By Kerry Juhl
Fast changing marketplace dynamics and consumer behavior tied to the recessionary economy are putting businesses at a crossroads. Teams need to quickly assess their priorities and pivot to new revenue and profit growth strategies. But in times of upheaval, the activities of teams can take over and they run the risk of confusing activity for progress. The alignment gained by pausing and reflecting as a team can keep the momentum going on key priorities while letting go of the rest.
An important step amidst a consumer learning initiative is to reflect, assess, and decide on next steps. It can happen in-person or virtually and can take as little as 60-90 minutes of the team’s valuable time. For this critical step in the journey, an outside, unbiased facilitator can be your most powerful tool.
There is no better time than now to consider these top 5 benefits of engaging a professional facilitator:
1. Unbiased Professional
A trained facilitator brings the valuable benefit of being an objective leader who can listen to all points of view, not vested in a particular position or outcome. This creates the conditions for a more open dialogue and opportunity to see possibilities that otherwise may be missed.
2. Participate in the Discussion
Ask yourself where you can add the most value. Should you try to participate and facilitate or focus 100% on participating with your team? Engaging a trained facilitator does a couple of things. It sends a message that this work is important. It also allows you, the owner, to invest your energy into the discussion while allowing an expert facilitator to customize the process and tools around your needs and objectives.
3. Full Engagement
Critical to success is hearing from everyone in the group. This can be tricky, particularly if there are strong (or silent) opinions and voices, and now you are not in the same room! Facilitators are skilled at navigating the group dynamics and engaging all participants into the discussion to ensure each voice is heard. They also know how to keep the ideas flowing when the group might get stuck.
4. Stretch Thinking
One of the most valuable benefits of a trained facilitator is the ability to stretch the group’s thinking. They are experts at quickly capturing ideas, summarizing, asking the right questions to build on ideas, connecting the dots between ideas, and pushing participants to think outside the box.
5. Drive to Solutions
With a process designed to meet the objective, the facilitator continually uses techniques to ensure a successful outcome with clear next steps, accountability and buy-in from the group.
Through the stages of Immersion, Interaction and Ideation, we help our clients gain empathy and develop the strategies and alignment needed to boost momentum and forward progress toward the team’s goal. Please contact Kerry.Juhl@SIVOInsights.com to learn how we can customize an approach with the right professional facilitator to meet your needs. We have a team of seasoned professionals who are passionate about working with like-minded clients and would love to talk to you!
As customer needs evolve and competition intensifies, traditional segmentation frameworks often fall short. Many segmentation models are based on demographics and psychographics, and often define customers based on traits such as their age, gender, attitudes and values. They tell you who your consumer is – but not why they make the choices they do.
To fuel meaningful, strategic growth, businesses need more than demographic snapshots. They need contextual insight. This is where frameworks like Demand Space thinking comes in.
Demand Space frameworks shift the focus from static consumer traits to the moments that drive decisions. Instead of defining your audience only by traits such as age, gender, or income, this approach considers:
It’s not about who your consumer is on paper – it’s about what’s happening around them, and inside them, when they make choices.
Consumers don’t always behave the same way, even when they share similar traits on paper. A single person has different needs and behaviors throughout the day, week, or year, and traditional segmentation often misses these moments that drive real-world decisions. Demand Spaces, on the other hand, are based on the moments where context, emotion, and need converge.
When implemented thoughtfully, Demand Spaces help businesses:
Demand Spaces help businesses find the moments when consumers are underserved by existing options. These blind spots often become the clearest opportunities for growth. By identifying emotional or contextual gaps in the consumer experience, teams can design solutions that respond to real pain points and not using assumptions.
They also help businesses go beyond what consumers say they want and uncover what they actually need in specific situations. This helps teams design offerings that better reflect real-world behaviors. It’s a way to spark smarter ideas, grounded in daily routines, shifting priorities, and overlooked occasions that traditional research often misses.
Demand Space tools help position brands based on context and need, not just category. This reduces overlap and creates clearer brand roles. That means brands can carve out distinct emotional territory, ensuring each one plays a defined role in the consumer’s life, not just on a shelf.
By focusing efforts on the most critical consumer moments – when the stakes, emotions, or needs are highest – teams can prioritize smarter. It enables brands to align resources with the occasions that drive the most value, loyalty, or conversion – improving both focus and ROI.
