Mining For Gold…In Your Closet
The growing trend of using video to capture qualitative market research interviews has become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have the ability to go back and understand the subtleties of a remark or action or gesture; on the other hand, however, is the guilt that comes from simply not having the time to revisit past studies. How many blocks of two hours do you regularly have available to watch video from a past focus group? Probably not many — so how do we make searching video as easy as searching text and how do we find new insights from past studies?
Before now, the state of the art in making video searchable was to attach keywords to video clips (as YouTube does). Since most research studies are based on several business questions that need answers, the parts of the video that get tagged will be based on those questions. If you’re interested in “blue,” those video clips that contain “blue” will be tagged, but the interesting things said about “green” will likely be lost.
It’s easy to miss things you’re not looking for…
Your consumers and customers love to talk. They will “answer” dozens of questions you don’t ask and will do things you don’t prompt them to do. What if you could easily get to both the answers to your business questions and to the insights that are hidden within those un-prompted answers and actions? And what if you could search across many qualitative studies as easily as you can with quantitative?
LIFEbytes Online™, is a tool that delivers against both of those “what if’s”. It takes a giant step forward by searching the entire transcript of the video including added narration from silent, purely observational video segments and added text (always in brackets) where context and clarity is needed. So you essentially have access to all the “between the lines” information that your respondents share without even being asked. Not to mention the many behaviors they display unconsciously. So LIFEbytes Online gives you immediate and long-term access to sharing the skills, best practices and behaviors that you already know work.
Innovation Focus did a large study around health and wellness, mostly related to food. As I was doing a demonstration of the database for a prospective client, and before I could do a search for something health related - like fish - they asked me to search for ice cream. I said OK, but pointed out that the study was health and wellness related; we didn’t ask any questions about ice cream. With some trepidation I typed “ice cream” into the search field, and voila, up came 79 video clips, each with a brief synopsis for easy browsing, of people talking about or doing something with ice cream — and without even the bias of a question.
Think of all the “ice cream” that you have hidden in drawers and cabinets. What if…