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- discovery research
What is Discovery Research
Consumer research is often focused on exploring the obvious or confirming what is already known. Breakthrough insights or ideas are, however, difficult to discover in a research process that is constrained by prior knowledge. In the Discovery Lab, we design qualitative consumer studies in a way that is revealing of deep consumer insights that drives site affinity and brand equity. The research design deliberately lays out a broad canvas, often starting with consumers' socio-cultural context and life themes, and successively converging to needs assessment, product search, consideration set formation, purchase, consumption and post consumption practices. The research process is aimed at "discovering" insights, opportunities, and ideas that are unusual, unknown, and often unconventional. For example, a discovery research agenda to understand how patients and physicians view chronic disease management may look something like the following:
Discovery research is not technique driven. The choice of qualitative techniques and small sample lab research is dictated by the research problem and the product category. The qualitative techniques range from simple group interviews and in-depth interviews to other techniques such as photo elicitation, laddering, ethnographic research etc. The concept of emergent research guides our research process. As the research progresses, based on the emergent learning, we revise or update our research guides and techniques. Consumer data collection is interspersed with extensive researcher / client discussion and interpretation sessions. The researcher sessions are used to study the consumer data from several novel perspectives and create new meanings and interpretations.
