means of communication around the globe today can become powerful tools for data collection.
Given that the usage of messaging apps is integrated into the daily routines of smartphone users, they can aid qualitative research. As compared to online surveys, which require consumers to firstly have access to a laptop or PC where a respondent must understand and type out each answer, messaging apps are like a plug and play solutions. Respondents can provide multimedia-rich, context-sensitive data in real time that can facilitate qualitative research.
Let’s look at how messaging apps are proving to be an effective means of qualitative research with adequate support functions:
Digital ethnography – a new avatar
In ethnographic research, researchers interact with a set of respondents in a real-life environment. The idea is to observe how a consumer is subconsciously using or interacting with products. For instance, an FMCG company requires to do a dressing table audit, where ethnography would involve going from one home to another to conduct physical audits that can often be inconvenient and time taking.
Enter-digital ethnography. Digital ethnography is nothing but the logical evolution of ethnography. With the use of messaging apps that enable quick photo and video uploads, researchers can derive in-depth insights through digital diaries that can be automated.
Fun and easy for the respondents on one hand and accurate and convenient for researchers on the other, messaging apps are a powerful tool today. Thanks to digital ethnography, researchers can easily capture real-time behaviour and reactions in a sustained format and assess this information for actionable insights.
Product evaluation
Qualitative research is exploratory in nature and plays an important role in understanding customer journeys. For product evaluation that necessitates consumer behaviour mapping over a period of time, qualitative researchers often used physical diaries to map customer experiences over a time period often risking the loss of data or the consumer not recording responses at the required intervals.
Through messaging apps, custom-made digital diaries can be constructed to record video interviews, photographs and text responses that can be immediately mapped on dashboards. Further, seamless reminders sent over WhatsApp can ensure that consumers are recording their responses at the correct intervals.
Trendspotting and innovation research
Brands often walk to great lengths to innovate and curate products based on trends. Here too, qualitative research has a critical role to play. Researchers carry out physical interviews, that may take days to analyse to spot a trend and work on innovation that may soon lose relevance in a fast-changing world of consumer preferences.
Messenger-based apps can disrupt the process by simply identifying a focus group and asking respondents to record responses on what they think is innovative. For instance, a hair care brand wanted to understand what consumers believed was innovation in hair care. Respondents simply had to send in pict ures that they believed were the latest in hair care innovation .
The data revealed that the respondents believed that innovation was a certain brand that was the first to popularise onion-based hair oil and shampoo. Pictures sent in by 100 respondents created a picture collage that demonstrated innovation clearly to the brand. Not just that, it proved to be cost-effective and saved the brand time and input cost by less than a quarter of its initial budget for innovation.
Democratising consumer research
A survey platform like Merren with customisable messaging app-based surveys is thus proving to be a powerful tool in the hands of brands seeking innovative qualitative research tools. With multilingual conversational surveys, Merren has successfully gathered valuable insights for many businesses, especially during the pandemic-led lockdown days.
In the hybrid world that is prevailing in the next normal, Merr en aspires to democratise qualitative research further for the benefit of business organisations.