As the world slowly emerges from the gloom of the pandemic, shoppers are making a return to stores. Although online shopping plays a larger role now than it ever has, in-store shopping is still a key focus area for brand managers and ensuring the right approach to things like packaging, planograms, and POSM in this post-pandemic world can make or break a brand.
Market research companies help brands to gather and analyze data about their customers’ shopping experience, but research and testing capabilities vary greatly between firms. One major hurdle faced by most market research companies is a lack of real-world testing access in stores. That’s where we are different.
With our cutting-edge research labs, Explorer Research brings the shoppers the most realistic experience, conducts in-situation testing, and brings you the type of shrewd insights your brand needs.
The Challenges Faced by Market Research Companies
Market research companies have played a vital support role for brand managers for decades. From focus groups to in-depth interviews (IDI), to eye-tracking technology, the marketing research process provides customer behavior analysis that gives you key insights into shopper motives and influences. With this, you can be sure your brand is targeting the right customers in the right ways and securing the all-important purchase decision.
The trouble is, making the shopper experience a realistic one can be tricky. As retailers are focused on creating a great customer experience for shoppers in their stores right now, the last thing they want (or will allow) is a swathe of market research companies turning their stores upside down for testing purposes. Unfortunately, that’s just what market research companies need to gain the most accurate insights. A faithful representation of the true shopper experience provides:
- More realistic insights about actual shopper behavior (versus claimed behavior).
- The flexibility to do A/B testing, moving one product out for another, or mixing up POSM.
- The chance to speak with and interview the shopper both in-store and in an interview room after their shopping experience.
On your hunt for a market research company to partner with, there are several limitations you’ll find:
- Few market research companies have the capacity to create realistic in-store experiences.
- Only a small number of companies include advanced technologies such as eye-tracking and biometrics.
- Large and fully flexible spaces suitable for testing are hard to come by.
The Marketing Research Process with Explorer Research
At Explorer Research, we have decades of experience in shopper research and employ the most cutting-edge technology to bring our clients the most accurate, detailed, and insightful customer behavior analysis. We favor the practical over the academic to help your team become shopper marketing experts. Of course, we would say that. What you want to know is, how?
Our expertise and technologies can help expand your team’s capabilities with:
- Advanced eye-tracking and biometric technology that follows consumers throughout the experience to gauge how they’re feeling, what they are seeing, and where their eyes are focused.
- VR testing with a green screen area and a life-size environment for realistic experiences.
- Immediately evaluate an in-person shopping experience against an e-commerce experience, to compare and contrast in real-time.
- Live video feeds of the testing environments.
- Aisle flow testing and analysis.
Market research facilities: Our lab is your lab
Our shopper labs in Chicago and Toronto utilize the latest and most innovative technology to evaluate all aspects of shopper behavior, whether online or in-store. Our market research facilities are ideal for projects like:
- Package optimization
- Planogram testing
- E-commerce usability and testing
- Store of the future initiatives
- Path to purchase studies
We focus on observing and measuring non-conscious shopper behaviors through a blended and thorough research approach using eye-tracking, biometrics, virtual reality, and more. Our labs are capable of testing for different environments including grocery, mass, and convenience stores, and different product categories (from CPG to pharmaceutical, to banking). We’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in the world to enhance shopper insights and build stronger marketing teams. Take a look at an overview of the projects we undertake in our US and Canadian labs.
Shopper Labs
We can create a combination of real products and shelves with a virtual background that approximates the actual environment.
An interesting example is working with one of the world’s leading appliance brands, we are currently creating a VR study to review a popular home improvement retailer’s appliance section and understand how to create a more favorable planogram. VR is vital to this research, as moving washers and dryers around inside a real store is practically impossible.
Working with Tim Hortons, we used testing boards for drive-through environments to understand more about how to make the most of this limited space and influence buyer behavior for maximum impact.
The Explorer Research Difference
Working with our team means partnering with an industry-leading team of marketing research experts. Not only do we boast decades of experience and the latest in cutting-edge research tools, but we are also committed to quality research and client consultation. We know that you know your brand and your customers better than anyone. We’re here to help you gain deeper insights into shopper behavior to ensure your messages are being heard. No matter the location, we also pay great attention to high-quality recruiting, and our labs offer immediate qualitative follow-ups with IDIs or focus groups, to debrief the shopping experience.
We understand that brands need greater flexibility from market research companies to obtain the most valuable customer behavior analysis. We offer the broadest range of immersive testing environments and our unique combination of quantitative and qualitative market research methodologies means we give you the most accurate and insightful shopper analysis.
Our market research facilities provide extensive capabilities for multiple methodologies, including online delivery for off-site clients, virtual reality environments, 3D skins to complete the shopping experience, interview and focus group rooms, and more. Importantly for research projects, we are able to duplicate the experience with the highest fidelity possible, while being able to isolate the issues and customize the research to answer the business question at hand.
Emerging from the global pandemic, it is clear that shopper behavior has changed. Face-to-face market research is vital to understanding how shoppers will behave in-store, in this brave new world. Answering the important questions about how to build loyalty with returning customers and what their new expectations are is critical to emerging successfully out of the COVID-19 era. We expand your team’s capabilities with the most comprehensive suite of testing environments and methodologies to help your brand triumph over the rest.
Interested in learning more about how shopper insights can explain motivations, unravel meanings, and identify the conscious and unconscious decisions that impact buying behavior? Download our Executive Guide to Shopper Insights.
