Big data is a remarkable tool for understanding your customers. Sales data can help you determine which of your products are most in demand, website analytics can allow you to observe what people are most interested in and social listening allows you to record what people are saying about your brand.

While big data can answer questions like what products are selling?, what content are people consuming? and what features do people cherish?, it often brings to the surface a new layer of why questions. For example, why do people like your product?, Why do people need your product? or Why do people donate to your cause?. It for precisely this reason that discovery research is so important.

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Why do people like your product?

In the 1950s, Alfred Goldman was hired by a food company to understand customer buying behaviour and why sales of cake mix were performing poorly. While conducting a focus group, one individual commented 'I actually like foods that are time-consuming'. That slip inspired the other people in the group to talk more openly about how guilty they felt over serving this kind of food to their families. As the conversation unfolded it was revealed that there was a negative image surrounding convenience food. Alfred found a simple solution; by adding an egg to the cake mix, preparers of the cake could feel like they had participated in the baking process. The cake mix was no longer viewed as convenience food and sales of the product skyrocketed.

Using open-ended discovery questions provided an opportunity for participants to share their thoughts freely about why they didn't buy the product. These questions allowed the researcher to consider a spectrum of opinions that would not be possible through close-ended questionnaires such as multiple choice or rating scales.

Why do people need your product?

A man walked into a shop and asked for a drill bit. Unfortunately the shop didn't stock drill bits so the cashier asked why he wanted the drill bit, he replied that he needed to drill a hole in the wall. With further probing the man revealed he needed to put a hole in the wall so that he could hang a picture frame. This level of insight provided the cashier with enough information about the true nature of the problem. Using this insight the cashier was able to sell the man a picture frame that could stick to the wall without needing to drill a hole in the wall.

Discovery research provided the cashier with an opportunity to dig deeper into the mind of his customer by probing for more information. Notice how discovery research is open to exploring new possibilities as they emerge. Approaching discovery in this way is important because the motivations, perspectives and causes behind customer behaviour can be vast and unexpected.

Why do people donate to your cause?

Feed the Heroes (FTH) is a nonprofit that launched as a rapid response from leaders within Ireland's startup community to support frontline workers during the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. After passing €1m in donations only 3 months after launching, FTH wanted to understand why people donated to the cause. FTH understood that using a traditional survey would only be useful for validating some of the drivers that they had already suspected but would not provide an opportunity for new unknown reasons and motivations to emerge. It was also clear that focus groups would not capture the diversity of the doner base due to small sample sizes.

It was for these reasons that the charity choose to host a survey on the OpinionX open-survey platform. Through the platform those who gave donations previously contributed to open-ended text based questions and voted on one another statements. Through the use of automated analysis features FTH was able to identify the most important statement that reflected the motivations behind those who had contributed to the charity; "It felt good to support both medical staff and the local restaurants at a hard time". Discovery research allowed FTH to identify why people donated to the charity. This level of insight is tremendously useful for future communications and could only be discovered using discovery research at scale. Check out the full Feed the Heroes case study for a deeper dive into this discovery research success story.

From Big Data to Big Insights

As we've seen, big data is an incredible resource for identifying customer behaviour. Combining this data with discovery research can enable you to also understand why customers make decisions which can be very impactful when formulating your strategy. Focus groups and in-depth interviews are great for conducting discovery research if you have significant time and resources, however they lack the robust sample sizes that ensure you are gathering insights that are reflective of the wider customer base. For those of us that need more scale and statistics for decisions without the hassle and cost of traditional qualitative methods, check out our post below about how OpinionX facilitates discovery research.