The Quest for Creativity in Research

I am a firm believer in getting your hands dirty when it comes to discovering Human Insights through 'Consumer Research'.

I was recently consulted to propose a research technique to understand why people use Instagram in Australia. Mainly, What a day in their life looks like, how Instagram plays a role, key triggers/motivations for usage, and how other brands are really engaging with people in this platform.

Past studies conducted on Instagram showed that women were more active on this platform and the content posted varied by format: For example, Photos were more about personal experiences, and Videos were about sharing bite-sized engaging content. What was interesting though, was that, there were also differences seen by region. You had more foodies in a city vs self-proclaimed Narcissists in the other city.

While a Qualitative approach was ideal for what we wanted to achieve this study, we did not want to only go in for run-of-the-mill, traditional techniques like Focus Groups. Instead, we recommended 2 studies to get an in-depth understanding of consumer motivations and drivers with regard to their Instagram usage.

1. Mini-groups with a Twist: 6-8 respondents are gathered in a comfortable setting (a cafe, beach) to discuss their attitudes about Social Media (particularly Instagram) among other things

Participants would keep a log of their Instagram usage prior to this discussion (over the past 7 days) This log is discussed in the group. Not only this, we would include Projective techniques where participants are asked to take a break for about 15 minutes, go out, do what they normally do with their phones/cameras, click photos/videos, whatever, and then come back to discuss what they did. This will make our participants more conscious about their usage patterns.

Our mini-groups would yield initial psychographic segments (For example, The Creative Artists, The Selfie Takers, The Foodies) from which respondents will be handpicked for the next exercise.

2. Instagram Diary: Shortlisted participants from the previous exercise go through their regular routine (using Instagram) as they would normally do. End of the week/weekend we have an indepth interview to discuss their usage behaviour and variations in usage according to the time of day, context etc. The idea behind this is to encourage spontaneity as much as possible, with least amount of bias.

The biggest benefit of taking the above route is that we gain diverse perspectives on how consumers interact with social media, while being as close as possible to their most natural, spontaneous behaviour to get to true 'human insights' that we can then use to guide our brand strategy to connect with people in a manner that is emotionally relevant to them.