By Marilyn Weiss

In the evolving landscape of market research, methods that leverage technology are continually being developed to gain deeper insights into consumer behavior. Mobile Missions are a straightforward approach that has proven successful for SIVO clients. This approach allows researchers to tap into consumers' real-life experiences in a natural and engaging way, collecting meaningful data in the form of open-ended responses, photos and video footage.  

Understanding Mobile Missions

Mobile Mission research is an immersive approach that leverages mobile technology to engage participants on their own schedule and in their natural environments. This involves prompting consumers to complete a series of activities and questions via their mobile devices, capturing their experiences, thoughts, and behaviors in real-time.  

Benefits of Mobile Missions

Mobile Missions offer several advantages over traditional research techniques:

Real-Time Interaction: Participants receive prompts and tasks on their mobile devices, allowing them to respond in real-time as they shop, prepare, or use products.

Natural Environment: The method captures consumer behavior in real-life settings, such as their homes or local stores, ensuring more genuine participation and deeper insights.

Engagement and Comfort: Participants can complete tasks at their own pace, allowing them time to reflect and encouraging more thoughtful and honest responses.

Remote Observation: Researchers can observe and interact with participants remotely, making it easier to conduct research in environments where in-person observation might be challenging or restricted.

Applications for Mobile Missions

Mobile Missions are versatile and can be utilized to achieve various research objectives. Five common applications that we see at SIVO include:

1. Shopper Insights 

• The First Moment of Truth:   Collect data at the moment consumers encounter a product in the retail environment to understand if the product stands out on the shelf and how it communicates branding and benefits via the package design. You can also capture initial reaction to features like size and pricing relative to competitive options.

• The Second Moment of Truth: Gain real-time reaction on how the product meets consumers’ needs, what it replaces in their current routine, the functionality, ease of use, and overall experience during use.

2. Customer Journey Mapping 

• Experience Mapping: Track the entire customer journey from initial product discovery to post-purchase evaluation. This helps in identifying touchpoints and areas where the customer experience can be improved.

• Service Interactions: Capture experiences with customer service or support, providing real-time feedback on service quality and responsiveness.

3. Brand and Promotion Engagement 

• Brand/Advertising Interaction: Gauge how consumers perceive and interact with a brand in various contexts, such as online browsing, social media engagement, or in-store visits.

• Promotion/ Event Feedback Effectiveness: Capture real-time feedback on promotional events, displays, special offers or discounts that may impact purchase decisions.

4. Behavioral Insights 

• Daily Habits, Routines, Lifestyles: Understand consumers' daily routines and how products fit into their lives. This can include topics like morning routines, parenting styles, health and wellness efforts, or fashion preferences.

• Cultural or Regional Context: Conduct research on how cultural or region-specific differences impact product use and perception, tailoring strategies for different regions or demographic groups.

5. Competitive Analysis 

• Comparative Shopping: Compare products from different brands during shopping trips, providing insights into competitive positioning and consumer preferences.

• Switching Behavior: Investigate reasons behind switching from one brand to another by capturing consumers' experiences with both products.

By utilizing Mobile Missions across these diverse areas, companies can gain a holistic understanding of their consumers and their products, leading to more informed decisions and tailored strategies that resonate with their target audience.

Executional Details

The execution of Mobile Missions typically involves the following specifications:

• Pre-recruited: Consumers or customers are pre-recruited to participate in the mobile mission for a specific time commitment

• Sample Size:  Because this is qualitative research technique, a sample size of 6 -10 participants to represent a specific customer segment is sufficient

• Duration: 2 to 7 days of activities, with daily prompts delivered to participants' phones

• Time Commitment: Approximately 30 minutes of activities each day for participants

• A Series of Questions and Tasks: A Discussion and Activities Guide is pre-programmed into the Mobile Mission platform to guide participants through a series of questions and tasks so they can easily provide written responses, video responses, video or photos of their tasks to capture their perceptions, observations and feedback.  

Your Partner for Progressive Solutions and Actionable Insights

At SIVO, Inc., we are on a constant quest to identify innovative solutions that lead to meaningful insights for our clients. We have had great success in utilizing Mobile Mission technology to capture consumer perceptions and behaviors in a natural and engaging manner to achieve your learning objectives.  

Contact us via our website form or email us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to schedule a discovery call to discuss your business and market research needs.

