Top 10 Reasons Your Brand Should Have An Always-on Market Research Community

Jennifer Adams leads Big Village’s Digital Hives and Online Communities practice where she is responsible for all aspects of our product, services and technology and is involved in consulting and leading the team on all client projects.

I ran my first MROC (market research online community) in 2004, as a “community consultant” for Communispace (now C-Space), the company that was, at that time, inventing the concept of “connecting with the voice of your consumers online.” We used to call them “focus groups on steroids” just so potential clients could have a frame of reference for what we were doing. Now, remember, in 2004 there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram or TikTok. In June of that year, MySpace hit an all-time high of (wait for it) one million active users, and was pretty much the only social media game in town – it would stay that way for another 4 years or so until Facebook started on its path to domination. Back then, the toughest part was convincing brands that “real people” could be found on the internet and would actually engage online in market research at speed and scale.

Fast forward 20 years, it’s a whole different ballgame: no one doubts anymore that real people are online. In fact, now close to 300 million US consumers are active social media users. Today, market research online communities number in the 1000s, if not 10s of thousands, and every major brand of record has had one, if not many, at one time or another. I am STILL passionate about online communities two decades into my career because every day I witness their power to help brands win in an ever-changing marketplace.

Some of the reasons to have an online community are the same as they ever were, and some are new. Below I’ve worked to pull together my “Top 10 Reasons” your brand should have an always-on market research community.

Top 10 Reasons Your Brand Should Have An Always-on Market Research Community:

1. Speed: Once your community is in motion, you can get the answers you need in minutes, with response rates of 100-200+ in hours. No longer do you need to forego doing research because of tight timelines or make decisions without first getting a pulse from the consumers those decisions will impact.  No other methodology comes close.
2. Reliable Quant: Many community platforms offer robust quantitative survey capabilities – polling, rating, ranking, rotating question blocks, branching and skip logic, and more. Response rates in a typical 1,000-person community can exceed 250, lending statistical significance to your findings. And while traditional quant surveys can see ~30% fraudulent or bad data, because of careful recruiting and close interaction with participants, you can be assured your community survey responses are all legitimate.
3. Rich, Multi-methodological Qual: Traditional qual struggles with cost, speed and small sample sizes. Communities solve for all of that – communities typically see hundreds of responses to qual, enabling robust comparative analytics (how are men different from women, Segment A vs. Segment B, Gen Z vs. Gen Alpha, etc.). A great community platform has tools that tap into right-brained AND left-brained thinking, allowing moderators and research writers to lean into multiple intelligence theory design, giving introverts and extroverts, linear thinkers and creatives, kinesthetic learners and visual learners different ways in to answer a given research objective in order to get to the deepest insights. Communities make video and audio response, card sorting, screen recording, image and video annotation, live focus groups and IDIs available for connectivity and creativity in approach.
4. Meaningful AI: One problem that existed for communities until recent year(s) is that there was TOO much data. How did you even get a handle on the 100,000s of unstructured responses, the constant peer-to-peer chatter, wade through the thousands of videos and photos and screen safaris to get to insight effectively, confidently and efficiently? A great community platform in 2024 will offer AI-enablement to transcribe video/audio, summarize findings research activity results, ID and code emotion and sentiment, surface longitudinal trends, call out differences by profile data and segment, enable robust moderation/probing/querying and combat bad actors and poor responders in real time. All of this intelligent support allows human researchers to go significantly farther in the same time – amazing!
5. Efficient ethnography: Communities – with advanced video and audio and screen recording tools – enable ethnography at an unprecedented speed, scale, economy and ease. This is important given respondent tendencies naturally lack precise recall while generalizing and sometimes polishing experiences and reported behaviors. Replacing “tell us about when” with “show us how” is a powerful switch to flip. In many cases, the way to truly understand why someone does what they do and feels the way they do is to watch them do it.
6. Easy, fast, high-quality focus groups and IDIs: With online communities, convening structured conversations with consumers is simple:  search the robust profile data and community research responses to find the groups and people you want to converse with; – schedule them and remind them through the platform; – immediately convene your text-based or video groups with front and backroom capabilities, the ability to drop in stimuli and quick polls and more. Within hours. At Big Village, we have done over 500 FG/IDIs in 2024 to date.
7. Longitude: This may be the best aspect of community research: it’s not a snapshot in time, but a living, breathing organism. A good community partner team will encourage you to rerun important research quarterly to unearth dynamic changes in sentiment and behavior as they occur, to mine member-initiated discussion boards for emergent white space and trends, to dive into changes in the political, economic and technological landscape to see how they are effecting consumers attitudes, emotions and behaviors, and to continuously track your brand’s ongoing performance against its competitors (both existing and emerging).
8. Real people: A quality community provider prioritizes member quality and heavily vets all community members. They employ rigorous technological controls at every phase of the community lifecycle, including using AI and human moderators to verify responses and continuously replace poor or fraudulent members. This means you can have confidence that you are hearing from authentic voices at all times, no matter the methodology you use- quant or qual.
9. Robust profiling: Every community member is profiled mapping to brand segmentations and adding robust demographic and behavioral data to the mix. They also can be matched to their digital footprint, so that brands can balance participant membership to needs, cut response data by segment/data point of interest and get a real-time read on how members’ reported behaviors line up with their organic online behaviors – not to mention the longitudinal benefit of tracking how target consumers change over time.
10. Value: Your typical always-on market research community runs anywhere from $150,000-$300,000+ a year, depending on size, volume of research and service level. On average brands run 4-6 projects per month with a high degree of flexibility/variability in research approach (diaries, polls, quant surveys, ethnography, focus groups, IDIs, etc.).  With a $240,000 annual spend on a community with 5 projects a month, the work nets out to $4,000 per project- near DIY rates for full-service support. With the average price of an ad hoc research study anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000+, the ROI of a community is clear. Ask your prospective community partner to show you the ROI their clients are realizing – you’ll get a vivid sense of the value your organization can achieve from an always-on community.