http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo

En 2007, Cadbury a lancé une pub virale, intitulée Le Gorille. Maintes fois primée, elle a notamment remporté le Grand Prix aux Lions de Cannes en 2008. Son impact a été spectaculaire. Les ventes du produit annoncé (Dairy Milk) ont augmenté de 9 % et les perceptions favorables à l’endroit de la marque ont grimpé de 20 points de pourcentage. Mais Le Gorille n’aurait peut-être jamais vu le jour s’il avait été prétesté en suivant les mesures d’efficacité traditionnelles. Pourquoi?

Parce que la plupart de ces mesures ne captent pas l’ingrédient clé qui a fait de cette publicité un succès planétaire : les émotions. Or, ces dernières jouent un rôle clé, les consommateurs n’étant pas aussi rationnels qu’on l’imagine.

It’s every moderator’s dream – eight articulate, creative and engaged participants sitting around the table. Sure, a well-designed recruitment screener goes a long way, but what other tools do we have in our box to help get participants to “bring it” to the table?

From our experience in moderating and recruiting, the pre-group assignment, (aka homework), is an effective means of getting the job done for all parties involved: recruiter, participant and moderator.

Call it a trade bias, but I’m always curious to know what people around me think about brands, products and ad campaigns. So when I recently found myself in the grocery store with my boyfriend and picked up a milk carton, I asked him: “So, did you notice the new packaging for Natrel? What do you think of it? What does it communicate?” “I don’t like it…” he responds, “but it doesn’t matter, anyway” he adds quickly, blocking my next set of questions, “because we never buy Natrel, we buy Lactancia”.

Now, I’m not the type to inventory our fridge every week, but I look in it often enough to be able to tell you with absolute certainty that we do NOT always buy Lactancia, and if I were to look in my fridge right now, there would be 50% chance that the carton would say “Natrel” rather than anything else.

Gamification is coming up as a new trend for data collection, making the experience more enjoyable for the respondent while allowing the researcher to obtain higher quality data. But how does one go about creating this experience?

A game for research purposes is built around two simple criteria:

1. A game needs rules, that are simple, clear and few.
2. A game needs a goal that is made explicit from the start and is attainable by all players

Humans have played games since the dawn of time, as it is a means to have fun, to socialise, to compete and to build a reward system through progression, accomplishment and ultimately a win.

Gamification in market research strives to bring this natural human tendency to surveying, by applying game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems.

The idea behind it is to convert respondents into players, by offering not a survey but an experience. The key is that players don’t need to be tense nor mentally prepared before setting forth to play. We are not completing a survey in exchange for reward points or a chance to win an iPad. No, this is an experience we were born to enjoy!