Innovation

Everyone today is over-researched, by companies and organisations who want to know everything from which car you drive to how many training courses you’ve been on. So innovative market research practice is more important than ever in delivering actionable insight.

Innovation has become a word, like insight and deliverable, that is easily used but impossible to justify. At Cognisant we believe that understanding the problem innovation comes through hard work and assessing the most practical solution.

Below are two examples of how we use innovation in research design.

Making your brand a ‘Lovemark’

In a world where we face thousands of brands a day and technology moves ahead in leaps and bounds, marketers are increasingly finding that traditional brand strategies are no longer working.

It’s taken as read these days that most products are branded and should do what they say on the tin. So with everyone matching each other in the basic product respect, where do we go from here?

Saatchi and Saatchi have come up with a revolutionary approach which seeks to develop ‘brand loyalty beyond reason’ and in the process are redefining brand management based on Love Marks.

What’s in a Lovemark? The Love Mark theory takes the existing concepts of brand management and then as the name suggests, adds ‘love’. Nice concept – but how do I apply it?

Working with s we’ve been developing a variety of research methodologies from online to face-to-face, designed to place brands on the love/respect axies. We also consider a brand as standalone and bench-marked against competitors.

To find out more about the Cognisant approach to brand, contact us today.

Social research: including hard to reach groups

When it comes to social research, we have has put a great deal of time and effort into developing innovative techniques to reach out beyond the usual suspects in order to engage with hard to reach groups.

We’ve done this because there is little use in simply including the same ‘easy to reach’ respondents in your samples whilst those who have poor literacy are excluded by the methodology.

So how can groups be excluded? For example if a client is looking to run a consultation, simply inviting people to complete feedback forms would effectively exclude all those with literacy issues – and yet this group have a right to be included in determining the outcome. Similar issues can relate to differences in society hierarchiese e.g partiachal, physical disabilities, language barriers, and so on.

One successful approach pioneered by Cognisant has been the use of the coffee cart consultation. We hire a coffee cart and offer free coffees to those participating in the research. The advantage of this approach is that by ‘breaking the ice’ over a cup of coffee to explain the project in hand we can engage with people who would never dream of accepting a formal invitation or being approached in threet.

To find out more about how Cognisant’s innovative approach to social research can help you answer your questions, contact us today.