If you’re involved in mark research, this scenario might be familiar...
You spend two days hosting a series of focus groups on, say, a new spicy ketchup product. Wave after wave of participants bare their souls and condiment-based feelings. You’re left with several journals full of scribbled notes and countless hours of audio recordings.
Back at your desk, the “fun” begins. Now that you’ve collected all this data, it’s time to process it, organize it, and start to make some sense of it.
In the bad old days (like, two or three years ago) that meant a lot of frustrating drudgery. Maybe you could delegate some of the labor to an assistant, but then you’re just outsourcing the misery.
Enter generative AI. While the hype around gen-AI tools can sometimes outpace their reality, there are indeed areas where this tech can be game-changing.
Focus group research is one of those areas. Here’s how tools like Harris QuestAI (part of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud family) can streamline the worst parts of your market research job, so that you have brain power left to tackle the important things.
Even the biggest masochist wouldn’t enjoy listening to two days’ worth of focus group recordings, rewinding every thirty seconds to figure out what Participant #6 just mumbled.
QuestAI is able to do this for you speedily, without complaint (and unlike assigning this task to an intern, you don’t have to feel bad about it). The software can easily identify and label individual speakers, generating a reliable transcript from both audio and visual recordings.
You’ll also be able to transcribe interviews in over 200 languages and have AI translate them into English.
Okay, so now you’ve got a written record of the focus groups you conducted. Someone’s still going to have to spend the weekend poring through those hundreds of pages, trying to tease out a useful narrative or actionable insights... right?
If that “someone” is QuestAI, life suddenly starts to look a little rosier. “AI is really good at ingesting this type of data,” says Xander Jefferson, QuestAI’s Product Manager, “and in lickety split time compared to what a human can do, at a fraction of the cost.”
After analyzing the data, QuestAI can also suggest follow-up survey questions that will likely generate impactful findings--and you can use a companion product, Harris QuestDIY, to draft and deploy those surveys at scale.
The great thing about AI is that it doesn’t get tired, or bored, or angry. (At least, not until the Singularity hits.)
With QuestAI, you can interact with your repository of focus group data using a function similar to a PrivateGPT. Pose questions in a natural way, like you’re talking to a co-worker: “Did most people seem grossed out by the thought of a spicy ketchup?” for instance, or “What were some names respondents suggested that would align with the taste?”
QuestAI is also excellent at unearthing the sentiments or emotions at play in your focus group responses--things that a bleary-eyed human might miss, but that are obvious to a tireless AI assistant combing through the data.
Your two-day spicy ketchup marathon was epic, but the C-suite only wants the TL;DR. In fact, they don’t want to read much at all--they’d rather have the important points packaged in a snackable way.
Before you traveled to Chicago to interrogate consumers about their ketchup preferences, you put together a moderator’s guide that laid out the objectives of your research and key questions you’d be asking. This guide will generally inform the reports that come out of your research
But check this out: You can feed QuestAI the moderator’s guide, which it will then use while processing the data it’s already transcribed and analyzed. You’ve essentially given gen-AI a roadmap to follow, which makes it possible for the tool to generate a topline report on its own.
This can be broken down by “chapters,” allowing for a summary and report on each major topic that was discussed.
You can also invite clients directly into the system--with controlled settings--to let them manipulate the data in their way, on their terms.
The easiest way to find out if QuestAI is right for your brand’s market research is to let us show you what the tool can do.
Unless, of course, you’re having too much fun doing all of the worst parts of your job on your own...
