Today’s leading organizations are increasingly employing agile approaches to developing new marketing programs, product or service innovations and customer experiences. By leveraging agile market research methods, your organization is able to simultaneously design, test and build new solutions before going to market. This approach speeds time to market, while still ensuring your go-to-market strategy fits with consumers’ lifestyles, situations and needs.
Our monthly blog post offers practical tips and advice on how to implement agile research. November's agile tips are provided by Jill Meneilley, founder of Mobius Solution Lab and one of Digsite's expert consultants.
Tip 1. Learn More by Asking Fewer Questions
Agile market research is all about prioritizing the most important observations or questions so you can iterate as you learn. If your team has a million questions at once, help them to focus on the biggest priority first. Then, use a Sprint research approach to leverage their answers to drill down further, finding out why your customers feel or act certain ways. Ask participants follow-up questions to solidify your conclusions. Starting with a smaller scope and fewer questions allows you to pivot as you learn, building better results and enabling collaborative decision making.
Tip 2. Capture Stories instead of Asking Open Ends
To understand the emotional context surrounding your consumers’ behaviors, consider online approaches where you can ask participants fill-in-the-blank style questions. Instead of asking a series of yes or no questions, having them tell a story can get richer feedback and deeper insights.
Tip 3. Get to the Experience
Capturing and understanding consumer experiences are a critical part of agile insights. Whether you’re looking to develop new solutions or improve current products or services, your success depends on understanding and empathizing with customers’ experiences.
Rather than just asking participants to describe an experience, have participants actually show you their interaction with a product/service through video. Combine live video interviews with online tasks or conversations to get deep insights. You can also record the journey of experiences over days or weeks—for longer purchase cycles or extended product usage. Drill deeper into emotions, context, and concerns with agile research.
Once you capture experiences firsthand, you can show early solutions to see how they address the customer’s challenge. By evaluating solutions against in-context information about your customers’ attitudes and behaviors—you can understand the nuances that make the difference between mediocre and world-class solutions.
Tip 4. Combine Text and Video
Agile research works best when you can capture emotions, context, and attitudes. But that doesn’t need to happen face to face. Short unmoderated videos are particularly useful to share emotional reactions show specific situations or issues. You can also have consumers capture shopping or usage experiences. Agile research platforms offer automated video transcription and text to clip reel analysis tools, making it faster and easier than ever to analyze video results and share findings.
To learn more about how your organization can make the move to agile research, here are some resources to check out:
- Agile Research Guide: How Teams Can Innovate Faster
- How to Build an Effective Agile Research Team
- How Leading CPG Companies Use Online Qualitative Research for Better Business Outcomes
