Should Research be more Fun?
In an article entitled, Now for the fun part… Gamification goes mainstream. The author Jo Bowman looks at how gamification utilizes fun surveys and online games as a way to make market research more interesting. At the Impact 2017 conference, they showed how using gaming and incorporating fun into consumer research engages consumers and in turn produces better insights. Unengaged research participants tend to give low quality insights. For the article he pointed out three case studies of companies that used interesting game style ways to engage with respondents.
Designer for a Day
One example given was Betty Adamou, CEO, Founder and Chief ResearchGame™ Designer CEO who had an activewear client whose brand was Lucy. Adamou created a three-level game, which allowed Lucy customers to become a designer for the day. The activities had the customer design pants, including choosing the color and design, and the price. This activity was fun for brand enthusiasts, but also helped provide the company with an understanding of “the brand’s next range, by understanding customer preferences.” The activity also addressed the issue of sustainability.
By creating a product that fits the customer’s needs exactly, can drastically cuts down on waste. The fashion industry creates an overwhelming amount of waste, 7 tonnes per 10 minutes. Gamification is truly an effective way to engage customers and clients. In traditional market research, Adamou explained that most time the client just comes to hear the insights from the data collected. But with gamification the clients team was interested in being involved in each step.
Hair Rants
The second project involved John Frieda hair care products. The company sought to gather insight, as well as attract media attention and increase customer engagement. The project got women to discuss their own hair. Bowman writes, “rather than using regular questions and sliding scales, elements of gamification were built into the survey to make completing it more fun. Animated haircuts, spaces where people were urged to ‘have a rant’ about their hair struggles.” They also asked unusual questions that looked at hair color stereotypes. This included what color hair you would prefer your doctor to have? Or what color hair you would rather go to the movies with?
Deb Sleep is the owner of Engage Research, the company that performed the study. She stated, “We know that if they’re engaged with it they’ll be better respondents, they’ll give us more quality in their verbatim responses and they’ll happily spend longer doing the survey.” Whether it be gamification through a fun survey or a qualitative research activity. Engaged respondents are crucial to gathering insightful data. Our online communities can be a great tool for creating interesting qualitative and quantitative data research projects. Our participants often comment on how much they enjoy sharing their thoughts with our online diary studies. If you would like to find out more about our software and how it can fit your market research needs, feel free to contact us.