They also help in assigning each brand, product, or service distinct moments. This ensures they serve different needs or occasions rather than competing for the same ones. By separating who serves what – and when – demand spaces bring clarity to brand architecture and reduce inefficiencies across portfolios.
Demand Spaces help businesses unlock growth by bringing clarity to what consumers need, when they need it, and why. Instead of chasing broad segments or spreading resources thin, brands can focus on the moments that truly drive behavior – revealing new opportunities, reducing internal friction, and building solutions that resonate in the real world.
Let’s say your target is a 35-year-old parent who regularly shops for snacks. Depending on the situation, they might want:
Each moment carries different emotional and functional needs – and may lead them to choose entirely different brands or products. This is the nuance Demand Spaces capture.
In a challenging market, brands can’t afford to rely on guesswork. Demand Spaces provide both smarter lenses for targeting and innovation, a more human understanding of consumer behavior, and a faster path to discovering what will actually drive choice – and growth.
To identify and activate demand spaces, brands need to move beyond static surveys. Instead, they should use context-rich research tools like:
These are some of the methods that help businesses capture real consumer behavior, in real environments. At SIVO, we combine deep qualitative expertise with flexible research models to help you map the demand spaces that matter most to your business. Whether you're reassessing brand positioning, exploring whitespace for innovation, or trying to understand behavior shifts in today’s market – we help you with the right tools and insights for your business.
Want to talk about how Demand Space research can unlock strategic clarity for your team?
We’d love to help!
By Ashton Walz
Are you new to Market Research? Or do you know someone who is new to market research? Many of us came out of business school with no more than one market research class under our belts so that means we had to learn the art and science of market research while on the job. But learning our craft while doing the job can be tricky because you're often "trying to safely fly the airplane while building it." With this in mind, the SIVO team thought it would be great to share the basics of quantitative online survey design with the next generation of market researchers out there. To our experienced clients and friends, please feel free to pass these nuggets on to someone new to our industry!
The Art of the Market Research Survey
An online survey for quantitative market research can be the key to gaining critical insight into your market, consumer, brand, product, or competition. Collecting this valuable data will lead to a better understanding of the market you operate in and your consumers’ preferences, opinions, behaviors, and needs. Leveraging the data and insights gathered from surveys, business teams can make informed decisions, shape their strategies, and refine their products or services.
But collecting this data can be tricky. If the survey is not designed well, organizations can be misled by inaccurate data. Market researchers have a phrase for this…“Garbage in, garbage out.” No one wants to make bad decisions from bad information so here are 10 tips for writing a great market research survey.
10 Tips for Great Online Surveys
Survey development requires both rigor and creativity. It takes experience and practice to get it right but there are some basic rules that will help you garner more accurate results:
1. Define Your Objectives
Clearly establish the purpose and objectives of your survey. Identify the specific information you want to gather and the decisions or actions that will be influenced by the survey results. This should be done first to give your survey questions purpose and direction. A best practice is to categorize your survey questions under each business objective so that when the data is collected, you know that you’ll have the answers you need.
2. Include an Introduction and Instructions
Provide a clear introduction at the beginning of the survey, explaining the purpose, importance, and estimated time for completion. Include instructions for navigating the survey and answering the questions.
3. Ensure Anonymity and Confidentiality
Assure respondents that their answers will remain confidential and anonymous. Avoid collecting personally identifiable information unless necessary for specific research purposes. Be transparent about how you will handle, store and share out the data. This allows the respondent to be comfortable and candid in their responses, which improves accuracy and depth of insight.
4. Avoid Leading or Biased Questions
Frame questions in a neutral manner to avoid biasing the respondents' answers. Use balanced language and avoid leading statements that could influence the respondents' opinions. A survey created with biased questions will ultimately be thrown out as the respondent’s answers are not representative of how they actually feel. An example of a leading question is, “Which product features do you find most useful?” This question assumes that consumers find the product useful when they might not find it useful at all.
5. Provide Response Options
Offer a variety of response options that cover the range of possible answers. Include options like "don't know" or "prefer not to answer" to account for respondents who may not have a specific answer or may be uncomfortable sharing certain information. In doing so, it becomes a lot easier to avoid bad data and get an accurate look at your consumer target’s preferences.
