MROCs in the Research Playbook
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Jun 23, 2010
Jan Trent of Wendy's International, Inc. presented a case study on Wendy's Consumer Corner, a private, branded MROC, at the MRA Annual Conference in Boston ("Incorporating Consumer Conversations into the Research Playbook").
Moving market research to "social media turf" requires new plays: Defensive plays for researchers are simply monitoring and analyzing social media sites through a dashboard and other listening tools. Offensive plays include building an MROC (which Jan called "a private social media research site") in order to create and lead conversations. "In a public social media site, they don't want us there. We can't lead. People don't go to social media sites to talk to companies. They go to talk to their friends." The private social media site offers greater depth of insights.
Recruiting the team: Wendy's invited fast-food consumers (customers and noncustomers) to join its community (target size of 300) and required each to sign a confidentiality waiver. "We had a letter from the CMO and President of Wendy's saying that they were selected to participate - gave them a personal touch while emphasizing the community's importance." Early participants named the group Wendy's Consumer Corner, the name a play on Wendy's square hamburgers. Why a private community? Jan quoted Samantha Skey, the CMO at Passenger: "Private communities are proving particularly useful to brands wanting to develop deeper customer relationships. For brands, private communities allow marketers to focus the conversation and ask poignant questions that correlate directly to real-time decisions being made at the company rather than jumping in on a discussion in a public forum."
Establishing a private community is like the preseason: A private MROC allows you to start small, experiment, and learn to listen to and direct conversations. You can address specific needs, while testing new tactics and strategy. It definitely has "learning curve advantages".
Before kickoff: To earn executive sponsorship, make sure to link the primary purpose of the community to the corporate strategy. Wendy's had new owners and a new ad campaign ("You know when it's real"), and the community was sold as a way "to dimensionalize ‘making it real'" and bring the slogan to life. As a result, the community had to be useful for Wendy's ad and media agencies, who are provided access to the community.
The gridiron hosts a range of activities with community members, including surveys, discussions, photo journals, video ethnography, diary/worksheets, live chats, white boarding and instant messaging. For surveys, "I had to step back from the structure, because this is qualitative. I adjusted the question to be softer, and I used a different rating scale for community surveys, so that my end user wouldn't compare them to the results our quant studies."
The rules of the playing field have to be learnt. Jan's vendor didn't want her to participate in the community the first few months that it started, but wanted her to observe the members and their own professional moderators. When establishing a new community, it's important to give member's trust, to make the environment safe and to give license to people to share openly. When it came Jan's turn to share, she talked about her love of McDonald's French fries, in part to help members realize they could freely discuss competitors and what they like and dislike about Wendy's.
Clock management: The most intensive demands are in the first months of the community, from project planning, to member recruitment to the initial community exercises. Then the ongoing demands take over: managing the schedule, approving up to four activities per week, with on-going communications and reporting. "I spend a lot of time re-engaging internally: if I don't have member activities every week, my participation will fall off."
Winners and losers: Overall, establishing Wendy's Consumer Corner was a great decision. Things that Wendy's did well: the internal sell-in, the ongoing communications of the results, the personal engagement with members and transitioning to "soft surveys". Things that could have gone better: bringing the legal department in earlier, moving from monologues to conversations, more chats, better allocation of time and personnel and recruiting patrons from other social media sites. "I want to give feedback on a more regular basis. We are going to start up a blog to do that."
What traditional research methods or budgets lost out? "This is an incremental tool for us," Jan said. "It really doesn't replace much. It's one tool in the toolbox, one play in the playbook." Wendy's continues to use focus groups, especially when getting consumer reaction to products or when the research situation better fits a live face-to-face setting. "This does not have to be an either/or decision. Communities are an option available for research, which we use when it fits the study objectives. We play to its strengths - exploratory research, probing, quality, visual - and remember its weaknesses: natural biases, nonprojectable, self-selected."