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Want to uncover the deeper consumer emotions that data alone can’t capture? Try gathering video insights.

By: Silvia Veltcheva, Director, Market Research

You often hear the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”. That is not just a saying - it is backed by science. Research by 3M published by the Media Education Center at William and Mary College concludes that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

But what about a video? Or one hundred videos?

In the current digital age, we are served (and some of us create) video content on an almost hourly basis. For many consumers, video serves as the main communication tool with their community and the world (e.g. Facetime, Snapchat). Bringing stories to life through video is much more digestible and memorable than reading text, charts, or graphs. Suzy’s own analysis comparing video and text open ends shows that when consumers are given the opportunity to record a video, their responses are much richer, containing several times more words than when they provide a text-based response.

But what’s the best way to capture video insights in market research? Let’s take a look at how Suzy enables brands to gather video responses seamlessly, and how you can quickly analyze the richness of qualitative insights at scale in a cost- and time-efficient manner.

The Power of Video Insights in Market Research

In order to enhance their understanding of categories, habits, behaviors, or even just the way consumers describe them, brands must invest in qualitative research. While text-based qualitative is important and provides brands with rich information to act on, it’s also critical to socialize those findings in a concise and efficient manner. When it comes to bringing the consumer to life for internal and external stakeholders, short snippets of video can efficiently convey a wealth of information.

The other benefit of using video content in research is to effectively demonstrate emotions and experiences. Researchers have often relied on lists of emotions or attributes in survey format to understand brand or product perceptions. However, while this approach has its place in research, it often risks “flattening” the consumer response and missing out on the nuances of the human experience.

Videos can also be very effective storytelling vehicles. Showreels, for example, give us the ability to stitch together a compelling narrative around the insights we gather from consumers by bringing them into and making them a central part of the story.

Building Consumer Empathy Through Video Insights

In the last few years, especially since the pandemic upended the way we go about our daily lives, many companies have launched customer-centricity initiatives. These types of initiatives often aim to bring brand managers, marketers, researchers, and senior stakeholders at companies closer to their consumers so that they understand them better and can focus future innovation around their needs and wants. Video plays a crucial part of those initiatives for three reasons:

It offers an immersive experience: By showing off consumers in their natural environments and allowing them to record their experiences, stakeholders can connect with their consumers from disparate backgrounds and “walk in their shoes”, thus understanding their unique experiences but also the commonalities that may link them together. By understanding a diverse slice of a brand’s target consumers, brand and marketing managers can minimize similarity bias in their innovation process.
It provides real-life context: By understanding how consumers interact with products and services in their personal lives, stakeholders can craft relevant communication and ensure that their brand evolves with the customer to meet real-life challenges and needs.
It can help enhance emotional resonance: Finally, it ensures that the products and services companies produce form an emotional connection with consumers. Since consumer preference is explained by both system 1 and system 2 thinking, appealing to consumer instincts and emotions can provide an edge for brands. Consumer videos provide a view into the unspoken context, emotion, and preference expressed through body language but not necessarily verbalized. A wince, a hand gesture, a frown or an expression of joy can provide cues and guide brands on the path of creating products and service that surprise and delight.

Enhancing the Impact of Research with Video Insights

In addition to the benefits of video for consumer closeness, it can also help teams amplify the impact of research. As an example, Professor Hans Rosling demonstrated impactful ways to bring data to life via animation and creative visualization, taking data points and turning them into tools that help tell stories. Similarly, consumer Showreels can help support trends we see in quantitative data, helping us move away from tables on a slide and making those data points much more digestible, memorable, and easy to understand.

This also brings up another advantage of video applications in market research – it aids us in combining quantitative and qualitative data. Video showreels can help explain trends we see in the data by putting a face and attaching an explanation to those trends in the words of consumers.

Video Applications in Market Research

Video open ends (VOEs) are a cost-effective way to integrate video into research. Suzy’s VOEs allow customers to tap up to 100 consumers to record a short video to answer a topic of interest, perhaps linking it to a large research initiative.

Focus groups and in-depth interviews are also a great way to collect qualitative insights. With focus groups, you can capture group insights and see how consumers interact together about a certain topic, while IDIs let you go in-depth with one consumer. Since both types of research happen through Suzy Live, you can capture video from either option.

Suzy offers integrated on-platform video editor capabilities with pre-built templates (including layouts, design schemes, and music). This enables you to create eye-catching Showreels with minimum video editing skills and time input. Coupled with Suzy’s AI summary capabilities, Suzy users have the ability to summarize themes that surfaced in the video responses, ensuring that your showreel content created is focused on the most salient themes.

Challenges and Considerations

An important consideration in leveraging video in research is compliance with data privacy. Those wishing to utilize video should ensure respondent data is safeguarded and privacy guidelines of their company and applicable regulations are followed.

Conclusion

The use of video in market research offers unparalleled benefits, enhancing consumer empathy and increasing the impact of insights. Video offers the benefit of engagement, memorability, and popularity. It allows brands to capture and convey the richness of consumer emotions, providing a more immersive and authentic understanding of consumer behavior. By incorporating video, teams can bring their research findings to life, making them more engaging and memorable for stakeholders. To maximize these benefits, consider integrating video insights into your next research initiative with Suzy.

Start harnessing the power of video todayto drive deeper connections and more impactful results. Book a demo with our team to see how our platform works.

Seeing is Believing: How Video Insights Enhance Research Impact