In-person, On-site Research Produces More Actionable Insights

This week, Mike Reiber and Rob Beachy are in Florida interviewing golf course superintendents from 6 of the state’s top 10 golf courses on behalf of one of our clients.

Six of the top ten courses are using a new generation amino acid-based fertilizer called AminOrganix 9-3-7.  This new organic fertilizer increases turf root mass and depth, heals turf quickly (within 15 days) after aeration or other course maintenance tasks, and eliminates surface and groundwater runoff/pollution commonly associated with chemical fertilizers.         

Our goals?  Record user experience. Refine positioning and messaging. Identify new use protocols.  Expand content marketing with user testimonials.

At Axiom, our culture dictates that our team is on the road at least once per month visiting our clients’ customers. 

Why?  It’s not good enough to generate customer insights from online surveys and focus groups or Zoom meetings.  There’s no substitute for in-person customer feedback.  Regardless of initiative — innovation, concept refinement, positioning and messaging, channel strategy, or test markets – in-person, on-site customer interactions have been integral to our client’s market success.

At Axiom, we use the following four tools to maximize the effectiveness of on-site interactions: 

• Project strategy brief – We prepare a one-page project brief. The brief summarizes client strategy, marketing, and sales objectives and relates them to project goals, deliverables, and possible uses for customer feedback. 
• Respondent pre-meeting exercise – Prepared respondents offer better insights. Prior to interviews, focus groups, and ideation sessions, we always distribute a brief that includes an exercise to complete before the interviews.  The brief also provides a list of questions.  Incentives are essential to spur the completion of the exercise prior to the meetings. We also offer a second incentive after the meeting.   
• AI analysis – We videotape and digitize most interviews and then use Axiom’s proprietary artificial intelligence tools to analyze word choice, phrases, tonality, and body language The analysis uncovers beneficial insights that can be missed.  Also, digital excerpts are extremely useful for customer journey maps.
• Digital excerpts – Verbatims are a great way to tie findings to actionable research summaries and implications. When appropriate, we provide video and audio excerpts to our clients who then use them for internal and channel partner presentations.

Would you like to gain deeper customer insights? Give us a call we can help!