Capturing video for research used to be so difficult, piling into people's homes and workplaces with tripods, heavy camcorders, tapes and lighting. But, now technology has made it so easy!
Not only can you do it all (lighting, filters, sound, picture) with one smartphone or tablet but you can also cut out the need to send the research team on the road and collect lots of self-captured video clips, allowing for more timely, responsive and often honest responses.
As we are becoming more and more comfortable with snippets of ourselves existing on film in all sorts of contexts, we have an opportunity to observe directly how the consumer feels. The smartphone in particular provides a window directly into a very personal and otherwise inaccessible space, capturing some in the moment snippets of people during their daily lives can be really powerful and is really easy to do.
How to Use Video Selfies in Research
Whilst I am a huge fan of video-selfies (where researchers ask participants to record their thoughts straight down the camera) the clips you can collect from consumers don't end there. You could:
- Capture consumer in-store experiences
- Capture the use of your products in home or on the go
- Record clips of website usage
- Capture interactions with your brand
At FlexMR we're always keen to use a wide portfolio of techniques to examine consumer behaviour, every method has its own benefits and we have found the magic is in how it is combined.
Whether you take a research community approach (where you invest in creating an open, sharing environment), do something collaborative and co-create (like SmartboardMR with group interactions) or conduct research for something more tactical and project specific (like combining polls, forums and a couple of key one to one interviews) all of these methods benefit enormously from some supporting snippets of video, that aren't any more expense to you or your consumers to share. So, next time you write your research objectives and you need the answers fast, don't forget you can still open that window and have a good peer in!
To book a free trial of the FlexMR research platform and make use of our wide range of quant & qual tools, click here. Or, click here to read more about the flexible management levels we can provide.
