The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards winner Opinium

Editor’s note: Opinium is the winner of the 2022 Qualitative Research Project Award, which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. This award is for a team or individual that has made an outstanding contribution to business objectives using qualitative research. To find out more about the awards click here.

Opinium conducted research for a subscription fitness platform launching a new product. In addition to using mixed methodology research technology, the smartphone-based interactive ethnographic approach allowed the research to naturally fit into participants’ lives and drove exceptional response rates. The insights empowered Opinium’s client to adapt to the demands of its target market quickly and efficiently, making updates to the product iteratively while the research was still in field. This NPD research was core in shaping the positioning of the new product for a successful launch. 

How did the qualitative aspects of this project affect the results? 

Research is only effective in so far as it allows clients to make smarter, more informed business decisions and that’s where this qualitative approach really comes into its own. The smartphone-based approach enabled in-home ethnographic video and photo outputs that were able to bring the findings to life for senior stakeholders, ensuring that the findings lived on well beyond the initial report.

The longitudinal nature of the study allowed us to follow and measure changes in participants’ self-reported health and fitness levels over time – identifying the impact of the supplement and fitness regime over time as it took effect.

Most importantly, the client had real-time access to the diaries and feedback from respondents as they came in, allowing them to make decisions based on the feedback as the research took place. As a direct result of the study, the client was able to make real-time changes to the product and program pre-launch based on direct insights from its target audience.

Why did you start this project? 

Our client, a fitness company offering live and on-demand workout classes based on functional fitness training, aims to make working out accessible to all women, regardless of age and fitness level. Its exercise programs are designed to empower people to achieve everyday well-being by mimicking the way bodies move in real-life, helping with core strength, balance and flexibility.

As part of its offer, our client was developing a new supplement designed to be taken alongside a fitness plan. The supplement was aimed at supporting healthy recovery - a key barrier to consistent exercise.

The client needed to understand women’s reactions to the supplement and exercise program, so they could refine and improve it prior to launch. That’s where we came in! We developed a research program to evaluate the appeal of the new product among the client’s key audience across aspects like taste, texture, packaging and ease of use to help refine the product prior to launch.

Was your original goal with this product achieved?  

Our goal was to gather feedback from 70 women over the course of 30 days to really give them a chance to take the supplement throughout the course of the exercise program as intended.

Keeping participants engaged for this extended period of time posed a key challenge. Our research approach needed to blend in with their routines, so we could gather feedback on how the product fit into their everyday lives.

To address these challenges, we chose to use a smartphone-based interactive app for a few reasons. First, it’s not easy to engage participants in a research project for a whole month but the app offered a way to regularly alert and remind participants to follow the program via their phone. Balancing exercise around work/life demands can also be a challenge for anyone – let alone providing feedback daily to a research agency! Because it was smartphone-based, our approach was integrated into the lives of participants automatically, working around them. We could facilitate task activities, discussions and diary feedback in ways and at times that worked for them, not for us.

The outcomes hugely exceeded our expectations. Of the 70 women who started the research program, all but one completed the entire project (99% retention). The depth and richness we were able to achieve in the project went beyond what any other methodology can offer for this kind of project.