Robert said “the metabolic rate of capitalism is quickening.” Here is evidence from the perspective of consumers…

…and then the ability of suppliers to react:

As part of this rapid change, Robert identified “10 D’s that will change your business”:

1. Disruptive technologies
2. Disruptive innovation meme
3. Digitization
4. Disintermediation
5. Dematerialization
6. De-monetization
7. Data
8. Democratization
9. DIY
10. Demography

What does the problem of accelerating discontinuous change mean for the role of market research?

In the book Leading Edge Marketing Research, Robert outlined 22 plausible future scenarios for the research industry. Of these, 2 are particularly relevant in an era of discontinuous change:

• The fast fashion path – RIME (Rapid In Market Experimentation) – “Do. Think. Speed to market. Rapid iteration. Products as real-time experiments, analysis of the sales data.”
• The futurist community – Anticipation – “Think. Do. Anticipate futures. Analysis of STEEP factors: Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, Political.”

In the fast fashion path, the model of “think” then “do” is turned on its head. Do, then think. Execute, then evaluate. As outlined in The Lean Startup, run rapid market experiments, and keep iterating, and keep iterating. Motto: new, better, faster, obsolete. This approach turns the research paradigm on its head, pushing product into the market, running it as an experiment, and learning. Retail stores that follow this pattern include Zara and Charming Charlie, which offers fast, inexpensive and fashionable clothing in a tight feedback loop.

The futurist community often collaborates to envision the future. For instance, The Futurist magazine includes forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future. What are the big changes on the horizon? In Race against the Machine, the authors extrapolate from the socio-technological age progression and see the Information Age passing into the Robotic Biotech Age. The social composition of society will change, and a new social structure will include people who lack the cognitive ability to work. There will be technological unemployment: what happens if you simultaneously have algorithms dislocate white collar workers and robots dislocate blue collar workers?

For more, check out Robert’s post on his blog, Future Of Insight, IIeX Philly: Fast Fashion or Futurists? (A Preview).

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What do you conjure when you think of the concept of data?

Michael Altendorf, CEO, Adtelligence

How does Adtelligence play into the data space?

Fundamentally, we are a company that takes data and uses it to offer consumers personalized and targeted experiences, thereby increasing their satisfaction and loyalty and offering higher conversions to e-vendors. As such, data is our life-blood.

You say that Adtelligence makes “Big Data” real.  Can you tell us more about that statement?

If you think about a truly complex, multi-variable situation you’d be hard-pressed to find an area more complex than consumer choice and consumer satisfaction. If you then add that to predictability you get a really hairy data challenge. We harness all that data and create very simple to understand yet powerful consumer experiences, thereby taking an ethereal concept and making it concrete.

How do you use data to improve the customer experience?

We believe that at it’s essence a great experience has to be ultra-personalized. We use data — reams of it — to create pinpointed experiences for consumers and pinpointed marketing situations for vendors. Customers love our ability to learn — the machine learns at a rapid rate — and provide dynamically personalized experiences on the fly.

What are the limitations of existing tools as regards the acquisition and use of data?

We don’t like speaking ill of competitors but since you asked, most current tools really don’t employ the level of learning or algorithmic power that they all promise. Therefore, they ingest great amounts of data but don’t use it in a dynamic way to offer personalization or quick-changes on the fly.

What are the core data needs of your customers?

Very simply, our customers want to connect to and build intimacy with their consumers using data (behavior, social, etc.) to gain the right insights in order to drive that intimacy. In a sense, it’s very simple to understand but super hard to do. That is why we believe we have a real advantage in the market.

How will Adtelligence help “uplevel” the data game and make it practical and easy to implement?

With Adtelligence, we believe very much that the more automation in the system, the more scalable and practical the solution is. Therefore, we have built a fully automated solution whereas most of the players in the space use manual techniques. In this way, the Big part of Big Data is emphasized.

What is the one core takeaway you’d like to offer the data community?

Our message on this is that while data is the blood of organizations, it’s only as good as it’s implementation and the execution that ensues. Don’t think of data per se as a panacea.

Michael is CEO of Adtelligence, which creates a data-driven 1-to-1 digital marketing platform. Adtelligence works with leading brands, ad networks, agencies and ecommerce shops worldwide to help them increase their conversion rates through real time personalization.

