Unique methodology brings understanding category and perceived barriers
Editor’s note: West Monroe and Johnson & Johnson Vision are finalists of the 2026 Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Research Project award, a category in the Quirk’s Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 17 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.
West Monroe and Johnson & Johnson Vision were named finalists of the 2026 Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Research Project category. This category of the Quirk’s Awards recognizes a marketing research-related healthcare or pharma research project that took an innovative approach, demonstrated more than standard best practices and ensured the research had the potential to influence long-term or wider business objectives.
These two finalist organizations created a research program blending deep creative qualitative remapping, rigorous quantitative mapping and choice modeling to understand how parents and Gen Alpha kids with myopia, also known as nearsightedness, navigate pediatric contact lens consideration.
West Monroe CEO, Kieron Mathews, answered a few questions about the project and the challenges faced. Including how the teams overcame survey fraud in a unique way.
Describe the child-centered healthcare research conducted and the effect it had on Johnson & Johnson Vision.
This project was designed to give young people big voices in their own healthcare decisions. It was focused on Generation Alpha, interviewing children aged 8-13 to uncover the practical and emotional impacts of being diagnosed with myopia. Typically, research into this cohort would focus on the caregiver and healthcare practitioners , i.e., the parents and the optometrists. Rarely do companies talk to the actual patient. This research took on that challenge.
The research helped Johnson & Johnson Vision’s pediatric marketing and innovation teams think differently about messaging, product features, packaging, trial support and positioning. It showed how to create demand-pull from children, while also giving parents and eye care professionals the confidence to support earlier consideration of contact lenses.
How did you determine which methods were best to use for this project?
The methodology was chosen around one central principle – meet Gen Alpha where they are. Direct questioning alone was unlikely to unlock the full emotional truth of the category, especially with children as young as eight. Talking to an adult moderator about eyesight, confidence, appearance and fears around contact lenses could easily feel intimidating or abstract.
So, we designed a simple, creative and highly engaging qualitative approach built around projective techniques, and a quantitative phase built around simple choice-tasks. Children completed activities such as self-portraits, “show and tell” with a meaningful item and letters to their glasses. These tasks gave children props and stories they could use to talk naturally about themselves before the interview moved into more sensitive areas.
The quantitative phase was designed to validate and model what we learned.
MaxDiff helped prioritize the motivators and barriers that mattered most, while conjoint helped quantify which product features and benefits would most influence consideration and trial.
What was the biggest challenge you faced working with children and their parents?
Interestingly, the biggest challenge was not getting children to talk. Once we created the right environment, children were open, thoughtful and highly expressive. The bigger challenge was ensuring that the quantitative phase was genuinely completed by children, rather than by adults answering on their behalf.
Survey fraud and misattribution are growing challenges across the industry, and this project had an additional layer of complexity – a parent had to qualify for the study and then hand over the survey experience to their child. There was an obvious risk that some adults might continue answering themselves. We addressed this by building extra quality-control steps into the parent-to-child handoff.
The child survey included a mix of typed responses and simple audio-entry tasks, such as asking the child to answer an easy question in their own voice, like, “What is your favorite color?” Those responses could then be checked through voice-analysis and quality-review processes to help confirm that the child, not the parent, was completing the survey.
This gave us greater confidence that the quantitative data reflected the true Gen Alpha voice.