By Kerry Juhl

Managing a business is non-stop, full-time leadership. Typically, 90% of a leader's workday is focused on the daily needs of employees, customers, supply chain, marketing, sales, financials... and the list goes on.  However, it is also a leader's job to present their team with a vision for the future, a "north star" that provides direction and goals for the organization, allowing them to compete effectively and transform opportunities into growth.

Category Vision: Assessing Your Market and Consumer

A great step in looking toward the future is to take stock of the landscape that you operate within, especially when there are changing dynamics in the external environment. The future growth of your business requires you to have a point of view on how your business will be impacted by changing consumer behaviors and preferences, the actions of your competitive set and external partners, and possibly the impact of new technologies. In other words, you need to have a vision of what your category/industry will look like in 5+ years to remain relevant in that future state and capitalize on future growth opportunities.

Trending

Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?

Our team at SIVO has experience with helping clients build their category vision of the future.  In fact, we have developed a step-by-step process that results in a defined Future-State Category Map to inform the Category Vision and Key Strategies for growth.  A Category Vision not only demonstrates category leadership and anticipates the future, but it allows clients to take control and literally create their own destiny…a future where the business can thrive.

The High-Level Process for Developing a Category Vision:

• Define Current State
• Incorporate Data/Trends Signaling Future State 
• Articulate Future State
• Create a Vision & Strategies to Build Future State

Define Current State: 

Clients need to define the space that they currently play in.  For some it might be narrow, for example, Skin Care.  For others it might be broad, for example, Beauty Products.  (There are pros and cons for how narrow or broad your category definition is and SIVO can guide your team to get to a definition that is relevant and actionable through our consumer insights solutions).

Incorporate Data/Trends Signaling Future State 

This step requires the gathering of category, competitive and consumer intelligence from a variety of sources, to answer questions, like:

• What is happening in the industry or category that my business competes in?
• What segments are growing or declining?
• What are the signs or hints of new segments emerging?
• Are there new consumer behaviors that signal the need to operate differently in the future to remain competitive in this category/industry?

Articulate Future State:

SIVO facilitates the client team through a small series of assignments and working sessions to envision the Future State of the category and to prioritize where to “place bets” within the category to maximize growth.

Create a Vision & Strategies to build Future State:

With the future state of the category defined, SIVO facilitates client teams through the creation of a Category Vision that serves as the "North Star", and Growth Strategies that the organization can put into action to drive category and brand growth for years to come.

Schedule a Discovery Call Today for Strategic Category Vision Consulting

A solid process with proven success. Are you ready to help your business create a category vision for the future?  Schedule a discovery call today or reach out at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to develop strategies and plans that not only anticipate the future but create it!

By Kerry Juhl

Do you know how your customers feel about their experience with your brand? Do they love it, or does it leave them feeling frustrated?

If your customers don’t love their experience with your products or services, your market share is likely at risk. According to a study from PWC,

Even if people love your company or product, in the U.S., 59% will walk away after several bad experiences, 17% after just one bad experience.

You cannot afford to not know how your customers are experiencing your brand.

The Importance of your Customers’ Experience (CX)  

Understanding your customers’ experience can identify product or service flaws. It can be important, even if you are coming from a place of strength. It allows you to build stronger customer relationships, seize new growth opportunities, and maintain a competitive edge in the market. Companies that prioritize a strong understanding of the customer experience are better positioned to meet the needs of their customers where they are and how they want to be served. This allows companies to thrive in today’s customer-centric business environment

Typical Stages in a Customer Journey 

The customer journey is typically divided into sequential stages that represent the key phases of the customer’s interaction with the brand. Stages typically align with the marketing funnel and include “Awareness,” “Consideration,” “Purchase,” “Retention” and “Advocacy.”  These stages may differ, depending on the industry, category, or channels that the brand is competing in.  

What is a Customer Experienced Journey Map? 

A customer experience (CX) journey map is a visual illustration that outlines the steps a customer takes when interacting with a company, brand or specific products or services. It helps organizations gain a deep understanding of the customer’s experience, including their motivations, decision moments, delights, pain points, and emotions that come into play, across all the touchpoints with a brand. Companies may also map the customer journey for competing brands to better understand product strengths and opportunities in a competitive context. 

Understanding the Experience 

Building a customer journey map requires comprehensive qualitative research exploration and is often followed by quantitative validation.  CX Insights Experts start with a combination of observation and qualitative methodologies (e.g., mobile missions, bulletin boards, shop-alongs, in-home visits) to facilitate in-depth conversations with brand or category users. This allows them to delve deeply into each key milestone and brand touchpoint within the customer journey.  With the qualitative exploration completed, experts will often conduct an online quantitative survey to validate the journey and quantify the consumer experience with statistically significant sample sizes. Note that the journey may differ for various user segments (e.g., younger vs. older customers, multicultural customers, households with kids vs. no kids, etc.) so the research must be inclusive of customer groups that are important to the business.  

