Delivering Continuous Insights: Involving Consumers in Every Decision
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Sep 19, 2008
On Monday, Monica Wood, VP of Global Marketing Services for Novartis Consumer Health, gave a great presentation at the American Marketing Association's 2008 Marketing Research convention in Boston, entitled Delivering Continuous Insights: Involving Consumers in Every Decision. Monica began by saying, "New technologies in market research bring the consumer and key influencer into the meeting room at every business decision point. Online communities allow market researchers and internal teams to deliver continuous insights through near ‘real-time' interaction with target consumers and professionals."
Novartis adopted online communities in the interest of saving research time and research dollars, while increasing the frequency of research. Novartis typically uses its communities for qualitative research, "deliver[ing] early insights in a timeframe allowing concept and program refinement prior to quantification".
Online communities for Novartis work best when private and secure, with participation by invitation only, after rigorous screening of potential invitees. Novartis targets about 300 members per community, with some communities representing a narrow demographic and some communities designed to represent the broad target population. In the third quarter of 2006, Novartis launched a consumer community, a professional influencer community and a pharmacist community; these were so successful that Novartis launched two additional communities in the last quarter of 2007. Novartis uses the communities for understanding brand insights, developing packaging, estimating the strength of clinical messaging and gauging the impact of promotions on purchases.
For recruiting, Novartis used standard recruiting methods that are used for building panels, involving online lists, with telephone screening interviews to make sure the people were who they said they were. Members are typically recruited for six-month periods, but some are kept for a year.
Similar to enterprise feedback management initiatives, online communities need "rigorous partnering with internal teams (i.e., privacy office, IT, legal team)" to ensure compliance with privacy requirements, information security practices and incentive administration.
Surveys are an important part of online communities, needed to obtain qualitative feedback from the entire community and providing opportunities for "structured routing for questions" and for demographic cross-tabulation. Member demographics and practice firmographics (size of the doctor's practice, age of the practice) are used in breaking out the survey results.
Besides surveys, the online community provides the following tools: discussion threads, online chats (analogous to focus groups), gallery of member-posted images, and more. For a specific need to develop materials for doctors, the team used most of these tools to develop messaging collateral prior to quantitative testing:
- Discussion forums to understand the information used to select a treatment for the condition
- Gallery to share images of the types of materials that doctors found informative
- Online chats both to obtain initial reactions to early drafts and to obtain final reactions prior to formal quantitative testing
- Surveys to gather feedback from all the doctors
The members of the communities become very engaged partners. Monica said, "We ended one community but people actually went crazy. They were ballistic, saying, ‘we love this, don't close it!' The doctors didn't want us to stop. The consumers didn't want us to stop. Once you start a community, be willing to invest and commit to it, as you may get a backlash if you try to close it down. You have to close it down gently and amicably."
In the past year, Novartis has conducted 130 community surveys, 330 discussion threads, 160 brainstorming activities, 14 online chats and several diary assignments. Novartis considers online communities to be a "Best In Class" research approach at "half the cost of traditional methods" with "months time savings".