How to Be a Digital Boss Without Burning a Hole in Your Pocket?

Ever found yourself in a situation where people say, ‘Go digital, use digital tools for research’ and you wonder ‘But which one, where to apply, is it really helpful, worth my time and money or do I just need to use it to flaunt something at the next global call?’

I’ve got you covered!

If you want a win-win situation where a digital tool ACTUALLY helps you as well as gives you talking points for that dreaded year-end review, then read further!

Here are my FABULOUS – FIVE digital tools that I’ve used across Asia, Europe, UK, US and Africa for consumer research. 

1. Video Capturing Tool: Voxpopme

A quick and user-friendly consumer video capture, analysis and editing tool.

• How it works: Get access to a dashboard, create your screener/questionnaire easily with 5-6 open ended questions, get the link, send it to your consumer (directly/via the recruiting agency), embed it into your quantitative questionnaire/qualitative focus groups towards the end). Consumers open the link and via mobile/laptop self-record their answers via video. Within 24 hrs all videos can be seen, analyzed, edited, stitched to make a video showreels with background music, slides, subtitles, captions, etc.
• Where best to use:  When you have 5-6 key open ended questions to ask specially to supplement quantitative research to uncover some of the ‘WHYs’
• My favorite features: By selecting/highlighting interesting verbatim from the consumer’s transcript, the corresponding video clip gets clipped by a simple drag and drop making it very convenient to create a showreel. You can also search for key words like Brand X, feature Y in the text and get all relevant video clips.

2. AI Based Visualizer: Bing Image Creator

A free AI based tool that creates product, pack, and mould designs within seconds.

• How it works: Log into Bing Image Creator. Type in your idea via text by being as descriptive as possible. For Example: ‘Create a fun, colorful pack of potato chips for kids which has a zip lock and a semi-transparent window with brand name XYZ, must have the signature Yellow colour of the brand XYZ’. Within seconds you will see 4 options of almost real looking pack designs. You can then edit your query text to make the output as close to what you have in mind. All visuals get saved on the tool and can be downloaded. 
• Where best to use:  During innovation and creative workshops, to add visuals to work-in-progress concepts, hypothetical solutions on concept cards for quick screening, during qualitative groups when asking consumers to design their ideal product/pack/mould design.
• My favorite features: Neither do you need to be good at drawing/sketching yourself nor do you need to brief a design agency/an illustrator/a visualizer/a graphic designer to bring your idea alive. So now anybody can design! Even if you are someone like me who always loses at Pictionary!

3. Crowdsourcing of Ideas: Eÿeka by Human8

A tool to crowdsource product, pack, service, mould design ideas from creative consumers around the world.

• How it works: Create a one-pager easy to understand brief with an insight, consumer problem to solve, category, target audience, when and where to use with any boundaries/constraints that you might have. Send the brief to Human8, they send it to their global panel of creative consumers including designers, ex advertising people. Within a week receive over 80 – 100 ideas with a well described detailed idea with sketches/images as references for pack/product/service/mould design. You may choose to take all ideas and shortlist/screen/build on them internally in an Innovation workshop or take Human8’s service to help shortlist based on a pre-set criteria given by you. The legal rights to the idea are relinquished and transferred by the consumer to the agency and thereafter to the client. Hence, no IP related issues in case you launch the idea in the market.
• Where best to use:  During initial idea generation, exploratory stages in the innovation process before prototyping.
• My favorite features: Helps widen the thinking pool of people, provides great inspiration to build/refine further internally and anyone from anywhere could come up with the greatest idea. Example: For my consumer problem in Australia, the ideas that made to the shortlist came from creative consumers from Brazil, France and Indonesia – all within one week.

4. AI Chatbot: EVE by The Evolved Group

An AI based conversational chatbot.

• How it works: List down the key topics of inquiry whether qualitative or quantitative and share it with the agency. They program the questions with pre coded responses, probing questions and this link can be sent to consumers directly on strategic projects or with agencies working on CLT or iHUTs in any language. They answer the questions via text or voice, get probed further to understand the WHY’s. You can either access the analysis tools directly and review conversation and analytics online or get Power Point reports with analyzed information as well as consumer verbatims to add to your story.
• Where best to use:  To add a quick, cost-effective qualitative leg to a quantitative study. or a deeper qualitative investigation coupled with video or image data. Example: With a quantitative study with 300-500 consumers, instead of doing 10-20 short qualitative interviews, this chatbot can finish 500 qualitative interviews within minutes. Not a full replacement for focus groups or depth interviews as conversations are typically less than 5 minutes but large sample sizes allow deep exploration. 
• My favorite features: The chatbot is continuously learning and feels like chatting with an actual qualitative moderator. She picks up on key words from your response and probes further to ladder down to details for better understanding. Very quick and cost effective compared to booking moderators to do short qualitative interviews.

5. End to End DIY Research Platform:  ASKABLE

A DIY platform where you can screen, recruit, schedule, moderate, run qualitative/quantitative studies within days.

• How it works: Sign up on the dashboard, create your screener, receive responses from the global panel of consumers, manually (Qualitative)/automatically (Quantitative) choose respondents, get their preferred time slots, and put in your preferred time slots, send invites and once you get a match, you are ready to conduct the interview on the platform itself where video recordings get auto saved. Even quantitative surveys can be conducted via the dashboard, but you will need someone to programme the questionnaire. 
• Where best to use:  For scheduling regular consumer connects with cross functional teams/stakeholders, for quick turnaround projects, for simple studies where complicated analysis is not required from the research agency but more knowing my consumer, concept tests, dipsticks that can be self-moderated.
• My favorite features: The ‘scheduling calendar’ shows preferred time slots for the consumers and you/stakeholders thus saving a lot of back and forth with cross functional teams looking for a convenient time to meet consumers online. With this you don’t even need to ‘e-mail’ consumer connect/fieldwork schedule to anyone.

So, here’s wrapping up my top 5 go-to digital weapons that are convenient to apply across multiple geographies, types of consumer studies and truly help me in better storytelling during research presentations. Which one do you plan on trying first?