Although crowdsourcing has been used for years in market research, it is often used as an input method, an open way to gather ideas from customers, prospects, and employees. In fact, crowdsourcing can, and sometimes should, be used throughout the research process.
Collection of ideas
The classic example of crowdsourcing being used is to create public or private online communities specifically for generating ideas. My favorite example from the last six years is My Starbucks Idea , which has generated around 200,000 ideas. The common problem that has been raised by the success of these sites is: how do we actually analyze the results?
Classification of ideas
Many idea generation platforms distort idea ranking by highlighting “trending” ideas. For example, the “Popular Ideas” tab on some platforms positively reinforces ideas that are trending, making it harder for new, worthwhile ideas to develop, especially those that are no longer in the Recent Ideas tab.
Others offer something different, you upload all your ideas and people who visit your site are shown two randomly selected ideas. They vote for the one they like best, all ideas are viewed and rated and visitors cannot alter the votes. Although participants can submit new ideas.
Gain insights through online communities or panels
Analysis
A few years ago, at the Green Book IIEX conference in Philadelphia, Niels Schillewaert lithuania phone number a case study for Air France-KLM that sought to improve the experience of connecting flights, which produce many negative emotions in passengers. After collecting ideas from one community, he recruited a second community of 46 frequent flyers to analyze the ideas and add their own perspectives. They expanded the analysis from 26 opinions to 68 and revised 6 marketing assumptions, making an analysis that the researchers could not have done alone.
At ESOMAR’s 3D Digital Dimensions conference, Josegh Blechman pointed out the importance of using crowdsourcing to analyse verbatim responses, specifically for classification and sentiment analysis. He gave an example of using multiple participants to evaluate each comment in order to improve reliability.
We recommend you read: 3 reasons why online communities dominate the world of research
Crowdsourcing on the move
Research Magazine recapped a current community for the US Navy. The Navy writes,
«Over the next four weeks, the CNO wants to hear from you – from the deckhand to the locker man, from the flagman to the commanding officer – we ask you to submit your ideas and also to vote and comment on other ideas. Collectively, the best ideas and comments rise to the top. To break the “trendy idea” bias.
Community-building software offers participants many ways to navigate ideas, including a search engine, tabs and suggestions for browsing similar ideas. All of this is to help the Navy “reduce administrative distractions.”