Four Reasons to Use Video in Your Market Research
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What if I told you there’s a way to get real-time insights, in the moment, whenever somebody uses your product?
That would be unbelievable, right?
Well… Video diary studies let you do just that.
Let me tell you a story from one of my team’s past projects. When we did a research study for a leading coffee company, we asked people to record videos every time they brewed coffee. The steps to making coffee were predictable, but what we learned about their environment was extraordinary.
People were brewing coffee in their bathrooms!
These diary study videos were crucial to discovering this insight. It was something we would have never known to ask about.
Video diary studies are all about recording behavior when it happens. They help you explore the moments that matter, by capturing them at the moment they happen.
You get to witness authentic moments, where they happen, as they happen, no matter what time of day.
Here are four reasons to use videos to understand your customers:
Video studies take ethnography to a new level. Even if we did in-home interviews with those coffee-brewers, we would have never sent a research team into people’s bathrooms at 6:30am. This is a peek into real life, in the moment.
You’ll capture authentic customer stories and will be able to uncover complex thoughts and deliver compelling insights faster than ever before—in a way that blurs the lines between qualitative and quantitative research.
Videos also enable you to get closer to what people really think, especially when it comes to hearing and analyzing the linguistic choices different audiences use to describe their experiences. It gives you data on what will resonate with a particular audience, and also the specific wording that will work to get you there. This is vital to understanding your brand or product’s unique selling proposition (USP) and a messaging strategy for each of your customers segments or personas.
Even beyond words, video allows participants to show emotion and express how they feel—pure gold to a researcher trying to figure out emotional drivers for purchases.
Video boosts respondent engagement. People talk much faster than they write so you’ll get responses that are way more detailed than a survey might be. It’s fun, quick ,and easy to use. Respondents can fit it around their busy lives and don’t have to set aside an hour or two to meet with a researcher.
Video is versatile. You can run a quick survey with a video question in it (I’d suggest vurvey.com for this) or a more in-depth, multi-part study (for this, try dscout.com).
You can ask for a selfie video or a screen recording, conduct longitudinal mobile diary studies. Not only that, you can capture hundreds of videos in less than an hour through apps like dscout.
People have their phones with them 24/7, and it’s never been easier to leverage video in your research.
To be honest, I’m surprised that more marketing teams aren’t using this approach because it’s a rockstar way to unlock and share powerful insights—insights that allow you to witness authentic interaction with your product or brand and explore moments that matter.
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If you liked this article, you might like…
My “Mobile Video Research Course” on LinkedIn Learning
InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Gen Z (grab your free chapter here)
Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser-focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.