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At the Marketing Research Association’s Insights & Strategy Conference in Orlando today, Timothy  Keiningham of Ipsos Loyalty shared an update on the Ipsos Wallet Allocation Rule, which won the 2011 NGMR Innovation Award. Traditional customer loyalty measures alone do a poor job of predicting Share of Wallet, the percent of category purchases captured by a specific brand. Ipsos has developed a way to extend such metrics to accurately measure Share of Wallet and drive business growth.

The fact that customer satisfaction alone isn’t an accurate predictor of Share of Wallet has been long known, but in 2007 Timothy and other researchers wrote “The value of different customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics in predicting customer retention, recommendation, and share-of-wallet.” In this paper, the authors demonstrated that customer satisfaction, purchase intention, and recommend intention (as measured by the Net Promoter Score classification) do not correlate to Share of Wallet.

Ipsos, Fordham University and Vanderbilt University staff collaborated to identify a measure that would correlate. What they found was that Share of Wallet was relative. If you are, in Net Promoter terms, a promotor of both Coke and Pepsi then Net Promoter alone can’t predict Share of Wallet for your carbonated soda consumption. Nor can aggregate loyalty for one firm be compared to aggregate loyalty for another — it needs to be compared on a customer-by-customer basis. The researchers found that Share of Wallet could be predicted by the relative ranking of a firm vs. the other firms used by a customer in the category.

This is easy to measure and builds upon your existing loyalty metric.

• Simply ask a respondent to list all the brands that they purchase in the product category you are analyzing.
• Then ask them to rate each brand using your favorite question (e.g., customer satisfaction, purchase intent, Net Promoter). “Don’t ask them to rank the brands,” Timothy said. “You have to convert the answers into ranks at the customer level.”
• Then estimate Share of Wallet among your customers (if that was your sample) or among category users (if you used a representative sample). To do this, use the Wallet Allocation Rule formula: (1 – Rank / ( Number of Brands + 1 ) ) X ( 2 / Number of Brands). “Don’t be afraid of the math!” Timothy said. In case of a tie, average the rank (e.g., a tie for 1st among 2 brands is a rank of 1.5). Once you have calculated this for every respondent, take the average — that is your Share of Wallet.

Where existing measures alone do not correlate to Share of Wallet, the Wallet Allocation Rule correlates highly: with R’s of .99 for pharmacies and mass merchants to R’s of .78 for airlines and .67 for automobiles. Additionally, now that Ipsos has tracked this over time, it has observed a strong correlation between changes in Wallet Allocation Rule scores and changes in actual Share of Wallet over time, with a .8 correlation. As Timothy observed, “It’s not that the metrics we use are wrong — it’s the way that we use these metrics is wrong.”

How do you grow your business using this measurement? Focus on improving your rank. Probe to understand from your customers why they prefer other brands to yours in specific circumstances and then work to improve those. To start with, go for the easy pickings : “Go after the guy tangentially stealing your share. Reducing the number of brands used improves your share with that customer.”

For instance, for a major grocery chain, Ipsos helped them realize that they lost on price to one key competitor. While they couldn’t match the low prices, they could come close enough on the pricing of grocery staples to make it easier for shoppers to justify purchasing them in the store rather than making a separate shopping trip for the now more marginal savings. For this firm, a 6% increase in being the first choice translated into a 7-point increase in Share of Wallet. For the grocery store, this was equivalent to shifting $62 million from competitors to their own firm.

For more, see Timothy’s presentation, Customer Loyalty Measurement is Broken: Let’s Fix It. Soon you’ll be growing your own business accordingly.

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The keynote address of the Marketing Research Association’s Insights & Strategy Conference kicked off with a kick in the pants. James McQuivey, Ph.D (@jmcquivey) of Forrester Research, and author of Digital Disruption, began by asking, “The end of research as we know it has arrived. Are you ready?”

James apologized for taking the air out of the room, but said that the pace and scale of disruption were changing consumer industries so rapidly that businesses were rushing to keep up, and as a result would change consumer insights as well: research disruption.