Activation Planning with a CX Journey Map 

Once the CX Journey Map is complete, it is time to bring the team together to immerse and align on the learning and develop an activation plan.  SIVO recommends a 1-day workshop with key team members and stakeholders to: 

• Immerse in the CX journey (including images, photos, insights, quotes) to create a common understanding and language 
• Identify and prioritize steps with the greatest opportunities for improvement 
• Develop design criteria and starter ideas for product or service improvements  
• Ideate next steps, assign owners, and create timelines 

A Key Asset to Customer Journey Mapping 

Hiring a strategic market research agency with proven CX experience, or a fractional Customer Experience (CX) Insights professional to lead the journey mapping process will set you up for success. You will need experts who have a strong background in CX research design, journey mapping, research execution and activation planning. They will help your team: 

• Assess the state of your brand experience from the customers’ point of view 
• Identify CX improvements that can drive value for customers and the brand 
• Work with your cross-functional team to deliver CX assets (e.g., customer profiles, journey maps, a comprehensive report) 
• Collaborate with your team to develop customer-centric recommendations and activation plans for product/service improvements that lead to growth 

Contact SIVO, Inc. at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to discuss how SIVO can help you map your customer experience.  Also, check out SIVO’s On Demand Talent Profiles to learn more about how a fractional Customer Experience (CX) Insights Manager can be an asset to you and your team.  

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By Kerry Juhl

The Responsibility & Privilege of Serving Customers

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.”​

– Mahatma Gandhi, 1890 

This quote is more than 100-years old, but it is still true today.  The opportunity to serve customers is a privilege.  The responsibility of that privilege is ensuring the customer’s voice is heard and understood.  Brand teams need to know what their customers need and what they value, as decisions about products and services are made on the customers’ behalf.​

Defining Customer Value

Understanding customer value can be a differentiator for companies in today’s challenging market.  Simplistically, if a brand team has $1 to invest – or needs to cut $1 in spending – knowledge about what customers’ value must guide these business decisions to stay competitive. 

So let’s talk about customer value…In everyday conversations, value has many meanings including price, worth, or even benefits. It is imperative for organizations to operate with a common understanding of customer value.  From a marketing and branding perspective, it helps to think about customer value as an equation:
Customer Value equals Benefits minus Cost (CV=B-C)​. 

Benefits include the advantages of quality, service, image, brand, experience, and the functionality one gets or emotions one feels when using the product or service.  Cost is not only price – which we think of as cash, credit, interest, even service fees - but it can also include non-price terms such as time, effort, energy, and convenience.* 

When teams define their Customer Value Equation, they can clearly identify growth opportunities by emphasizing or improving aspects of an offering that customers value (where to invest) and they can identify cost savings by eliminating aspects of the offering that customers do not value (where to cut).

Developing the Customer Value Equation

SIVO employs a 5-Step Process to develop your Customer Value Equation.  In partnership with our client teams, we Mine, Explore and Quantify the customer value drivers leveraging Functional, Emotional, Life-Changing and Social Impact values. Note that the Quantify Step can be qualitative consumer learning, a quantitative survey or ideally, a combination of both.  The design of this step is dependent on how much past learning that the team already has in hand.

Four Categories of Customer Value

We then partner with teams to Develop & Refine the Customer Value Equation. Lastly, we help teams Apply their equation by assessing where their products/services are over/under-delivering and facilitate them through the generation of ideas to improve the customer experience.

The result of our process is rich with discoveries. These insights provide a unifying understanding of the target customers’ purchase drivers, must-haves and nice-to-haves regarding a product or service – giving teams confidence and clarity on what to do with $1 more or $1 less. 

Our Offer to You

SIVO is interested in sharing our Customer Value Equation experience and case studies with you and your insights team!  Our “CVE Download” can easily be part of an in-person or virtual “Lunch & Learn” or your next team meeting.

If you can answer “yes” to at least one of the following three questions, please reach out to SIVO.  

1. Do you want to better understand what your customers value? 

2. Do you want to improve how you serve your customers? 

3. Are you interested in improving: 

• Your products and services, 
• Customer loyalty​, 
• Market share, and 
• Revenue and profit growth?

To learn more, contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com.

*Referenced article by Gautam Mahajan https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2394964320903557