Bio: Jessica Hogan is part of the Consumer Insights and Strategy team at J.D. Power and Associates and is responsible for conducting in-depth consumer research, analysis and reporting from data extracted from social media resources. She frequently taps into her knowledge of consumers gleaned from over 10 years of experience as an advertising account planner.
Have you seen upper management become more interested in social insights?
Among our clients, absolutely yes. We actually target those responsible for “upper funnel” decisions. Folks that are in the strategic planning group, C-level marketing and R&D are getting much more interested in the depth of insights that we uncover. In fact, many times when we start working with a group, our main point of contact will be a mid- to senior-level brand or research manager. Later, we’ll see our research being run up the flagpole and affecting decisions at the strategic level.
Where are they using these insights? Product development? Customer Service?
That’s a good question. It differs by client, but we have tapped directly into R&D, brand groups from planning to outreach marketing, customer services and those that manage the end-to-end customer experience, product innovation teams - that pretty much covers the gamut. We’ve really worked with every type. It just depends on their needs. Usually when we start with one group, we’ll end up working with two or three others.
So you spread throughout the company?
Yes, they’ll see how this type of research can help with their pain points and then jump on board.
How do you see the findings from your insights being combined with traditional research to create a holistic view of the marketplace?
I’d like to say that a lot of our clients have cracked the code on that, but I think it’s still a work in progress for most. And to be honest, even for us. At J.D. Power we have our Ask, Watch, Listen research methodologies. By listening in with social media you can then uncover insights that can be validated by traditional forms of research like survey and vice versa. So when you see topics explored through traditional research, you can then go back and evaluate the consumer opinions about that topic in more depth and breadth through social media analysis.
We’re also looking into development of metrics that combine traditional methods and digital research. But there are a lot of ways in which J.D. Power, as well as our clients, are looking to create more of a holistic view of research that combines traditional and digital. It’s just taking shape in different ways based on their processes that are already in place and the metrics they are used to using. And we try to customize based on each situation.
One way we are doing this is by developing metrics that utilize social media data and traditional data, such as our Social Media Strength metric that combines favorable social media commentary with sales across a number of brands. It’s worked out well for auto and we’re planning to use it across all our industries soon.
Is there any really interesting project that you are working on that you could give us a sneak peek into?
One of our newest partnerships who is a major CPG manufacturer came to us and said, “We’ve seen that you guys have the ability to provide us with anticipatory research that allows us to see into the future a bit more than any other research that we’ve used to date. We want to put together a program where we can have an ongoing insight into where the marketplace is headed.” So we developed a custom methodology for them. It looks a little like what you’d see coming out of a traditional consultant group. There are parts that they handle, parts that we handle and parts we work on together closely. This is essentially an ongoing program that provides them with anticipatory research instead of rear-view validation research and metrics.
So proactive research?
Yes, exactly. Especially on the product side, we’ve been able to inform product innovation, testing and other R&D efforts based on customer product usages that they are unable to discover with their traditional research. For instance, women are talking about using their mascara in completely different ways than what they’ve seen before because that’s the sort of info that wouldn’t come out in a focus group.
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