The old objections to disruption no longer hold. For instance, “a disruption long in the making” has been coming for the branch banking experience, which was first replaced with “a robot, a machine, the ATM”. In 1977 one of those machines cost $100K in todays’ dollars, cheaper than a branch but still expensive. It did disrupt banking in a certain way, but it was expensive and not everyone would use it or they wouldn’t use it for certain transactions (such as deposits). Today, of course, people can make a deposit from their smart phone, as James did over the weekend. “I got my camera out, took a picture of the check, tore up the check, and the money is mine. The bank didn’t have to spend a dime on the device and on a per person basis they are spending pennies per consumer to develop this application. They didn’t have to teach me anything or show me how to use their app.”

Mobile banking is an example of digital disruption, which overturns the 2 traditional objections to “old” disruption.

1. People will never do that. — “Everywhere I look, that is being turned upside down. Look at Piinterest reaching 50 million users in less than a year.”
2. It will cost too much to do. — “It costs much less on a per person basis to innovate.”

As James said, “The objections to disruption are evaporating. The demand side and supply side are meeting on this high end.”
As consumers rapidly expand their digital behaviors, there are 2 things research has to find out:

1. What do they really want? Really want? – In the past, researchers really asked, “Given the constraints of our industry, given the problems making changes, what is the minimum amount that we have to to make to keep consumers with us or to make them satisfied enough to switch to us?” Now researchers have to ask the more fundamental question, “Deep down, what do consumers really want?” This is liberating “and terrifying.”
2. How quickly (cheaply) can we give it to them? – And digital technologies mean firms can do it cheaply.

These are the key concerns of research disruption. James has a saying: “When companies adopt technology, they do old things in new ways. When companies internalize technology, they find disruptive new things to do.”

“Digital disruptors do it: better, stronger, faster. No, that is not a Kanye West song. I’m referring to the 6 Million Dollar Man — I had the action figure as a kid, and you could look through his eye! Well, through technology we could make Steve Austin better, stronger, faster. But it doesn’t cost 6 million dollars to do anymore.” Here’s how digital disruptors accomplish this:

• “They will build Better product experiences
• “That create Stronger (digital) customer relationships
• “Bringing it all to market Faster.”

Old disruption was uncommon, only very few people were able to invest a significant amount of money to bring ideas to life. With digital disruption, many more people can participate, operating at significantly lower cost per idea, bringing many many more ideas to life. Some of these ideas are “bitty teeny ideas” but some are “huge, bigger than whatever could happen before.” Imagine you have 10 times the number of innovators, innovating at 1/10th the cost — you have 100X the power with digital disruption: it is a force multiplier.

How can consumer insights help? What does research disruption look like?

Identify and prioritize “the adjacent possible” (from Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson). What is outside the circle of our consumers’ experience, what is an adjacent possibility that our consumers are seeking and satisfying? “Don’t build the future; build the next thing people really need and let the future find you.”

Say to yourself, “My customer is here, but if they moved out of my circle, what do they want and how do I get there to give it to them? Do that, and then the next thing magically presents itself, leading to future steps.”

“Now whose job is it tell the management team what are all the things possible? Your job could and should be to tell the organization what consumers need.”

James concluded with, “This is the end of the research as we know it, but the beginning of something much cooler!”

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At the risk of really showing my age, I’m going to say that you have no idea what it was like sitting in meetings twenty five years ago — hours and hours of flipping through pages and overhead projector presentations. (On the chance you don’t know what that is — here’s an overhead projector – LOL  I can’t believe they still sell them and you can get one at Staples for $250! That’s insane!) 

But I digress.

What I’m trying to tell you is that being a data badass at meetings is really tough to pull off when you’re in front of the room with overhead projector slides falling out of order and making a mess on the table.  Even modern PowerPoint presentation slides have static graphics that don’t allow you to dig-in based on feedback from meeting participants. If they want to see the data a different way, it’s back to the researcher or analyst (even if that’s you) to slice things differently. But with the QuestionPro App, you can make those adjustments in real-time and answer the question on the spot before a decision is made (or postponed)!

But today — you can be a total badass in your next meeting and get your point across by using the handy – dandy – brand-spankin’ – new QuestionPro interactive data visualization app! Available now on iOS devices. Here

You can download it here from the Apple App Store.

I’ve just downloaded mine from the App Store and is it ever cool!

If you have a QuestionPro account, all you’ll have to do is log in with your credentials and you’ll see all your surveys right there in the app.  Here are a few screen shots from some of my surveys.

