Online Qualitative Research – It’s What We Do

“Come for the Technology, Stay for the Research.”

We take qualitative research to new heights with Socrates, the world’s only online software moderator. Through one-on-one conversations, Socrates encourages consumers to share their thoughts, emotions, and ideas through personal stories, that enables us to provide you answers for your research objectives. Our qualitative research online is combined with our innovative text processing software, Aristotle and our linguistic analysis, which moves beyond coding into insightful conclusions for better business decisions.

We specialize in custom online qualitative research, and partner with your research suppliers to improve their open ended questions.

Quester Direct

Customer Profiling
Learning about your customers’ attitudes, interests and opinions is paramount Quester can help you get to know your clients personally by understanding their complexities, life experiences, and the influences that motivate them. This exercise can be used to help inform segmentation work, or as a follow up to add color and life to existing customer segments.

Concept/Message Testing
Ask ten people “What did you think?” about a concept and you’re liable to get ten different three word responses all starting with “It was.” Socrates encourages respondents to elaborate on their stated feelings until we arrive at the main source that drives their reaction. Finding out that a majority of people disliked a concept doesn’t help you fix the problem; realizing the benefit statement was “condescending” does.

Shopping Experience
Your product is priced lower and is just as good as the competition, so why is your market share lagging behind? Socrates can uncover the stories linked to consumer preferences, learn about the external issues shaping perceptions, and understand consumers’ thought processes prior to their decisions.

Product Experience
It’s easy to find out if the product is below, at, or exceeding expectations, but much harder to find out why. With Socrates’ expertise, we gain valuable insights focused on product features, quality perceptions, packaging and even the situation of use.

Brand Positioning
People often have deep emotional connections to certain brands. Quester’s benefit laddering process takes a multistep approach that begins with scratching the surface and ends layers beyond, by going deeper with each question. The result is a clear pathway that interconnects basic product features to benefits and truly personal emotions.

Brand loyalty
How is loyalty to a business derived? And what are the perks that drive customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction? Quester will put Socrates to work to solve these quandaries. Socrates can uncover loyalty drivers and barriers – large and small.

Unmet Needs
We know not “everything that can be invented has been invented,” but what is important is that what you invent better matter. By giving respondents freedom to discuss their daily lives, Socrates can discover what needs are not being fulfilled, what current solutions are available, and what the ideal solutions will be. Custom: Tell us what you need to explore. Quester’s Research team is adept at helping Socrates conduct in-depth qualitative – we’ll work with you to get your customer stories, and get you the answers you need.

Research Partners

Ad/Concept/Copy Testing
Socrates is incorporated into these designs to probe traditional likes and dislikes, or to explore the emotional connections created by the stimuli.

Trial Drivers/Barriers
Our research partners layer behavioral data over surveys geared to understand drivers for Early Adoption, shifts in purchase frequency, and product rejection. Socrates is typically used as a follow-up on a quantitative metric such as purchase intent or to explore purchase considerations.

Tracking
In the Tracking context, Socrates has been applied multiple ways. Some partners prefer to use Socrates to probe the same open-end on a regular basis over the course of the tracker. Others, however, use Socrates at the end of the survey, as a means of exploring the key issues of the timeframe being explored. Some topics are focused on defining key product benefits, while others use Socrates to gauge effectiveness of messaging campaigns.

Exploratory
In custom studies, three to four open-ended topics are threaded together using Socrates to build a more in depth conversational module. This provides a much greater understanding of the mindset behind key metrics, and of the factors that influence purchase decisions.

Ideation
Much like in our stand alone qualitative designs, our research partners use Socrates to explore unmet needs and challenges in various product use situations. The additional probing provides added color and richness in understanding everyday consumer situations.