Communications testing: Exercises to unlock deep insights into your market.

Communications testing. The process of uncovering genuine insights about what people really feel, why they behave as they do and what might lead them to change their behaviour. It may sound simple...but it’s not!

Our activity templates includes a range of activities, from warm-ups and ice-breakers, to deep cultural immersion projects and concept testing, designed to surface those elusive insights on Together™, our industry leading online qual and research community platform. 

Scroll down to download your copy, or read on to learn our tried and tested approach to communications testing.

Let’s take a subject we’re all familiar with. Food. Think about the last meal you ate. What did you eat? Why did you choose that? How much thought did you put into that choice?!

Eating is such a commonplace activity, but like many things in life, it’s something we often do on autopilot. We don’t pay it much attention.

But if lots of us just eat (and buy our food) largely on autopilot, what can entice us to try something new? How can food companies grow their market share? How can they communicate their products in a way that will catch people’s attention?

Communications testing answers those questions. It’s a data-backed way of digging deep, getting to the heart of what your target audience really wants and learning how to attract them to your brand.

Our approach

The template is designed for use with our online qual research platform, Together, and uses a three-stage approach of communications testing:

1. Explore
2. Contextualise
3. Evaluate

Each stage of the templates contains a carefully tiered range of tasks and activities. Step-by-step, they help you to understand the wants, needs and behaviour of your target audience: going deeper every time. Uncover:

• What your brand is communicating to people.
• What competitor brands are communicating.
• The best way to communicate in order to achieve your goal(s).

For example, in the first activities stage – Explore – the tasks in the template are designed to help you explore the wider context within which people experience your brand. Say we were talking to a food company. In that instance we would undertake activities to unearth the factors that contribute to how individuals experience:

• Food
• Related food brands
• Specific products
• Food ads.

Take a look

Here’s an example. Called the fridge-freezer exercise, its aim is to help us to understand people’s existing preferences around ready-made meals and the brands and packaging they’re choosing

This exercise provides a baseline into people’s food preferences. From uncovering insights into participants’ current food habits, we can move on to exercises that will reveal more about their relationship with food and what might lead them to make different choices about what they eat.

Our activity templates have helped hundreds of researchers design their online qualitative studies and have confidence that the activities they have selected will uncover the rich contextual insights they need. Download our Communications Testing activity template below

Get your template: Communications Testing

If the pandemic is forcing you to be more creative and look at new ways of delivering on your research brief, be that tactical or strategic, let us help.

You can take advantage of a FREE discovery call so we can help you understand how online qual can work for your project in practice.

Over the last decade we’ve worked with over 400 agencies and brands running everything from foundational studies, new packaging or product tests to co-creation workshops – we love online qual  and we know you will too.

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