What’s the best way to go through video responses and glean insights? Tom Bassett, founder of Fabric & mindswarms, discusses best practices for extracting relevant data and weaving powerful stories to share within your organization.
Mobile video surveys provide powerful first-person accounts that speak customer truths. But how do you get the most from your data? Using his more than 20 years of experience working with companies like Microsoft, Virgin America, and Nike, Tom Bassett shares 4 tips to help you effectively analyze your data and draw conclusions.
Reviewing Results
When analyzing your mobile video surveys, there are a couple of things to look for. First, you’ll want to identify patterns and themes. What are people identifying with? What are the recurring problems or issues with the product, service, or experience? Come up with a list, aiming for no more than 5-10 patterns. Once you’ve identified these, it’s important to run them through your brand filter. Ask yourself: How are the insights related to my brand? Which are the most relevant for you (versus insights that are not related to my brand)?
During this stage, it’s also important to look for original insights – outliers. For example, what’s something you didn’t expect the respondents to say? What’s something unique you noticed, when seen through the eyes of the consumer? Since it’s very hard for brands to differentiate these days, the off-speed pitch is often where you find the interesting angles.
Organizing Results
Next, you’ll want to bracket your insights into two main buckets: problems and opportunities. This is a relevant way to share insights back internally at your organization. Senior leadership teams often want to help solve problems – but they also want to understand where the potential zones of opportunity are to help grow. Are the respondents articulating a problem or need that hasn’t been met? Have they mentioned a totally new idea? An expansion of idea?
Identifying Story
This is an important step because although it’s great to have lots of insight, it’s essential to find a focal point. Ask yourself: What is the overarching story? How do you articulate this? Try to hone in and articulate one story. Philosophically, we like to see things through the eyes of consumers. For example, for a Yahoo Personals project: “Women don’t want to let go of the idea that Fate played a role in finding the partner of their dreams.” Once you determine THE story, you’ll want to come up with chapters, or building blocks that help build that story. Ask yourself: What are we trying to teach or tell people? What’s the big reveal? In simple terms, there is a beginning, middle and end. The middle is usually the reveal (the point of tension, the climax) while the beginning introduces it, and the end wraps it up.
Sharing Results
When you give your presentation to colleagues, use the videos to really engage them! Videos lift heads, because there is sight and sound and motion. So, make sure to show video clips of respondents in order to get their attention. It’s worth it to put together a 2-3 minute series of clips in order to share the data in the most powerful way possible. But don’t use video to be a surrogate for PowerPoint; use video to tell a compelling story. Otherwise, if video just lists points as opposed to adding up to something singular, viewers will be confused. (One additional tidbit: we also like to sprinkle in single Fabric clips throughout a debrief deck, to help keep things lively. These clips can be links to the study matrix, or videos can be downloaded and placed into the presentation).