INTRODUCING…

 
 

Why InFocus? George Brown can tell you in 1 minute!

 
 
 

Your Qual Research Is Missing Something Better!

Focus groups and/or individual in-depth interviews (IDIs) have been essential staples for understanding customers for 50+ years. Yet, they are far from perfect for two of the most common use cases: evaluating and optimizing stimuli like concepts, packages, ads, or ideas, and deep understanding of attitudes, needs, and behaviors surrounding a brand, issue, or target group.

There’s an opportunity to revolutionize your qual technique by securing more clear, confident, validated, and bias-free input, making your ideas even stronger and better aligning the team around new insights for effective action.

 
 

That’s why we developed Live Online™ InFocus — it gives you more confident direction in choosing/improving your ideas, more precise and “Predictive Qualitative™-validated” insights on key issues or needs (see below), and does it with more efficient use of respondent and team’s time.

Here’s how it works:

  • 10–20 participants log-in to our proprietary platform, with no camera or microphone (responses are typed anonymously)

  • The “moderator” sends questions to the group, one at a time

  • All participants answer each question simultaneously

  • The team watches and adds follow-up probes in real time

 

Why It’s a Better Choice vs. Other Online Qual Platforms

  • 100% Bias-Free because participants don’t hear each other’s input — anonymity breeds honesty and deeper truths (especially on more sensitive topics, or B2B or professional research where respondents tend to “grandstand” to impress peers)

  • Rich Qualitative Input from highly engaged respondents, explaining the “whys” and uncovering unexpected insights (like the inspiration for T-Mobile’s Super Bowl campaign and Abbott’s Billion Dollar launch)

  • Real-time A.I. guidance, to allow you to synthesize input more quickly and probe deeper “on the fly" 

  • Predictive Qualitative™ providing everyone’s anonymous “votes” on key themes to validate their level of agreement, so research isn’t swayed by thinking the most eloquent or loudest respondents are representative

  • Quant-like question types for more precise feedback and to help speed through basics, allowing focus on more important research questions, and even revealing differences in sub-groups instantly 

  • Segment/sub-group visibility so you can see differences in key groups on each question — e.g. users vs. non-users, older vs. younger, etc. — and probe to understand why

  • Greater clarity and validity from eliminating bias, increasing precision, and ACUPOLL’s Predictive Qualitative™ approach that “validates" key opinions across the whole group

  • Easy scalability from InFocus small qualitative base sizes of n=10–20, which are comparable to focus group/IDI costs, to 2+ larger Qual+Quant groups of n=50–100+ for even greater confidence — why separate qual and quant when they work better together?

But Don’t Take Our Word for It…

Click the plus signs (+) below to check out some of our successful case studies, from choosing/improving concept/packaging/ad directions, to understanding key attitudes/opportunities around important topics like loyalty and shopper marketing programs.

  • T-Mobile wanted to launch a new loyalty program, but they needed to learn a lot before defining it. First they had to understand how people feel about loyalty programs: What do they like? What bugs them? What’s the ideal? Then they needed to shift more specifically to loyalty programs in the Telecom industry. And finally, they wanted to share their seed idea for their own program and learn how to make it better.

    Live Online™ Sessions came to the rescue and helped them get to the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ quickly, iterate and build new ideas in real time, and engage internal stakeholders in the learning — all with great quality sample. The session provided rich verbatims contrasting T-Mobile vs competitive users and capturing customer excitement, and on-the-fly probing turned up a key insight: people wanted to be auto-enrolled. We also learned ‘fast facts’ about their reactions, as well as precise details about what changes to make and how best to enhance T-Mobile perceptions. The auto-enrolled insight drove the whole “no need to audition for Magenta Status” campaign, including this Super Bowl ad (one of several) that generated 56 million views on YouTube.

  • Abbott was urgently striving to save lives during the pandemic by increasing penetration of COVID testing via the launch of their new BinaxNow home test. They needed to optimize the concept, an easy-to-use app, and instructions for use — and it was crucial to pinpoint the best way to communicate clearly and allay any concerns about effectiveness.

    While they were planning to conduct focus groups and then have us provide quantitative global concept testing, they quickly pivoted from traditional qual to our Live Online™ Sessions, given the greater clarity and confidence it could deliver. We helped them uncover a key insight underlying people’s concerns about efficacy, and the launch generated over $1B in Year 1 revenue in the U.S. alone. BinaxNOW remains the #1 home COVID test globally.

  • Nestlé was in a rush trying to develop their TV ads for the biggest marketing showcase of the year: the Super Bowl. They had two rough ads to choose between and optimize, and they didn’t want to rely on focus groups with the risk of group bias, or one-on-ones that would generate a laundry list of changes with no way to clearly prioritize across the diverse conversations.

    The brand turned to our tried-and-true Live Online™ process that blends qualitative input with quant questions for greater precision and confidence.

    “Given our tight timeline and situation we were in with the two concepts, this seemed like the best way to get the deepest, most actionable insights in the time allowed. What ACUPOLL helped us do was understand that this really had legs to win in the big game.” — Butterfinger Brand Manager, as reported in Advertising Age.

    The ad generated 480 million impressions and a historic launch for their new campaign.

  • Sauer’s wanted to evaluate and improve their brand packaging — pronto! They had three new directions to choose among, but wanted to optimize them first, for their best “shot on goal” before moving into the validation process. The first Live Online™ session on a Tuesday helped them identify each design’s strengths and opportunities for improvement; they got to work and quickly revised the stimuli for a second session that Thursday, which helped finalize which design to run with and what needed to be tweaked. Then, we tested the optimized concept in a FastTrack™ survey for national validation just a few days later — and, in less than a week, demonstrated the significance of their improvements vs the old design.

  • Kimberly-Clark and Ogilvy needed to develop a shopper marketing program for Walmart (in-store and online) to help cater to key neglected shopper segments and boost brand sales. They had a dozen loose program ideas targeting three different groups and wanted to get reactions to the various “big ideas,” identify the strongest interest areas, and “co-create” how to best execute the program elements and mechanics. A series of Live Online™ Sessions helped bring focus and direction, inspiring the team and rapidly moving them from rough concepts to well-defined programs for launch.