A New Approach To Tracking Brand Experience & Touchpoints

If you are faced with the challenge of conducting research that uncovers a true representation of the full range of brand touchpoints, how would you go about it? It’s not just TV advertising that is influencing purchasing decisions, its online, viral, outdoor, reviews etc. Brand touch points can easily be overlooked or just not considered at all by the research team; its a common oversight. The reason for this is that we as humans are poor witnesses of our own behaviour, so our recall is often left lacking. Also, traditional Q&A can lead to over-egg certain touch points and under-value others.

Thanks to major technology developments, right now, researchers have the ability to literally put the respondent in the position of researcher. Further device-agnostic platform enables consumers to record all of their experiences and brand touchpoints, no matter who they are with, where they are at and at what time of day it is, thanks to the simple fact that they have it with them at all times of the day. Because our mobiles are omni-present, this method of data gathering is much less intrusive and more natural than sitting in a focus group facility.

Research has shown that when documenting and sharing experiences and everyday lives via mobiles, the number of brand touch-points recorded, and their diversity, is much greater. Accordingly, what was often seen as supporting media - outdoor, point-of sale and social media - actually plays a much more significant role in influencing the purchase decision than at first thought.

There is of course another upside to mobile data capture and that is the immediacy of the data and therefore the insights gleaned. Responses are real-time - arriving with the researcher in a matter of minutes and hours rather than days and weeks. The researcher is now enabled to deliver real-time insight to the client who can now make business-critical decisions, and iterate creative, in quick time.

We’ve seen our tools and and the capabilities they enable drive a number of new approaches, not least a phased approach to gaining insight into understanding, knowing and validating. Here’s an example of this is achieved.

Taking a typical three-phase approach, the researcher may use the initial phase to understand consumers’ brand awareness, how they currently interact with the brand or use the product and what their perceptions of it are. The researcher wants to get depth and breadth of information during this phase so it’s best conducted on a laptop of desktop to avoid short-hand responses.

A second phase would focus on capturing daily habits and experiences with a product or service, or a category, wherever they are. This diary-based approach would help the researcher know how the brand makes the consumer feel, how persuasive it the creative is and what the experience occasion is.

Finally, the third phase would almost repeat the first phase but be used to understand shifting perceptions of the brand now the experience has occurred.

Mobile qualitative research, and of course its quantitative counterpart, are now mainstream, there’s no hiding from that. But researchers are only just beginning to consciously design mobile engagement into their studies. The benefits to an approach such as the one described above are clear; immediacy, ability to adapt and iterate campaigns quickly, more accurate weighting of brand touchpoints and richer data.

We hope this post has illustrated some of the ways you can achieve great research utilising Further’s device agnostic qual software. Not only are mobiles changing consumers lives and how they build relationships with friends, family and brands, mobile is moving market research into a new domain whereby the consumer is empowered to be the researcher. Knowing, seeing and experiencing close up how consumers interact with brands across a diverse range of touch points is essential to making the right decisions.

To find out more about how Further’s software can catapult your market research into the future, call us on +44 20 73515 3301 / +1 310 853 6986 or Get in touch