As soon as you login to the app, it will synchronize with your account and show you all the surveys that are in your QuestionPro folder:

Here is a shot of the surveys in my QuestionPro account.  You can see the names of the surveys and the number of responses to each of the surveys.

After you click on one of the surveys — you’ll see this fabulous overview screen:

It shows you where the responses came from and the general stats for the survey completions.  At the bottom of the screen are all the questions you’ve asked.  The important part for you to know is that this app works best when you have CHARTS and not open ends.  It won’t do anything with those.

Here is an example of one of the questions:

Now here is the badass part of this — you can spin that pie chart around to see additional data — or the category that goes with the percentage response to the question. You can also use the built-in tools like Compile and Spotlight to make sure the most relevant responses are being highlighted. Select/deselect specific responses and the chart automatically updates!

How I would use this app

As I write this, I’m headed off to a meeting with a client.  Now, we’re going to be talking about some research and I’m going to have this data right there in my hand.  Whenever we have to make a decision such as “Who is our target audience?”  I can click on the app and say something like “Our research shows that 45% of the people we surveyed in this market are engineers.”  This would tell us that we should create the marketing materials with an engineering mindset at the center of our content.

Or let’s say you used the Net Promoter Score question in a customer service survey. The score is typically broken into 3 categories, then used to determine your ‘net’ promoter score:

• Promoters: nines and tens;
• Passives: sevens and eights;
• Detractors: zeros through sixes

Analyzing this, we might say that promoters are great pats on the back, and passives could be completely happy but could be from people who never give nines or tens. But if you really want to make improvements, you need to dive into the detractors. So in the QuestionPro App, I could go into this question, de-select the promoters and passives, and then look at the percentages for just the detractors. All in real-time.

Like I said: b-a-d-a-s-s.

Related:

For more info, check out the data visualization page on QuestionPro.com.

Check out the online press release on 24-7pressrelease.com.

The QuestionPro App is powered by SecondPrism.

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If you were to ask me what my favorite pastime is, I’d have to say people-watching. No surprise, I am market researcher! Observing people and their interactions with one another can be a great source of inspiration and entertainment.

With that in mind, I recently attended my first focus group excited to study our core consumers. While I may like to observe for fun, I was unsure what to expect. A myriad of questions ran through my mind. Who will attend? What will I learn? What should I be observing? What is the flow of conversation?

I was fascinated by the people attending and was surprised at how openly opinions were shared among the group. I expected people to be reserved, yet I experienced the complete opposite. The group was responsive, providing clear feedback on concepts as if talking to their best friend. While I was uncertain how the research would go, by the end of the day I saw the value in this type of methodology. Understanding the “whys” behind something is very powerful.

Behind the Scenes, What You Don’t See

Even with my limited exposure, I knew the first step (like with any research) was to determine the objective: What information is being sought? How will the insights derived from the research be utilized? What do we want to discover? Once our goals were finalized, I learned the next step is to choose a moderator. From here on out, the collaboration begins.

Apparently, logistics take up an inordinate amount of time once the moderator/facilitator is chosen. It is astounding the little details that need to be taken care of. Needless to say, I was glad to find out the research manager was responsible for choosing the markets where the focus groups will take place, developing a screening questionnaire to identify qualified participants, working with the facility to manage the recruiting process and the backroom logistics, coordinating stimulus, and communicating arrangements to internal clients. While we did have final approval, it was a relief to have a partner on board to pull everything together.

Environment

Our focus group was conducted in a traditional setting- a conference room. A one way mirror made it easy to monitor the discussion, and the microphones in the focus group area allowed us to clearly hear the conversations taking place. In addition, video cameras were recording the sessions giving us the opportunity to play back anything we may have missed at a later time.

Moderator/Facilitator

While the task may appear simple, the role of moderator requires a high level of skill. We were fortunate to have a seasoned individual at the helm, which greatly increased the odds that our results would be actionable. She led the group discussion, ensured our team’s objectives were adequately addressed and guaranteed all relevant topics were covered in the time allotted. With the wrong person in the driver’s seat, I would imagine the research insights could be limited and incorrect.

Sample Size – Does it Matter?

