Agile Online Communities
We know brand teams are under immense time pressure ahead of launch and can feel like workstreams are waiting in suspense for insight programs to deliver. Can insight generation be more agile, and make better use of the research timeline?
We believe agility is a mindset, and that online communities can be an effective gateway to enable insights to build and evolve in real time taking everyone on a journey of learning. This provides true agility while still providing the confident depth and credibility that is expected to make crucial strategic decisions ahead of launch.
Why online communities?
Online communities are unique in their ability to facilitate agile and immersive learnings for three key reasons:
- Long term engagements: What makes online communities exciting for insight building is that we can engage respondents for a longer period of time. Respondents are recruited for multiple milestones of research to explore the topic, pressure test emerging hypotheses, validate, and further refine insights all with the same core group of respondents.
- Real time insights: The ability for instant translation means that, irrespective of the market, we can have sentiment and analysis within 24 hours.
- Flexibility: Online communities are highly flexible. They enable us to generate qualitative and quantitative data in a wide range of ways. From embedding questionnaires, running blogs, forum group discussions through to organising a pop-up virtual interview.
How and when should you consider agile online communities?
Iteration: Agile communities can be used to develop and iterate insights, which can be particularly beneficial when developing comms materials (positioning, messages, concepts, and e-detailers). It helps the materials evolve with lots of little iterations rather than just three big steps (qual, qual, quant). This can provide huge levels of confidence and support for making those critical decisions.
Connecting insights: Agile communities can also be hugely valuable to connect a larger research program together. Through having a consistent group of respondents follow your brand journey, providing insights along the way to guide and support all ‘in-between’ decisions along the product journey. This can significantly improve both efficiency and impact of your business insight activities to increase confidence for both you and the wider team of stakeholders.
In essence, online communities can be the gateway for being truly agile while maintaining the integrity and quality that Blueprint Partnership is known for.
Reach out to learn more!
Case study: Concept iteration and development (timeframe four months)
Our client needed to develop a branded campaign to evolve their messaging, in order to match the market momentum, the campaign needed to be ready to roll out by early 2023. Therefore, the marketing teams needed to create a winning campaign within a four-month timeframe. This required agility, and robust research to enable quick and confident decisions.
What we did:
- Month one: four concept territories and eight concepts were explored within a one week online forum with eighty physicians across four markets. Insights were available in real time, with a clear read out of learnings two days following the forum completion.
- The outputs: Eliminate poor performing concepts and territories to focus the creative process while also identifying areas for refinement or new ideas.
- Month two: The same physicians were recruited for a follow up, one week online forum to explore six refined concepts and across three territories.
- The outputs: one single territory and a refined set of concepts.
- Month three: revisions were tested in a smaller forum (32 physicians), to give a light touch, check ahead of a quantitative phase.
- The outputs: A check that executions would not distract from the core message sentiment.
- Month four: quantitative concept testing including the online forum respondents and a broader fresh sample.
- The outputs: A clear and consistent winner across all KPI’s.
- In addition to this, both the 2nd and 3rd concept choice also performed higher than the benchmarks indicating these concepts had been developed suitably for the market.
Why it worked so well:
Through evolving the concepts in smaller milestones, it enabled the creative agency to focus their efforts and make multiple smaller edits at a time.
Through having short pops of research, it enabled the brand and marketing teams to go through a focussed process of elimination, exploration, and refinement.
By having a flexible methodology, we could provide both qualitative and quantitative metrics for teams to review, supporting clear alignment with internal stakeholders enabled confident decisions.
Client feedback:
The agile online community invited the complete team to go on a journey of learning and allowed the implementation of customer feedback into the creative campaign development from the early beginning. Even in a very short research timeframe, this approach enabled multiple customer insights informed iterations to optimize the campaign concepts before quantification