A guest blog this time around, from MB&a collaborator, brilliant insight specialist (and strategist and oh so much more) Mitra Powell. Mitra writes:
ONLINE RESEARCH IS NOT NEW, it's provided an agile solution for many years. But in this time of WFH and remote access, online research tools have come into their own. For a long time it was felt that online tools were better suited to young, millennial participants. Nowadays silver surfers ‘google with glee’ and the decision to ‘post or not to post’ is driven less by age or technical ability than by attitude and openness to sharing.
So when MB&a were asked to explore people’s relationship with water in a recent behaviour change project for Affinity Water (slap bang in the middle of lock-down) we naturally looked at online methodologies to get the insights we needed... And actually, in this particular case, online was the best way to uncover what we wanted, as it gave participants the power to share their experiences in the moment, without judgement or comparison.
Because it turns out, our relationship with water is deeply personal. No-one really talks about how they use water; how long they shower, how often they brush their teeth, whether they boil their kettle with fresh water every time, how they wash up, or whether they wash their fruit before they eat it…. The list is endless and endlessly individual.
We all have our own engrained and hidden water habits, and what better way to uncover these than through a carefully plotted, self-guided emotional audit of how people engage with water. Over the course of 5 days we asked participants to take us on a journey of how they interacted with water in different parts of their home, posting voice or video memos of their experiences, as and where they happened.
We added in deprivation and celebration tasks to make the unconscious conscious, helping to uncover the positive emotions of water such as joy, sensual pleasure, comfort and safety, along with uncomfortable tensions such as guilt, loss, defensiveness, and shame. We stimulated fresh thinking with provocative ideas (beautifully expressed by Free the Birds, our creative partners on this project) and only enabled dialogue between participants at the end, keeping each person’s perspective pure.
Given the deeply personal and individual nature of people’s relationship with water, this self-created ethnographic journey, shared and curated through their own online channel, gave participants a research approach that allowed them to be generous, true and richly insightful.
Win-win all round.
Mitra has over 20 years experience as an insight specialist, with a passion for brand strategy and innovation. An accomplished quali with a Masters in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Mitra is dedicated to getting to the underlying motivations that drive people's choices, helping brands to make deeper and more meaningful connections with their customers.
"Getting answers to tricky problems depends on the questions you ask and the openness with which you listen to what's being said. Listen for the meaning behind the words, and often, you're halfway to a solution."
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