6. Use Logical Flow and Organization
Organize your survey in a logical and coherent order. Start with easy, less intimidating questions to engage respondents and progressively move towards more specific or sensitive topics. By using this ‘funnel’ technique it helps prime the respondent to think more critically when the in-depth questions come up. This organization can also help the researcher to weed out any respondents that would not provide accurate or helpful information for the study. (e.g., if someone doesn’t buy carbonated water, don’t ask them what their favorite flavor is.)
7. Avoid Double-barreled questions
To ensure that your data is clear and insightful, be sure to avoid asking about two topics in a single question as it creates ambiguity in the data and leaves the analyst wondering how to interpret it. For instance, the question, “Please rate how well you like the lighting and atmosphere of this store?” leaves the analyst wondering if the respondent considered the lighting, the atmosphere or both when providing a rating.
8. Make it Interesting
A well-designed market research survey aims to uncover crucial information while simultaneously engaging with the target audience, to cultivate a sense of involvement. A mix of closed and open-ended question types can create a more interactive and enjoyable survey. Not only does it provide for an immersive experience but generally leaves the respondent feeling like they are being heard as they can freely express themselves through various types of questions.
9. Keep Survey Length under 15 minutes
In the same vein as making the survey interesting, survey length should be no longer than 15 minutes and ideally, 12 minutes or less. When respondents get fatigued, it can negatively impact their attention and diligence which impacts data accuracy. Long lengths also lead to incomplete surveys as respondents drop off.
10. Test Your Survey
Before launching the survey, conduct a pilot test with a small group of respondents to identify any confusing or problematic questions. Adjust based on their feedback to ensure clarity and relevance. This can prove to be extremely useful as there could be some things the survey designer didn’t catch that a respondent will.
Your Source for Expert Consumer Insights
At SIVO, Inc., we dedicate ourselves to creating engaging and accurate quantitative market research surveys that help you better understand your market and consumers. We are experts in developing the appropriate questions and applying the right analytic techniques to deliver insights that meet your business objectives.
Contact us via our website form or email us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call!
Before we experienced a worldwide pandemic and the Great Resignation, employers knew how to keep and retain talent. The focus was on providing work-life balance, exciting roles, improved technology, and better onboarding and training. In this new age, people are requesting flexible work schedules and locations. A report by the Future Forum, a group within Slack Technologies Inc, found that “95% of employees want flexible schedules and 78% want flexible locations.”
While not having to stick to a fixed 9-5 schedule and the ability to work from anywhere can be helpful to workers, employers need to dig deeper to understand how this will play out. These new ways of working come with drawbacks that can sneak up and drag down employee satisfaction and morale.
Because the boundaries aren’t as firm as they once were. We used to have a built-in transition with the commute to and from work. Many of us no longer have that physical and mental transition that ends work time and starts home time.
comes from being online all day, in virtual meetings, without truly interacting or collaborating with people face-to-face. Gone are the spontaneous “water cooler chats” and the conference room banter that happens before and after meetings.
If you find yourself talking to your dog or cat throughout the day, you are not alone. Working from home can create feelings of loneliness and isolation, as people find themselves rarely needing to leave their home/work office. This can be especially true if you started a job during the pandemic and you have never met your co-workers or manager in-person.
Many companies are incorporating new approaches to support employees in adjusting to flexible schedules and locations, such as:
If you haven’t listened to your employees recently, now is the time. We can help you and your organization understand what employees REALLY want, and how to help them achieve the balance they crave in this new world we are navigating.
With SIVO’s Organizational Intelligence Solution, we dig deep via employee interviews and group discussions to understand the challenges and engagement of the workforce. We facilitate leaders in the development of strategies and solutions to help employees cope with the “side effects” that come with flexible work schedules and remote work environments.
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By Marilyn Weiss
Did you know that 81% of consumers say they want brands to get to know them and 66% report that they would be willing to share their personal data to receive more personalized experiences?*
While there are many market research techniques for getting to know your consumers, one of the best ways to understand the intricacies of what they think and do is to “walk” side by side with them in a real-world context. Being with them in the moments that matter, you can discover the underlying linkages to how they make choices about your product or service. This is the essence of ethnographic research; a powerful market research methodology that delves deeply into the lives, habits, and environments of consumers to uncover rich insights that explain their behavior.
What is Ethnographic Research?
