The award recognizes and promotes excellence in qualitative research on an International level. A panel of respected industry judges reviewed entries on project design, scope and execution, along with the study’s impact on the client’s business objectives.

Layla’s qual study for her client, The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada (CCFC), was selected for its strong efforts to:

• Tackle an important health issue with creative research techniques
• Uncover valuable patient insights on a sensitive topic
• Provide a solid business plan for the client’s five-year strategic communication efforts

The study focused on identifying relevant communications channels in which the CCFC could better engage with patients of Crohn’s Disease and Colitis. The 10-day study aimed to understand how to get the right information into patients’ hands at the right times.

Understanding that the disease often dictates patients’ lifestyles, Layla designed a study that would allow respondents to participate on their own schedules. She used an online discussion board (hosted on IdeaStream™) to encourage openness and honesty in a supportive environment. Important conversations took place among participants as they revealed details of their struggle and found support.

During each day of the study, respondents were asked to complete a different task or share opinions on a different topic. For example, patients at varying stages of the disease were asked to recreate the moment of their diagnosis, recommend valuable information sources, review and offer feedback on various CCFC publications or describe how the syndrome affects their day-to-day work/school life.

The study revealed different communications opportunities at various stages (prior to diagnosis, at diagnosis and post diagnosis), as well as types of information and tools that would assist in providing future patients with knowledge, empowerment and support to most effectively control the disease.

The CCFC has used the results of the study to develop a five-year strategic plan that would guide the organization’s approach to patient and health care provider engagement and communications. The CCFC now tailors its communications in a meaningful way to each of the defined patient audiences to provide appropriate information at appropriate times.

Layla and the CCFC will receive the 2012 QRCA Qually Award at the upcoming Worldwide Conference on Qualitative Research, April 25-27 in Rome, Italy that Dub will be exhibiting at, so why not drop by and say hello.

We can’t wait to meet you!

We were very pleased with ourselves and feeling proud when we received this testimonial from one of our Australian clients in our inbox today. I think you’ll see why when you read it…

It’s a combination of simplicity and sophistication that makes IdeaStream from Dub one of the best market research software packages that we’ve used.

Simplicity is for the participants – the ease of registration, the ability to customise the design of the platform and the user friendly interface means it’s easy to quickly establish a relationship with the people you need to engage with and ensure they are comfortable with your objectives and needs.

The sophistication is the back end and the research expertise that has so clearly gone into the design of the product.  From project management to reporting, IdeaStream allows researchers and their clients to have access to a powerful live platform.

Our company has evaluated and used competitor offerings and IdeaStream is by far, superior in all aspects.

If you’d like to find out what makes online qual tick and have the same experience as our friends around the world, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or email us@dubishere.com

Thinking about using online qual research techniques for business-to-business research, then look no further. Dub recently completed a research community for a B2B supplier to the construction industry that enabled them to evaluate the potential for a completely new service offering. The iterative nature of the research community allowed the agency client to fully explore these respondents spontaneous wants and needs for additional services before introducing a series of prompts (covering the service concept, detailed aspects of the service, potential naming/identities and marketing communications).

The online research  approach pioneered by Dub enabled the client to generate a level of interaction between respondents that would not have been feasible using ‘off-line’ methodologies, as it would not have been practical to conduct groups with this geographically disparate, busy business audience. As a result of the study, the b2b client is now in the process of launching this new service offering that will represent a real breakthrough within their industry.

To find out more about how Dub’s approach to online research can get you closer to your customers than ever before, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

Dub has recently completed a great project with one of the UK’s leading brand innovation agency clients, on behalf of a major own label ready meal producer.

Objectives
To explore consumer attitudes towards different ready meal cuisine types offered by one of the UK’s leading supermarkets. The purpose of this online research community was to evaluate perceptions of several newer cuisines that had recently been introduced within the stores, understand how they impacted on more established cuisine offerings, and to identify any further opportunities/gaps.

Results
The extended nature of the online research community approach meant that we were able to dedicate discussion streams to fully explore consumer responses to a wide range of issues, and to respond/react to comments and insights.

A potential new range opportunity that only emerged in the final couple of days of the online research community is now being actively pursued by our client and is likely to lead to significant incremental business with a major retailer.

