An Intimate View

How Connecting Over Live Video Can Bring Marketers Closer Into Consumers’ Lives

The Challenges

Around the world, brands are struggling with consumer engagement. As a result, the client, a multinational snacks and beverages company, recently launched an initiative to connect their teams with consumers directly. Previously, they conducted research through agencies and in person, but this initiative enabled the team to engage with and understand consumers firsthand, with the help of Discuss.io’s live video platform.

The Solution

In this program, teams were encouraged to park their assumptions at the door and to engage with consumers one-on-one. In these conversations, the team members could connect with consumers on different topics of relevance to them. No matter how different those topics were, however, the benefits of these conversations were often similar. Let’s take one veteran marketer’s conversations as an example. This marketer had been a part of the team for nearly four decades. She was an expert in the enterprise and knew the various brands that she worked with intimately. As a part of the new initiative, she was asked to get to re-know the consumers that she was targeting. And so she did. She set up conversations with consumers about a topic of interest to her: consumers’ purchasing habits at convenience stores. This marketer had historically engaged with consumers in-person, through the help of an agency. However, using Discuss.io’s online platform, she was able to set up and conduct her project on her own. In one stop, she set up recruitment, scheduled the times of sessions, had conversations, and shared those insights with the rest of her team. In connecting online, she engaged in conversations with the consumers and answered the questions that she had. Because the session was conducted from the consumers’ homes, this marketer was able to get an intimate look into their lives, including inside of their refrigerators.

The Results

Having conversations directly with consumers, this veteran marketer and others like her were challenged to abandon their assumptions and re-engage with consumers in order to discover new insights. Consumers participated in these conversations from their homes, giving the team a virtual in-home experience without having to leave the office, saving time and budget. Furthermore, this lack of travel allowed them to expand the scope of their research, since they were no longer bound by geography. With access to the archived video available within hours of the sessions’ completion, the marketer was able to quickly pull together and share key insights across her team, allowing them to make faster, more informed business decisions.