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Looking for a faster and more agile way of gathering relevant insights and trends for your brand or business? If your market research budgets are tight, take a look at five simple techniques that we use to gather and identify deeper insights to help inspire winning innovation. Short on time? Take a look at a short video showing how we brainstorm insights with leading brands.
1. Define Your Focus
Before you get started, outline the focus for insight gathering work. This not only saves time, but allows you to go deeper in your search. As you start to gather "early insights", you can always come back and check whether your area of focus is too narrow or too broad.
2. Insights from Social Media
We use Insight Agents to track and monitor relevant web forums and discussions groups linked to the agreed area of focus. Follow and join different chat groups to track evolving trends. Even spending a few hours can uncover a range of "early insights" and themes that could have potential.
3. Insights from Online Product Reviews
If you are looking for insights linked to a specific product category, spend some time reviewing online product reviews of current or relevant competitive products. Capture the issues that people are describing and looking for the "deeper reason" why.
4. Revisit Old Research With Fresh Eyes
Most of the brands and companies that we work with are sitting on tons of market research reports. With fresh eyes, and a fresh focus, look at this data for new insights and insights that may have been overlooked.
5. Share and Select Insights With Greatest Potential
Finally, take time to share and refine early insights with other team members. On all projects that we run, we encourage teams to share, edit and evaluate "early insights" using our online platform called Zip-Zap Ideas®. Alternatively, get people together in a workshop to share insights and to run the "So What" challenge, in order to pick insights have greatest potential to drive winning innovation.
Good luck with these simple techniques. And don't forget, the ultimate test for your early insights, is will they help to inspire new thinking that will make a difference to your business?