Steve Jobs once said: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them". In many instances survey or discussion research cannot deliver what researchers need because people simply cannot express how, when and why they act in certain ways. In our observational research methods, we observe online and offline consumer behavior without asking questions in a direct way. They provide answers to questions we even never knew we should be asking.

Consumer-driven ethnography

We empower consumers throughout the entire ethnography process:

• Consumers observe their own environment using different multimedia devices, taking pictures, shooting videos, or sending SMS status updates
• They upload their user-generated content to interactive blogs and online diaries
• Through crowd interpretation, clients as well as other consumers are involved in interpreting data, providing complementary perspectives to understanding stimuli.
• Our qualitative researchers apply different creative techniques to detect interesting data patterns leading to new consumer insights. Our toolkit includes text analytics, visual ethnography, and qualitative deep dives.
• During 'auto driving' sessions, we bring back our preliminary insights to consumers, allowing us to fine-tune the insights we have generated.

This unique approach reduces potential Hawthorne effects (people acting differently as they are observed by an external observer) and takes away researcher gaze (suffered by external observers having a selective perception and interpretation). To maximize organizational impact and drive change, we bring consumer stories to life within your organization via blogs, news flashes and movies.

Social media nethnography

Hundreds of millions of conversations about products and brands take place every day on blogs, forums, review sites, Twitter, YouTube and social networks. They provide tremendous opportunities to listen and learn from what is being said. Our groundbreaking and award-winning social media netnography approach facilitates insight generation, enhances brand understanding, sparks ideation, and tracks marketing activation impact:

• Selecting relevant keywords and paying close attention to data quality, we monitor the most relevant online sources for the research objective and structure conversations in a consistent format
• Using advanced text analytics and applying a unique emotional framework (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch), we unravel big themes present in online conversations, understand the emotions expressed, and deep dive into themes using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data analysis.
• We report results either ad hoc or in a dashboard format, allowing our clients to track performance and to use the dashboard according to their specific needs.

We have successfully applied observational research methods for a wide range of clients such as Lego, Danone, UCB, MTV Networks, helping them turn hidden insights, trends and motivations into the blindingly obvious.