Although the qualitative sample size is small, it is important to make sure the core target groups are represented. I know that focus groups are not designed to be statistically representative of the population, but I learned that it is important to keep the composition of each group as cleanly defined as possible..

According to the Center for Assessment, Planning and Accountability (CAPA), a focus group is most effective with 7-12 participants. When in the field, we observed 7 individuals per group (lasting 60 minutes) and went through 4 sessions. After seeing almost 30 people in a day, I felt that was the right amount in order to achieve our objective.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain – Well, Mirror

With logistics taken care of, it was time to go in the back room and observe. While each focus group and environment is unique, I encountered a room packed with an abundance of snack food. My will is strong, temptation is stronger, and I found myself in the company of countless peanut M&Ms. A tailored lunch was later provided, along with an assortment of sides and beverages to last throughout the day. Needless to say, everyone in attendance was fully nourished and/or had a stomach ache.

Multiple groups from within our company attended the research from design, marketing, packaging, and insights teams. I know from previous experience, having the stakeholders attend the research is important. Reading a report provides knowledge, but seeing for yourself how the consumer reacts and engages with your product/concept/service is powerful. It’s like the Chinese proverb says, “Tell me, I’ll forget. Show me, I may remember. But involve me, and I’ll understand.”

Once the session began, everyone took a seat, opened their laptop and watched the respondents, ready to document their perceptions of the findings. Some people took notes (myself included), others watched intently as if committing the dialogue to memory, and others just listened. The dynamic in our room was interesting. While we all watched the same group, we each experienced it differently.

After each session, we discussed potential “Aha!” moments, questions to further probe on, areas of concern or praise, and overall “gist” of what took place and how to digest the information. Most importantly, we talked about what information is actionable and how.

Deliverables

Once the field sessions concluded and analysis finalized, a final report was delivered that highlighted the key findings and implications. Our moderator was able to extract information from the participants that the group found very beneficial. These insights were utilized in our final report and I must say; I was impressed with her. For any qualitative study, the learning’s from our research were to provide directional insights and help guide future initiatives. They are being used in tandem with other research methodologies today.

Overall

My first focus group experience was exceptionally valuable and I am excited to add this methodology to my “research arsenal”. In future groups, I plan on becoming more actively involved in the planning process and I am excited to learn how the learnings from the research will be acted upon by company decision-makers. The best part about market research is continuous learning and the never-ending supply of peanut M&Ms.

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The biggest mistake which almost every online panel company does is to overlook the critical importance of respondent satisfaction.

But we provide adequate incentives for their time & effort!

I have often heard panel managers protesting.

Let us first get this thing straight – your incentives are really not that lucrative enough that someone will patiently click through 30 minutes of a survey – in reality it is the exhilarating emotion of ‘my opinion matters’ that drives many respondents to join a panel and participate in surveys.

Do you really think that for few dollars a working professional will undertake a survey?

If yes, then you are sadly mistaken.

Maybe a teenager is tempted to earn few extra bucks – but in general people are more excited about the ‘my opinion matters.’

Many online panel companies are reporting ‘respondent burn out’ which is drastically affecting the response rates.

There are cases when a simple target audience is getting tough to be approached for a survey. For an online data collection company it is not the client or employee that matters but the respondents – what if you have clients on board and a terrific team but inactive respondents – the result is simple to guess – BIG Failure.

So what should we do?

No need to panic my friends – today I am going to share with you an awesome secret that will help ensure that your respondents are more engaged and actually ‘look forward’ to your survey invites!

Sounds too good to be true?

The solution is simple = follow this 3 step process.

Step 1: Trust

I had the opportunity to talk with many potential respondents, and the biggest fear they have is that the moment they will provide their email address they will be ‘bombarded’ with survey requests.

This fear is not without reasons – unfortunately we don’t push the clients (after all they pay you) but the respondents for a survey.

For example if the client wants data collection to be done in 1 week (even if realistically it requires 3 weeks) we don’t push the client to accept the reality – instead we push the respondents to finish it in 1 week. For the same we will send mammoth amount of survey invites – hoping that enough number of respondents participates to complete the survey in stipulated amount of time.

This strategy is counter-productive in 2 ways:

1) Now that somehow by pushing respondents to participate you have completed the survey in 1 week – the next time also the client will expect the survey to be done in 1 week. So it is not a one-off case but becomes a standard practice to send zillions of invites to complete the survey in 1 week.

