Researching a Customer Experience That Doesn’t Exist Yet
We ditched the standard research approaches and threw a party.
Experiencing an essence
Our client, a wine brand, was launching national distribution of a new brand and needed a market activation plan. The challenge? How do you capture the essence of a brand consumers haven’t experienced?
Our solution: we collaborated with our sister agency, 9Rooftops, to create an event equally designed to meet event marketing product sampling needs as it was to elicit consumer insights necessary to fuel brand growth. Here is how we were able to strike the balance between motivating attendance, event engagement and organic feedback:
- Leveraging social media to recruit real consumers. By sourcing our guests through social ads, we were able to reach our qualified target audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional recruiting methods while avoiding “professional” respondent bias.
- Making the event itself the incentive. Instead of offering our guests the transactional incentive of a check for their time, we offered them a sense of exclusivity and invited them in to be part of the brand.
- Collecting feedback via brief, engaging and low-effort surveys. Through short-form surveys, we were able to check in with our guests before, during and after the event which was both less intrusive and more contextual than traditional surveys.
- Putting “liquid to lips.” We had a sampling station set up for our guests to taste the product and provide in-the-moment feedback. Our guests sampled not only the base varietals but also cocktail recipes.
- Capturing qualitative insights via a “confessional corner.” We invited our guests to sit down for interviews with their friends where their personalities were able to shine. These moments were captured by our on-site videographer and built into our reporting, driving a great sense of empathy for the consumer.
Who knew research could be so fun? We did.
