CHICAGO: General Motors, the automaker, has enhanced the power of its quantitative market research by using qualitative videos that feature carefully selected consumers that can help bring its findings to life.

Ednei Hishida, GM’s global online research manager, discussed this subject at The Market Research Event (TMRE) in Focus 2018 conference held in Chicago by KNect365.

“We were providing a lot of information to the company but we were not necessarily engaging our internal clients,” he said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: GM enlivens dry quant with lively video-driven qual.)

In tackling this problem, GM has leveraged video insights where members of its research panels offer a more in-depth perspective on the topic at hand.

“You can relate to a person,” Hishida said in explaining this approach to the TMRE delegates. “It’s not always easy to relate to numbers.”

Building on this theme, he suggested that hearing speech intonations and seeing non-vocal cues is extremely valuable. “In our written [quantitative] surveys, we can collect only 7% of what our customers are trying to tell us,” he said.

Using a targeted sample of consumers, he continued, is essential, as managing videos from 2,000 people at a time would be “like drinking from a fire hose … It would be completely unmanageable”.

Equally important is collaborating with internal clients to agree on a focal point of about 20 respondents to engage for the video stage of the research.

On the technology side of the equation, consumers can use mobile phones or desktop computers to create their videos, which are prepared for in-house consumption by GM’s researchers.

Alongside representing a cost-effective research solution, the automaker has been able to activate rich insights. “Now my clients can better act on the information they receive,” Hishida said.

Indeed, he reported, this video content has more than proved its worth to the company. “Several times, subtle differences we noticed through video have made all the difference,” he said.

Sourced from WARC