Specialist services

What is Behavioural Economics?

And how does it fit with qualitative research?

This is a summary of the webinar ‘Babies, bathwater and behavioural economics: the challenges for qualitative research’ by Sue Bell and Suzanne Burden, given at the April 2012 The Festival of NewMR event on BE.

Key take-out
Behavioural economics gives qualitative researchers a tried-and-tested framework about how people really make decisions. BE makes qualitative research better because we understand people's thinking patterns better, which leads to sharper more usable recommendations. However, researchers have to adapt some of our methods and techniques to make the best of the insights BE brings, but we do not have to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’.

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What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis is the study of how people use language in social interaction.

Who can use this?

Use DA to:

Understand how your brand 'talks to' your customers (and how they talk back!)
Diagnose problems with customer service interactions, or professional service encounters
Explain how people interact with your website
What people really mean when they talk about or write about your brand.

Read about how to use discourse analysis in research

Sensory qualitative research

Sensory qualitative research is a developing area within qualitative research. It is used at an early stage in product development to understand how consumers evaluate and interpret the category that we are researching when the product is actually in-use.

Sensory qualitative research needs to be conducted face to face. Some times we use professional facilities with kitchens if we need to cook or heat or freeze the products under controlled conditions.

We can also conduct sensory qualitative research in-situ, such as an in home focus group, which gives us an authentic context to understand usage situations.

Sensory qualitative can be the precursor to, or a follow up from quantitative testing.

Behind our sesory research lies a belief in Piercian semiotics which gives us our framework for understanding what people say about the products they are testing (more details on request).

Written communications: documents, newsletters, letters, intranets, websites

We are experts in all forms of written communications research including:

Research into brochures, packaging, financial statements, letters and spoken communication, as well as advertising.

We are the experts in financial disclosure testing.

Plain language testing. We have tested countless PDSs, and we have also tested specific definitions (eg flood definitions).

How this helps you

We know exactly how to conduct this research professionally and accurately.

We tailor our research to your needs, and avoid a simplistic one-size-fits-all approach.

We make actionable recommendations which will work for you.

Read more about what makes us unique

What is semiotics?

Semiotics teaches marketers and decision-makers how consumers decode visual material, such as packs and ads. It's that simple.

Semiotics also teaches us about how our culture - the material world that we live in - influences consumer behaviour. It's about how people use products and brands as symbols to communicate to themselves and to others.

If your research is usually about consumers / customers' beliefs, attitudes and decision-making processes, then you probably know a lot about how your customers think, but perhaps not why they think that. Semiotics can teach you the why.

Read more about semiotics