Building a Research Collab: High-quality Innovative Market Research at Scale.

I had the opportunity to present this week at the ESOMAR Global Congress in Toronto, together with Claudia Furniel and Thyago Sim?es , sharing how we have managed to help Itaú, the largest bank and most valued brand in Brazil, to grow its iLab (Digital Lab), an innovative CX Research platform, that puts the bank’s customers on the driver's seat, helping to shape business decisions and the future of bank services.?This year alone, we will run more than 1,200 qualitative research projects in the Digital Lab, in 4 different countries. It is an average of 25-30 studies per week! So, are you wondering how is that possible?

Let me start telling you there are 5 main success keys to make this happen, at that scale:

???????????1 – Partnership – Ecglobal Business is the agency, but we see ourselves, and truly work, as an extension of Itaú’s team. When bad things happen, because they happen sometimes, we work as a team, and we quickly learn, fix, improve and move on.

2 – Process – you cannot scale something if it is not well documented and had previously been tested and proven. And here we have the processes, which have been evolved and refined along the years, well defined on both sides, and they can quickly be scaled.

3 – Technology – you need the right technology to be the enabler, facilitator of the workflow, and to implement the processes and data management. But it is not just about one technology, but the capacity to select, implement, integrate, and use different technologies with the goal to give autonomy and empowerment to the teams involved.

4 – People - To run that volume of qualitative research studies (and we also develop quantitative as well), we must talk to a lot of people! And to deliver the right profiles of customers, or potential customers, that Itaú wants to invite to their studies, we needed to build capacity to:

a.????Quickly find different targets, which means the ability to target highly segmented groups of people. To active this goal, we combine different recruitment sources and methods, that include Ecglobal's own panels, Itaú’s clients lists and also members from the Collab social network (I will explain about this later on this article).

b.????Communicate effectively with the users through different channels. Email is not enough anymore, and we should be able to use other channels such as SMS or WhatsApp to quickly reach users and build trust with them.

c.????Assure quality – Deliver the right profile, at the right time, to the right study. We should be able to assure we are inviting people who tell the truth about their profiles and will be committed to the goal of each study. We have ZERO margin for errors!

d.????Provide high-quality experiences to the users. From recruitment to customer services and incentives. Our goal, representing the brand, is to provide the best experience to the bank’s customers and potential customers. It needs to be consistent, reliable, effective, as any brand communication channel.

5 – Generalists and Specialists – Ecglobal has put together a diverse team, specialists and generalists that make sure the processes run smoothly from end-to-end and deliver the best actionable insights to Itaú and the participating Brands. From project managers to moderators and analysts, everyone is committed to the result and satisfaction of the end-clients who are the business decision makers, sponsors of every research that we run in the platform.

That being said, how we managed to put this together? We decided to focus in first place on the user experience and communication. We thought… well social media is the common way people nowadays communicate and build relationships, so let us go social! But it does not mean we would build a Facebook group or create a community on Instagram.??Why? Well, beyond issues like privacy and data ownership, there are several requirements that open social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter do not provide, such as:

• Appropriate insights tools - From tools to quickly create a new profiling questionnaire, or a survey, or to design an interactive exercise to test a prototype.
• Deep profiling and CRM capacity – we need same capacity of advanced CRM platforms such as Salesforce, so we can keep a track record of all invites and past user participation, so we do not keep inviting the same people. Beyond that, we can quickly create new attributes and profiling variables, on the fly, based on the responses they provide on the pre-screeners, profile questionnaires, social conversation feeds, or even based on the learning from a specific study.
• Long-term engagement: we have studied gamification for more than 15 years and know how to incorporate a fun component to the user experience. We wanted to combine game elements and dynamics with a loyalty program, engaging content and communication through multiple digital channels.

And if you think that is a lot, Itaú brought even a greater challenge to the project: How about if we bring other companies, from other industries, that have similar challenges to scale their insights programs, and are looking for innovative ways to deliver qualitative and quantitative insights faster and at reduced costs? Let us evolve the Digital Lab into a Collab!?And again, you should be wondering… what would be the main requirements of a Research Collab? Here are some of them:

• Participant Brands should have the capacity to join forces on the recruitment front. The platform should keep tracking the source of all new members joining the platform.
• There will be moments where the group will be talking to the participants in a neutral way, for example, when we run cross studies, on topics that are in the interest of the group, or when we want to just run a blinded survey. ?
• Each brand should have their own community within the collab social network (the mother community), customized to their own needs, so they can run their own studies, keeping their privacy and channel of branded communication with their users.
• One of the major benefits of the collab should be to also enhance the user experience and engagement, so users could participate in multiple communities (once invited and qualified), engage in multiple discussions in the social feed, and participate in studies about multiple topics and categories. And, at the same time, we should have the ability to control participation by member, and offer new opportunities based on different profiling variables, segments and past participation. ?
• The participating Brands should gain a holistic understanding of their consumers, now being able to understand them from multiple angles such as lifestyle, habits, shopper experiences, preferences, usage, and attitudes in multiple categories. So, we should be able to cross data among different communities, segments and profiles.

Considering all these requirements, Ecglobal decided to build its own social media platform, incorporating all the research tools, CRM, gamification, loyalty program and features described above that could not be find in any social media or community platform available in the market.?Built upon our proprietary platform, the Digital Lab has grown to 15,000 profiled users this year and continue to grow each day.?Itaú has managed to develop research studies at a fraction of the cost of traditional research methods (70% less) and at 1/3 of the time.?Leader brands in their categories such as Nestlé, Natura, BRF, Via, Stellantis and Quinto Andar have joined forces with Itaú and are now part of the Collab.

As we look into the future, the platform keeps evolving, and we are incorporating new tools and capabilities such as text analytics and machine learning, so we can take advantage of the huge flow of structure and unstructured data being generated into the platform.?With thousands of consumers sharing about their daily lives, answering questions, collaborating on the communities’ activities, and dialogues on the social feed, we see brand trust and intimacy with the consumers been built, and what intended to initially be just a research platform is becoming a powerful brand intelligence and engagement tool.

If you never thought market research and CMI could become part of the total brand experience, I invite you to keep an eye open and read my next article “Why Leading Brands should build their own Customer Communities”.