2) As the respondents are getting multiple survey invites it will fill their mailbox with so many requests that the survey company will look more like a spammer – thereby pushing respondent to unsubscribe or worse become ‘inactive’.

Always remember it is best to say NO than to say SORRY. So politely explain to clients the expected time line and never trouble respondents (after all your panel members are your biggest asset).

Today it is critical to ask yourself:

Do my respondents trust me?

Do I evoke enough trust to attract potential respondents?

How to ensure that a strong foundation of trust exists?

I always insist on following these 3 simple methods to build trust:

Method 1: Always establish the engagement level with the respondent I.e. How many surveys they will receive over a course of time.

During panel recruitment exercise always ask this question:

Q: How many surveys will you like to receive?

1- Once a day
2- Once every week
3- Once every month
4- Once every 3 months

The frequency mentioned may vary but the idea is to always present a choice to the respondents – as to how many survey invites they wish to receive.

Now once you receive the information – always stick to it.

No matter what happens if the respondent says he wants ‘one survey a week’

Your panel team has to ensure that it is followed strictly.

It is the small things which matters the most.

Once you have established trust with your panel members they will love participating in your surveys – isn’t it what you always want in the first place?

Method 2: You need to have a transparent incentive system.

It is not that someone is looking just for incentives but when you are not honest in your approach to provide incentives it prevents trust to build.

Let me give you an example: I have seen survey invites where participants are lured in with “Win guaranteed USD 500 on participation ” – of course this is a lucrative amount and tempts people to take surveys but when the survey is over there is a catch – “Thank you for participation – you now have earned 100 points – you will be able to cash USD 500 once you have earned 2000 points”.

As you can see in the above example the panel company was not honest – they tricked the respondent with a huge sum but it had a catch. The respondent will feel cheated and for sure will never participate in your future surveys.

By a clever trick you may be able to get few surveys completed but are you in this business for a short term only?

It is imperative to have a crystal clear incentive system – in case a respondent has any doubts about it – a help desk email ID/toll free number should be provided where they can get clarified.

Always remember that honesty is the foundation of trust.

Method 3: you need to have a structured grievance system in place.

No matter how seamless your processes works there will always be issues that respondents will face – it may be incentives or broken survey links or difficulty in understanding terminology – your job is to simplify things for the respondents.

How to do that?

Well it is simple – create a dynamic respondent help desk system – when I say dynamic it means that you must let go the archaic mail based system where you shelve out standard template based answers. Every problem is unique and so shall it be treated the same way.

- First create an exhaustive and easily navigable FAQ so that respondents can seek the answers themselves (in fact it will save you lot of man-hours to revert on usual queries).

- Second put a person knowledgeable at help desk who understands the technicalities of issues – most of the time we have people who just forward standard answers.

- Lastly create a forum/community where you encourage other respondents to pitch in – this will help create more affinity for your brand as well as responsiveness.

The more comfortable the respondents are taking surveys for you – the more active panel community you will be able to create.

Step 2: Respect

If you have never cursed the ‘slow’ driver in front of your vehicle in a slow moving traffic you are a BIG liar.

Although I completely abhor this bad practice but sometimes you just don’t want to be slowed down.

Let us all accept this nasty fact that whenever our time is wasted by other people – we really get annoyed.

But wait a minute…

Your respondent too is a normal human being who must feel the same!

Unfortunately we forget this simple fact when we send:

1)    Lengthy surveys (read 30 minutes+)
2)    Complex answer choices
3)    Difficult to comprehend questions
4)    Broken survey links

Your respondents feel that you don’t respect their time – the end result is non-responsiveness.

In this super fast-moving world no one wants to be slowed down.

Slow = Failure

Like I mentioned earlier incentives are never the primary driving force for most respondents – therefore the more unprofessional and incomplete survey you serve to respondents – the more agitated they become.

Respect = Trust = Highly engaged respondents

It is a simple formula but very few are able to implement it perfectly.

Follow these 3 commandments to create an active panel community:

1)    A panel manager should simply REFUSE to field a poorly designed survey.

2)    Without proper quality analysis of the survey both manually and logically no surveys should be launched.