For more information contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or by emailing stephen@dubishere.com

Courtesy of our client, we’ve got another great case study to share with you. This time the study was for a salad dressing manufacturer and brand owner, to help them understand current consumer attitudes and dynamics within the sector.

Approach
The study was undertaken over a two week period in the summer of 2010 to coincide with the peak usage of salad dressings, thus enabling ‘real-time’ experiences to be conveyed. The ongoing nature of the online research community enabled continued probing and interrogation of consumer responses, as well as the introduction of positioning stimulus that helped our agency client to identify the most credible and appealing proposition for our client’s brand.

Client comment
“This simply would not have been achievable within the more limited time constraints of a more traditional research methodology (ie; focus group discussions)“, say no more!

For more information or to understand how your brand or organisation can benefit from online research communities, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

Added Value – part of the WPP marketing services group of companies – is the world’s leading brand development and marketing insight company with some 25 offices worldwide and a global client list that spans all categories.

 Dub have been working with Added Value for over three years, developing and enhancing a leading-edge digital insight and innovation tool that helps them to source the latest ideas, insights and opinions from consumers and experts around the world, without the need to bring together contributors – an activity that can prove costly and inefficient.  By both providing the social software and helping the client with some of the finer points of building and managing online communities, Dub has helped Added Value win more pitches, delivered more creative multimedia insight, and cemented its positioning as one of the leading industry innovators.

The platform, designed to support Added Value’s work – known as AV-id – makes use of micro-blogging, IM, forums, bulletin boards and media-sharing technologies, and harnesses the latest social networking behaviours to support live and ongoing dialogue among leading-edge consumers and experts from around the world. Added Value consultants are empowered with a unique moderation toolkit that allows them to interact directly with the community whilst sharing their thoughts and ideas with other members of the project team in both local and remote offices.

Driving actionable insight

By assigning members of the niche online communities structured tasks and activities, (of both a qualitative and quantitative nature), a stream of rich, multimedia insight and consciousness flows. Data visualisation tools such as tag clouds help strategists identify trending topics and emergent themes, and subsequently used to spot issues that require further investigation and probing.

Idea generation and collaboration innovation

Recognising that traditional research techniques can sometime be a one-way street, we worked with Added Value to develop a number of collaborative tasks and techniques that allow members of the communities to generate and share ideas, and then select winning ideas. This co-creation technique is widely accepted as a new paradigm that brands are quickly latching on to as they seek to enhance their innovation  capabilities.

Usability, training and adoption

Today,  many of us use social software in our own private lives, but relatively few are adopting them in the workplace to enhance productivity and, as in this case, support greater insight and connectedness.  Knowing this, we worked in partnership with Added Value on a rigorous education and adoption program for key Added Value stakeholders, including a regular series of global webinars and inspiration sessions. These sessions also provide the opportunity for valuable debate that feeds into the platform’s ongoing development program.

The AV-id platform and  methodologies it supports are being deployed around the world everyday by Added Value, and in languages including Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Korean and Italian.

As well as being used to engage consumers and experts, AV-id is equally at home engaging internal stakeholders – marketers, R&D teams, designers etc – and creating internal innovation communities.

For Bel – a global food company – AVid was deployed to help marketers, R&D professionals and designers come together to create new ideas and innovative solutions to everyday problems they face.

To-date, brands including Pepsi Lipton International, Meetic, Tefal, Reliant Energy, and Barilla among others have embraced the AV-id approach.

Background
The Lexi Cinema is one of the most innovative and state-of-the-art micro-cinemas in the UK. As well as being one of London’s newest arthouse cinemas, it’s also a Social Enterprise, raising funds for the The Sustainability Institute’s activities in South Africa.

Objectives
Not only were the Lexi’s management team in the dark about social media, they were unclear as to what it could deliver for their organisation. Having approached them with an open mind (and open ears), we quickly came to the conclusion that they needed help demystifying the world of online social media. In turn, it was identified that some basic social media campaign work that could increase occupancy and help spread the good word of the team’s efforts, their fantastic venue and the awe-inspiring program of films and events.

Solution
Our starting point was a series of managed workshops and engagement sessions with the management team. Stakeholders were presented the opportunity to ask those awkward questions they always wanted to know about Social Media, but were too afraid to ask. Detailed show’n’tell sessions ensued, allowing the team to get hands-on with social media services, thus removing all fear of failure!

