Using social media to develop new people research methodologies

While the use of social media in marketing is quite well-established, it is less so in research. The recent Menu Menu project within Philips Design was set up to explore social media as a research tool, to gain a better understanding of people’s behavior. Social media enabled the People Research team to take in-sight generation and co-creation with consumers to a new level of engagement and gain knowledge in areas strategic for the business.

The research team moved away from the more traditional methods of identifying needs and developing solutions. “We wanted to gain an in-depth understanding of our target audience with respect to food and cooking, and how they approach dilemmas and issues in the kitchen,” explains Jon Rodriguez, Senior Research Consultant and Creative Lead for the Menu Menu project. “Our target group were people who enjoyed cooking, had children and also worked during the week.”

From passive to proactive
In order to glean a new level of information from participants, the project involved them in a dialogue rather than just asking them questions in the traditional style of research. Generative techniques used the creativity of people to become aware of and express their own experiences.

 The project tested out three more proactive approaches:
• Moving from questions to dialogue – having a conversation about cooking;
• Moving from observations to provocations – participants were set challenges and creative exercises to stimulate more innovative ideas;
• Moving from the idea of individual users to community – so that people would trigger each other.

Creating an online dialogue
The Philips Design People Research team worked with an external agency Funky Projects, to set up and build the communities. As well as using Facebook and Twitter, a website was created to recruit participants, and this was then the main forum for keeping them engaged and having fun with the project.

The initial focus was on Spain and Germany, where a small number of participants were identified in each (30 in total). The project ran for a specific period of just two weeks, during which 10 days of challenges were set. When participants signed up to be involved they were sent a box containing information and materials relating to some of the challenges, as well as some surprise envelopes. The challenges were all food related, with the aim of gaining more information about context and rituals.

“Provoking a dialogue helped inspire innovative ideas that we could explore with the whole group, as well as giving us deeper insights,” explains Rodriguez. “For example, we asked people to invite their best friend for dinner who would then interview them. (We provided the questions on a place mat.) We also asked participants to make a 360 degree video of their kitchen, and asked which were their 5 favorite kitchen tools and their 5 forgotten tools. Fortunately people love to talk about food, and fun was also a key element, so it had wide appeal and the participants actually enjoyed it.”

After a while an English version of the site was built in addition to the Spanish and German versions so that staff working on the project could also get more involved and share their own insights. At the end, the results and priorities were presented back to the communities for further feedback and dialogue.

The participants were very engaged in the project and the methodology elicited a lot more ‘real’ information that was set in daily context. This participatory approach, leveraging online platforms, made it much easier to observe the latent needs that people had, that may not have been expressed in a more traditional research exercise. “This project was very authentic, we were completely immersed in it and everything was shared between participants as well,” says Rodriguez. 

This project has generated experience and knowledge of new methods of people research to add to possible techniques. Overall there is benefit to be had in mixing different methods to complement each other.  For example, anecdotes expressed in a generative session can elucidate the understanding of a field visit observation. Participatory methods, such as Menu Menu, are invaluable in understanding latent needs and co-creating solutions with consumers.

10 January 2012