3)    In case of survey link broken provide adequate help desk support and strictly ensure that in future it does not happen.

Most importantly ‘Treat your respondents as you expect to be treated’

Step 3: Engage

Most of the online panel companies treat their relationship with the respondents as a ‘one night stand’ where as in reality it should be as sacrosanct as the institution of marriage.

Let me share with you a harsh reality:

There are only a limited number of people who are willing to participate in surveys – I agree that the number increases with time but it is miniscule in comparison to people who are getting disenchanted with survey companies.

So imagine a scenario where you have annoyed enough respondents and left just with clients seeking responses but the panel population not able to meet the demands.

Scary situation if you ask me.

If you follow the above 2 steps (Trust and Respect) you will definitely ensure that you receive good responses.

But is that enough?

Not at all – what you have to do is to take the respondent’s experience with your surveys to an all together different level.

How am I going to achieve it?

Well simply by moving your relationship beyond just the surveys.

Let me ask you a simple question: How do you engage your respondents?

Engage?

Yes engage – that is – how do you ensure that respondents are more active and connect with your brand.

Today ask yourself a simple question: Does my respondent is only motivated by incentives or they truly love participating in my surveys?

It is easy to find out the answer – do a split testing – for the same survey give half the respondents a lucrative incentive and for the other half an average incentive – then find out the response rates – if the lucrative incentives have a considerable higher response rate than an average one – it is high time to change your approach.

The problem is that the market of online data collection is getting highly competitive – so in the ensuing price wars if you have to win projects the incentive margins are diminishing rapidly – what if you can only give an average incentive? Will you compromise on your profit margins to get requisite number of completes?

Of course not!

So the best way is to engage respondents to have an enhanced response rate.

Follow these 3 simple rules to get more engaged respondents:

Rule 1: Make surveys interesting

Rule 2: Keep it simple and short

Rule 3: Be creative in approach

But I am a data collection company and I don’t design questionnaire?

Some of you may ask this question but let me counter question – what is stopping you to educate your clients to follow the above 3 rules?

It is high time to recognize the critical importance of your respondents.

In fact you are as good as your panel base – the more responsive they are the easier you will run the show.

Before I complete this article let me share with you 5 Golden Rules to build an awesome panel community.

Rule 1: Respondent first – everything else second.

Rule 2: Treat your respondent the way you want to be treated yourself.

Rule 3: Your respondents are human beings and not an ATM machine.

Rule 4: There is limited pools of respondents, so don’t lose them at any cost.

Rule 5: Make it a pleasurable experience for your respondents to participate in your surveys.

I hope that today I have been of some help to you.

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You may be in a group, company, or corner of an industry that’s suffering from a chronic lack of the creative and progressive energy needed for innovation, but that doesn’t mean you need to accept that truth as final. In fact, I believe accepting innovation can’t happen in your area of work is a fast track way of becoming a dinosaur (not the cool ones from Jurassic Park).

My suggestion is that you create a process, a time, and a place to think practically about innovation as it pertains to your life and work. The time has come for you to own innovation on a personal level by finding your ‘Innovation Station’. You don’t have to call it that, come up with your own name for this place. This is where your best ideas and plans will come together.

Here are a few tips to help get you started and keep you motivated:

Consider Your Location – My Innovation Station location is the all too cliché, coffee shop. I love coffee and I love the energy of others moving about and getting things done. The coffee shop I go to is filled with these types of people. This pumps me up to think creatively and scribe some creative ideas and solve problems. Try to pick a time and place that’s relaxing to you and motivates you at the same time.

Follow the pain – I heard someone say recently that where there is pain, there is opportunity. The idea is that if something is bothering you, there could be a major opportunity for you to derive the solution. Sometimes it’s hard to think of a place to start in all of this ‘innovation talk’. Thinking of creative solutions to things that bother you can be both helpful and therapeutic. What drives you crazy in your field and personal interests? Solve it.

Scribe Well – Keep a notebook full of your ideas. If you hate notebooks, at least keep a folder for all of your random pieces of paper. Begin scribing ideas down as they come to you and store them. Some of my most innovative thoughts come to me in the middle of the day in the middle of a problem I’m solving. By doing this I keep both my sporadic and organized thoughts in one place for further development. It also frees me to move on to other things in my work day without the sinking feeling of letting a good idea slip away.

