Take the pulse of your target groups in their own homes.

Do you truly understand what drives your (potential) customers? After all, in an ever-increasing global market, it gets harder and harder for anyone to get in close contact with consumers. So what can you do to obtain qualitative insights and get inspired when you lack the resources to engage? You get connected to your consumers through E-QUAL©.

Outline

With E-QUAL©, MetrixLab offers you a broad range of state-of-the-art tools and techniques that enable you to connect deeply with consumers in a fast and cost-effective way.

More precisely, we challenge consumers to show their daily lives and share their motives, behaviour, needs and emotions with you by inviting them to participate in various interactive assignments. In this setup, we do not ask them specific questions directly, but rather create the possibility for open and unforced feedback: We ask without actually asking.

Methodology and setup

All of our E-QUAL© setups are based upon the participation of consumers worldwide, invited and selected through our Online Consumer Panel, OpinionBar. Among other options, E-QUAL© can be used for

• Problem scouting – Uncover frustrations and areas for improvement for your own products or for products within your category.
• Opportunity tracking – Have consumers show their habits in your domain, and discover springboards for innovation.
• Online observation research – Experience when, why and how consumers use your products or services without the intervention of a moderator.

Depending on your objectives and requirements, E-QUAL© offers you the following possibilities for pulse-taking:

A profile in pictures and words
Respondents are shown logos of brands, visuals of activities, products, hobbies, etc., on consecutive screens. Each time, we ask them to select the pictures that best fit them. As we show the selected visuals again, we ask them to expand about themselves, based on the selected brands, products or activities.

Moodboard
Because a picture says more than a thousand words, we invite consumers to express their feelings and emotions by creating an online moodboard around a category, product or brand. They can select their own background colour and can choose from a wide variety of relevant pictures related to the objective of the study. After having created the moodboard, they are asked to give their work a title and explain what they have been expressing.

Natural grouping
Natural grouping is very useful to acquire a better understanding of how consumers view the (broader) category you operate in. We confront participants with a set of visuals of different products and ask them to form groups from them. They can make as few or many groups as they like. By naming each group and explaining why certain products fit together, they give you a deep understanding of how consumers look at the designated category.

Picture assignment
With this assignment, we ask respondents to take pictures of themselves and their family, all the products they use from the category under study, pictures of themselves using the product, etc. This exercise gives us an excellent view of the everyday life of consumers, as well as how a product is used.

Diary
A diary task entails respondents keeping a journal for an entire week in which they explain in detail their experiences with a certain product. They inform us on what went well, what frustrated them, how they solved any issue they ran into and so on.

E-QUAL© is often used by our clients in combination with other MetrixLab products, like SCOUT© (Usage & Attitude research), to help define hypotheses and provide input for certain topics that should be covered in quantitative validation. In combination with CRAFTER©, it has proven to be very useful to discover possible interesting domains for idea generation and concept development.

The outcomes of E-QUAL© are presented to you and discussed in detail in an inspirational one- or two-day workshop. (Visual) materials such as personas, moodboards, pictures, diaries and quotes will be used jointly to formulate key learnings and consumer insights, the opportunity par excellence to develop new and relevant concepts.

Your benefits

E-QUAL© provides you with extensive possibilities to get closer to your (potential) customers. With a variety of tasks and assignments, MetrixLab offers you

• consumers sharing their experiences and emotions as a result of challenging and engaging tasks and assignments.
• more honest feedback on every conceivable topic, including personal ones, thanks to the safe in-home situation and absence of a moderator/interviewer.
• extended possibilities to keep participants engaged, even in several survey rounds, thanks to the flexible setup in which participants decide themselves exactly when they fulfill their tasks and assignments.
• more visual output like moodboards, pictures and short movies, making the results more inspiring for marketers.
• sheer endless possibilities for assignments, from shopping in order to buy or look at certain products, to using your product for cooking, cleaning, d.i.y., etc.
• a cheaper and faster option than traditional qualitative methods, especially when conducting research in several countries.
• the possibility to engage a larger number of respondents than by, for instance, focus groups and providing a quantitative "feel" at the same time.

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