Customer Stories
Qualitative Research Software Captures Deep Consumer Insight
Redefining Customer Closeness, Brand Potential Uses Discuss.io Platform to Differentiate the Market Research Experience for B2C Companies
The Company
Brand Potential is a UK-based marketing agency and consultancy, servicing clients in the EMEA and Asia Pacific (APAC) regions. The agency has worked with well-known brands including Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and eBay.
“We believe that big brand ideas can come from being in the moment,” says Francesca Bennett, Project Manager for Brand Potential. “Discuss.io has allowed us to connect with consumers directly and do just that.”
Brand Potential began its partnership with Discuss.io in April 2020. The agency sought to fulfill the needs of a large client by delivering deep consumer insights at scale, with the hope of securing multiple similar projects in the future. Within months of several successful video interview sessions using the Discuss.io platform, Brand Potential scaled their use to hundreds more video interviews.
The Challenge
At the start, Brand Potential needed a solution to carry out face-to-face field work during the global shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency wanted to connect with consumers in hard-to-reach places, ensuring its teams were gathering insights about unique environments out of reach for traditional market research methods—especially amidst the shutdowns.
“We also needed a solution that would allow us to be flexible based on all our clients’ needs, which vary from client to client,” says Bennett. “We use Discuss.io for both focus groups and individual interviews, so we can deliver on any client expectations. The intuitiveness and completeness of the platform is what sets it apart.”
The Discuss.io platform allows Brand Potential to interview consumers on behalf of its clients, who also prefer to observe many of the interviews while in progress. Brand Potential was especially keen to provide this experience. So, they used a ‘backroom chat’ feature in the platform, enabling clients to watch interviewees and communicate with interviewers behind the scenes in real time.
The Solution
Following an evaluation of Discuss.io alongside its competitors, Brand Potential selected Discuss.io as the agency’s distance-interview solution. “There are alternatives out there like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, but the experience is not that straightforward, and they create a lot of other issues for our clients,” says Bennett. “Discuss.io is more than a platform—it has allowed us to quickly scale our online interview program and keep up with client demand.”
Brand Potential has found its clients greatly appreciate the ‘observer’ function Discuss.io supports—one of five unique roles available to users on the Discuss.io platform. The platform notifies moderators when observers are watching the sessions, but the subjects (i.e., interviewees) are not aware. Observers are able to communicate with the moderator of each session in real time using the backroom chat capability, even as the moderator interacts with the interviewee.
“Interacting with the Discuss.io platform has been so easy for everyone who has taken part—whether that’s respondents, observers, or moderators,” says Bennett. “The video, the ability to save moments, we found that really, really useful and our clients love that, too.”
Although Brand Potential has used their own translators, Discuss.io has its own aggregated network of moderators, translators, report writers, and other research experts to make having conversations with consumers as easy as possible. Unlike other video interviewing tools, each of these roles has a dedicated function within the platform.
The Results
Brand Potential was able to operationalize its approach to research and scale consumer conversations across divisions and geographies. Now, Brand Potential has executed 20 projects featuring dozens of interviews in more than 5 countries—including Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan.
Clients who observe their Discuss.io sessions enjoy tagging key moments with a simple click of a button. Following each session, the archived video recordings display each individual user’s saved moments with color-coding at the time that they clicked the button—a huge benefit to clients who want to take part.
The platform specially highlights moments that multiple people have tagged as well, allowing teams to quickly identify key moments that matter to the group as a whole. Both Brand Potential and its clients can also pull automatically generated text transcriptions from the interviews without even reviewing the video footage—a “value add to the client,” as Bennett describes it.
“After we started using Discuss.io, one of our major clients commissioned quite a big piece of video work because they had such a good experience with the platform,” she says. “I recommend Discuss.io—it’s really easy to use and it makes our lives much easier.”
Key Takeaways
- Discuss.io is the best global platform for eliciting insights from consumers, clients, and employees. Unlike other video interview platforms, Discuss.io is purpose-built to capture direct insights from interviews, enabling companies to leverage those insights at scale for better organizational decision-making.
- Discuss.io’s myriad features—observers, backroom chat, automated transcriptions, key-moment tagging, and roles-based access—minimize friction while gathering deep and “thick” consumer insights at scale.
- It takes a company that understands the value of consumer closeness to build a video platform like Discuss.io. As a result, Brand Potential and other agencies can be up and running and start to scale in just days; then operate at the fast, successful pace that their clients demand.
