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.
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.
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 the combining.
Whether you take a research community approach (where you invest in creating an open, sharing environment), do something collaborative and co-create (like smartboards with group interactions, see here) 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!
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