In the last couple of days I've been getting great updates about customer research methodology. I heard Mike Rodenburgh, SVP of Partnerships & VAR's at Vision Critical talk at AIMS about new tech tools that simplify running customer panels online.
Customer panels in the marketing research context are all about having a group of people who agree in advance to answer questions about specific topics. They have been pre-screened so they represent a known sample based on demographic, geographic and other dimensions. Mike's amazing example was of a baby food panel with many thousands of participants, that fielded a total of 175 studies in the course of a year. (Just in case you were wondering, these are people who buy baby food for their young children. And everyone didn't complete ALL the surveys.)
I'm actually more interested in the concept of smaller panels, that would look and feel more like an advisory board for one organization. Well, I attended an online webinar about those this week as well.
Liz Van Patten was the researcher who was speaking about her experience running these using bulletin board technology.
Here's how this works. You recruit a group of your customers to participate in a panel discussion that is going to happen on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, etc.) The panel discussion happens online. The group gets to know each other. Liz says that even though the cash incentive is the starting motivator, the group becomes a bit of a community (just as you'd expect if they met face to face regularly), and ultimately they develop some emotional ties to your organization.
People have been running advisory panels without BBFG tech. The boards just make it easier and much lower cost.
Now isn't that a cool idea?