With the basics out the way and the team knowing the difference between a tweet, a troll and a tag, we set about developing and implementing a social media strategy. The focus was to engage two key audiences; local cinema-goers and content producers. With very tight budgets and minimal resources available, the solution needed to adopt free and open social networking platforms. We set about building a Lexi community of cinema-goers on Facebook, and focusing more on niche producer networks using Twitter and it’s in-built monitoring tools. Hashtags proved invaluable when igniting conversations around specific films and cultural events such as the live stream from The Met in New York.

Local audience groups were invited to join The Lexi’s Facebook page, where they received regular film updates and could swap their views and opinions. We trained the client in the fine art of Community Management and sat back and watched the conversations flow. For The Lexi, the ability to get direct feedback from the horse’s mouth proved invaluable!

Twitter was then used to engage with content producers, and other cultural thought-leaders in order to spread the wider word.

Results
With an online community of over 1000 connected people, our Social Media Strategy has almost doubled The Lexi’s subscriber base in little over 6 months. More importantly, bums-on-seats have increased and brand awareness is at a high thanks to the multitude of online conversations taking place daily. Those that joined the community are more likely to visit the cinema on more than one occasion, and traffic to the website has seen a significant increase – along with online ticket sales.

But don’t take it from me, here’s what the client says;

I wish we had a working relationship with all our suppliers and service providers, like the relationship we have with Dub. They just get it!

Results: significant increase in bums on seats in our cinema (!), significantly increased traffic to our website, the establishment and maintenance of two flourishing and engaged communities through Facebook and Twitter, people mentioning our Facebook and Twitter communities at the bar in the cinema, significantly improved search ranking and an in-depth but clear and simple consultation document on the best way forward for our business, online and in the area of social media. We are very lucky.

From the outset, Stephen and the team at Dub understood the challenges facing a local social enterprise micro-cinema with a less-than-ideal physical location and a minuscule marketing budget.  Energy, enthusiasm, the ability to really listen, the intelligence to quickly appreciate strategic and operational context, and, of course, the patience to explain the finer points of social media marketing to the, er, shall we say…less technologically aware – Dub have these qualities in abundance, not to mention the more prosaic qualities of responding quickly to queries and delivering things when they say they will.  If our plans for cinema world domination come to fruition, I’m sure it will be in no small part down to Stephen and the team at Dub.

And finally, The Lexi Cinema has a blueprint with which to extend their estate in the future, so watch this space…

Socialising Best Practice and Lessons Learnt

The Design Council, a UK Government-funded strategic body, promotes the use of design through the UK.  They help business be better at doing what they do by instilling design thinking and by helping designers be more effective and public services more efficient.

Having embarked upon the development of The Designers’ Business Knowledge Base (DBKB) – an essential Best Practice resource from which design professionals, design buyers and design educators can seek inspiration and guidance – the client required a strategic overlay describing how the DBKB could be delivered as an interactive communication and collaboration tool.

The core of our work saw the development of a Digital Framework for the DBKB focusing on how users could submit and extract experience-based stories and case studies. Insights were by way of formal submissions and more conversational stories of the kind designers of all ages and experience could submit using simple, easy-to-use social software tools.

The  framework was constructed on four pillars; The User Model, Content Model, Business Model and Sustainability Model.

• The User Model proposed a variety of benefits and rewards for each of the stakeholder groups, including those of a social, emotional, financial and experiential kind.
• The Content Model explored how the resource would harness user-generated content to provide insightful and inspiring best practice examples.
• The Business Model looked at and made recommendations as to how The Design Council could monetise the service
• And finally, the Sustainability Model took inspiration from what we believed to be some of the more forward-thinking online services around, and how the DBKB could integrate their behaviours in order to be more future-proofed.

The crux of our strategic recommendations was for The Design Council to harness its existing offline design practitioner network connections for traditional push messaging, but also to engage them in more dynamic and ongoing online conversation in order to trawl for ongoing insights and knowledge around design best practice. The development of best practice guidelines in a traditional sense had proven to be expensive, and often the outcome would date very quickly. Digitally captured knowledge could be kept alive, nurtured and extended by the community, and knowledge shared over time to the extent that the community became self-helpers.

Our recommended process and methodology is currently being developed ready for implementation.