Make a plan – The most depressing thing you could do is create exciting ideas at your innovation station and then fail to make a real plan for executing them. Journal your next steps. When will you hit the Innovation Station again to think things through? What do you need to make your ideas come to fruition? Get a plan together and start moving. Things will shift on you, but having a good initial plan and journaling your steps along the way will keep you grounded amongst the chaos.

Ride the wave – A lot innovative ideas start somewhere and then evolve into something completely different. Remember the 17 year old kid that sold his startup to Yahoo! for $30 million? You may not know that he first built an app that flopped. He later flipped the philosophy of his app 180 degrees and, boom, it took off. Ben Silbermann, has a similar innovation story…he founded Pinterest.

Keep your passion– Being an innovator is tiring. You will encounter opposition you never saw coming from people you never thought would be an obstacle. Take it as a sign of progress; you’re getting somewhere. There will be many times when you want to quit ‘being that guy’ who’s pushing through convention to create tomorrow but you must endure. Stare at the wall for 10 minutes. Read an inspiring book. Take a long weekend. Walk away from it all for a second. Do whatever you have to do to keep from burning out. Most of all, remember the feeling in your gut that put you on the path of innovation in the first place.

Be a student– Some of our innovative heroes have amazing stories of rebellion and breaking the mold. I love reading about them and wish I had the courage to take such bold steps at times. However, don’t mistake these acts of rebellion as a total abandonment of education. In many cases these great innovators dropped out of school only to be mentored by another entrepreneur or potential investor. Listen. Read. Seek high quality council. In order for you to break free of convention, you must first know where convention begins and ends, right? Most of us can’t afford to pull a Bueller on this one.

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I love going beyond my comfort zone of market research conferences and looking at the wider business environment. E2 is a great opportunity to do that, and I look forward to helping bring you on that journey.

E2 (formerly Enterprise 2.0) is the only conference I’m aware of that looks at enterprise business technology challenges from just about every angle. Look at the track list and you’ll see what I mean:

• Big Data & Analytics
• Cloud, SaaS and APIs
• Mobility
• Social & Collaboration
• User Experience & Design
• Consumerization of IT
• CXO Leadership
• People, Process & Engagement

Now that’s an ambitious agenda, but it’s all important, and it’s all interrelated.

Leading up to the conference I will be doing some pre-interviews. You can look forward to a conversation with E2 General Manager and co-Chair Paige Pires de Almeida. I’m circling in on a surprise interview guest as well.

Then of course I’ll be reporting from the conference in June. I love that this conference is outside of the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

I will keep you posted with more details.

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Starting your own company through creativity and innovation is as much an American ideal as, well, something very American. The United States’ quick growth is the result of many heroes and hard working people. Some of the most hard working among them being the innovative thinkers, inventors, and creators from our short history. Without those creative individuals we would be pedaling along doing who knows what. We still see this breed today, shaking things up and making tomorrow. Many of these individuals can be found in the realm of the modern startup.

Jacksonville, Florida, the city I live in, is ripe with new startups and those seeking to take an idea and turn it into progress. What a great mission to have. Start something you love and create jobs and economic growth in the process. Not to mention the other contributions your startup will have in its respective industry, geography, and social circles.

The stark truth, however, is that to make all of these dreams become reality you need money. Something most young entrepreneurs lack. And to get money you need to speak with potential investors (Angels, Venture Capitalists, Family members that will never speak to you again) and convince them of the feasibility and profitability of your venture.

While there are many things to check off of the list through this long journey of starting something, the one major goal, especially in the early days, is validation.

You may think your idea is wonderful, and your mom probably does too, but does anyone else give a rip? Have you actually done any math to figure out your costs and funding needs? What’s your breakeven point? When will you be able to pay the money you borrowed back to the investor? When you share your idea do people get the core of what you’re saying? Does your message strike the heart strings of potential customers?

These questions hurt the brain for some and drown the soul for others. Yes, you will have to face this scrutiny, and yes you will have to crunch some numbers to make your dreams come true.

In this next short series of posts, Research for the Startup, I’ll cover the basics of concept validation for the startup and potential research methods that can be used to get you into the meeting. You know, the one where they give you money and the real carnage begins.

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