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Using Online Communities for Customer Insight

The American Marketing Association held its 2005 Marketing Research Conference here in Boston last week.  I made it over on the last day and had the chance to sit in on a session called "Online Consumer Insights: Lessons From the Front Line".  The conference session described as - When companies and consumers engage in an online dialog, it's a win-win situation for marketers and customers.  Several leading manufacturers share their experiences in leveraging an ongoing online relationship to conduct research, provide information, develop insights and successfully guide management decisions - was essentially about using company sponsored online communities to help guide market research.  Representatives including Joyce Ann Lindbloom-Salisbury of General Motors, Mike Troutman of Eastman Kodak Company and Lynne Kerger of the Chicago Tribune spoke on the panel with Thomas Brailsford of Hallmark as the moderator. 

As market researchers by profession, a common goal among the speakers is to continue to find ways to conduct research on behalf of their companies faster and cheaper.  The panel openly discussed how using online communities has helped them to establish a direct dialog and relationship with the consumers representatives in each online community.  The companies all had different parameters, uses and measures when setting up or interacting with their community.  Some even found other benefits in working with the communities.

GM, for example, realized early on that consumers don't always want to talk about what GM wants them to talk about.  Setting up the online community has helped them to learn to "ask the right questions", as Joyce Ann stated.  GM still conducts traditional market research such as panels and focus groups but has found that using the online communities allows GM immediate access to a segmented customer group.  Joyce Ann revealed that GM has had 9 branded communities over the last 3 years.  Some of the communities included:

  • Hybrid car communities
  • Women's communities
  • Mobility communities (wheel chair or disabled consumers)
  • Tech influential communities
  • General Automotive communities

Kodak set up its first online community to open up an online dialog with a segmented consumer group.  For example, the first group consisted of consumers who had already made the switch from film to digital, they already owned a digital camera, already used online albums and used websites to share images.  Kodak gave them cell phone cameras and sent them on "field trips".  Kodak then asked members of the online community to perform tasks such as "print photos online".  The researchers then developed insights based on what the community talked about online.  Kodak admits that this type of research is not the "end all, be all" and that they learned a lot from their first test community group (and admits they could have done things better) but that it has helped them to be more strategic, efficient and cost effective in delivering research. 

Lynne Kerger told the crowd that the Chicago Tribune started to seriously look at online communities for market research because it needed a way to connect with consumers faster.  TV can measure how many people watched a show within hours, online news sites can measure viewership by click through, but the newspaper's research department faced very different challenges:

  • The newspaper could only gather evidence of how readership was going every 3 months -
  • "The product" (the newspaper) was produced daily and the actual production of the product was a huge challenge to make changes without data to back up why...
  • And they have journalists and editors trained NOT to listen to others (form their own opinions)

By setting up online communities the research staff at the Trib had more immediate access of "facts" by asking questions such as "what sections did you read in Sunday's issue?"

Of course, listening to this panel raised many questions in my mind such as, aren't these "sponsored" community sites bias?  are these folks receiving incentives and if they are, doesn't that sway their opinions?  (BTW, I later found that incentives for all three companies were small, each very different but up to about $20 per month at the highest).  What about confidentiality within the group?  How do you recruit people into the group?

After a lengthy Q&A session many of my questions as well as others were addressed.  To summarize, all company representatives agreed that using online communities for insights is just one piece of the puzzle and does not have to be used as the sole source of consumer information.  I applaud these companies for looking beyond traditional market research and exploring different methods.  A final thought (disclosure, I'm going to promote Cymfony because its nagging at me...) I would urge companies to consider another option of looking beyond the sponsored online community site and dig a little deeper into blogosphere and consumer-generated media to explore unbiased or unfiltered discussion using tools such as Digital Consumer Insight. 

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Posted by Cymfony on October 3, 2005 at 08:56 AM | Email this post Permalink

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