Ethnographic research is a qualitative research method that is rooted in anthropology. In the context of market research, ethnography involves observing and interacting with consumers in their everyday environments, such as homes, workplaces, or community spaces. Skilled Research Strategists will immerse themselves in the lives of participants, seeking to uncover unfiltered insights into their behaviors, motivations, and decision-making processes.
When to User Ethnographic Research
Ethnographic research is particularly valuable in scenarios where understanding consumer behavior in context is essential. Here are some situations where ethnography can be highly effective:
New Product Development: Exploring how consumers use existing products or navigate specific tasks or routines can provide invaluable insights for developing new products or improving existing ones.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has gone deep into the lives of senior citizens and how they communicate and interact with their families, living nearby and a far, to inform the development of health tracking devices for older people and their families.
Improving the Customer Experience: Understanding the customer journey and identifying pain points or opportunities for improvement can inform strategies to enhance the overall customer experience.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has spent quality time alongside farmers and hunters on their properties to help clients better understand their experiences with outdoor utility vehicles.
Cultural Understanding: When entering new markets or engaging with unique consumer groups ethnography helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of cultural norms, rituals, values, and preferences.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has explored the lives and rituals of pet owners and how different pet parent styles dictate their dog and cat food buying behavior and preferences.
Gaining Reaction to your Brand: Examining how consumers interact with and perceive brands in their everyday lives can uncover perceptions, attitudes, and emotions that shape brand relationships.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has worked with a national retailer to understand the impact of their new store footprint on shoppers’ overall shopping norms, routines and perceptions of the store brand, as our client developed unique-to-market storefronts.
Best Practices for Conducting Ethnographies with Consumers
1. Establish Rapport: It is critical to build trust and rapport with participants to encourage openness and honesty during observations and interviews. Respect their way of living and cultural sensitivities throughout the research process.
2. Observe without Bias: Approach observations with an open mind, avoiding preconceived notions or biases. Pay attention to subtle cues, behaviors, and non-verbal communication that may reveal underlying motivations or attitudes. Most insights come from observing what they do and not just listening to what they say.
3. Dig beyond the “what” to get to the “why”: It is easy to capture what is happening in their lives but understanding the reasons why and the associated emotions and values is where the rich insights are found.
4. Use Multiple Data Collection Methods: Combine observation, interviews, photography, video recordings, and artifacts to capture a comprehensive view of participants' lives and experiences.
5. Maintain Confidentiality: Because consumers are opening up their lives and homes to us, we need to respect their space and maintain their privacy, ensuring informed consent and confidentiality for participants throughout the research process.
6. Stay Open and Flexible: Be prepared to adjust research plans and methods based on unexpected discoveries or changes in the environment. Embrace flexibility to capture emerging insights effectively.
7. Gather Diverse Perspectives: Engage with a diverse range of participants to capture a breadth of experiences and perspectives. Consider factors such as age, gender, income, and cultural background, as well as product usage, in your recruitment criteria.
8. Limit the Size of your Team: When visiting consumers’ homes or workplaces, you will want to limit the visiting team to 1 interviewer, 1 videographer and 1 client team member per respondent. The idea is to keep it casual and as close to reality as possible. It also helps encourage respondent candor.
9. Bring a Videographer: A high-quality video reel will bring your consumers to life for the stakeholders in your organization. Trust us. It is absolutely worth the added expense to have a professional behind the video equipment!
10. Translate Insights into Recommendations: Finally, give your research partner the time to comb through the notes, video and transcripts to synthesize the data, identify the ethnographic insights and translate the insights into actionable recommendations. This will always take longer than you think it will!
By using these guidelines to fully embrace a holistic understanding of consumers’ lives, businesses can uncover nuanced insights that help build a relationship with their consumers, inform strategic decisions and drive innovation.
SIVO for your Ethnographic Research
As business teams try to navigate an increasingly complex and dynamic marketplace, SIVO’s skilled and experienced research team can lead you through ethnographic research to make sense of the mysteries of consumer behavior and unlock new opportunities for growth. Reach out to the SIVO team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to schedule a discovery call today!
For more DIY approaches, check out SIVO’s On Demand Talent Profiles to learn more about how an experienced, fractional Qualitative Research Strategist/Expert Moderator can be also an asset for your ethnographic research needs.
Introduction statistics cited from Forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/07/18/why-customer-centricity-is-a-key-to-long-term-success/?sh=60917fb67f64
SIVO Insights brings together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence. Have a business challenge? Let's talk!
We bring together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence
