Working in the UK and Internationally
Moderation & In-Depth Interviews
‘Beware clients holding their own “insight sessions” with “consumers”. It’s useful to a point. But it’s not the same as employing a trained, experienced researcher’
Binet & Carter ‘how not to plan – 66 ways to screw it up’
Are you looking for qualitative or quantitative research that gets inside your target audience and provides you with the insights you need?
Moderation is both a science and an art. All data is picked up through the moderator’s questions and interaction, so good moderation will collect good data while poor quality moderation will collect poor quality data. So, choosing a high-quality moderation provider is the best route to maximizing your insights. In other words, it’s not just a case of asking a few simple questions and recording the answers.
The science is the understanding of methodology, research bias, techniques of asking questions in a certain way and keeping the conversation focused. Due to focus group time constraints, getting the most out of a session is key.
The art of moderation is to create a comfortable environment where respondents feel like they are having a great conversation with an old friend. In this way, they provide honest and authentic answers without needing to invent or contrive their responses.
Done correctly, good focus group & in-depth interview moderation provides respondent output which is unfabricated and delivers authentic insights.
In-Depth Interviews
In-Depth interviews (aka IDIs) provide extensive insight into a specific type of customer.
Whereas focus groups gather a wide range of perspectives in a short time, an in-depth interview follows a respondent into the detail of their life and customer journey.
This technique delivers comprehensive information on how customers respond to many variables including pain points, innovation, environment, price, design and service quality.
Focus Groups
Focus Groups provide quick, in-depth insights into attitudes, opinions, behaviours and interactions.
A focus group can be designed to cover a lot of ground and test many hypotheses (a Kaleidoscopic approach) or it can zoom further and further into one issue (a Microscopic approach).
In practice, these two approaches can be blended according to the client’s priorities.