Market spaces and qualitative research

Market Spaces are specialised groups for strategic brand/product development.

They differ from traditional focus groups in that they take place over an extended period of time and in a virtual space, allowing for individual and group tasks and discussions that allow for in-depth reflection of ideas and the time necessary to discard or optimise them with the collaboration of all participants.

Digital marketplaces are places where customers, specialists and suppliers can discuss innovations, needs and trends within a category or business.

They are virtual spaces for conversation, creativity and the contribution of ideas based on unresolved needs or those arising from changes in consumption.

Their great value is that they are not just the company’s point of view, often biased, or the analysis of what is said in closed groups, perhaps limited to a specific moment, but a long-term collaborative space with its own evolution, where there is room for experimentation and the private launch of ideas and prototypes that can be improved by the potential consumers themselves.

Marketplaces are much bigger brainstorming sessions in terms of time, space and participation than face-to-face meetings. There is a lot of paid software available to create bazaar-type marketplaces, but a very simple and cheap way to do this is to install a plugin to create a forum or group within a social network, such as Facebook.

Remember that the key to the success of these spaces is voluntary participation, collaboration and the spontaneous contribution of ideas, which is why social networks seem to be an ideal place for them.

Although the first phase, the most creative and participatory, happens almost automatically if we have the participants and the platform, we then have to sift, classify and relate the ideas that emerge.

It is therefore essential to have a team that understands the basic objectives of the research and has sufficient criteria to make a thorough selection of the proposals that emerge. For this phase, tables can be created in Excel that allow us to relate the ideas to themes of interest to the company or brand.

It is also important not to discard any ideas that come up, even if they seem irrelevant or crazy at the moment, and perhaps save them in a file that can be consulted later.

Many companies have implemented their own marketplaces in a very successful way, IBM’s JAM is one example, but many more have done it in a less sophisticated and rudimentary way with great results.

The objectives of marketplaces can be almost anything that requires the input of different viewpoints and where innovation is important: new products, new campaigns, new business, solutions to internal company problems, product innovation, discovering new consumer insights.

The specific objectives are almost infinite, the general objectives must go hand in hand with the company’s objectives, because it is a collaborative vision that focuses its development on the customer, and this requires changes in the classical vision that most companies have had until recently.

In marketplaces, thanks to new technologies, barriers are diluted and the aim is to focus on the active participation of all participants in order to find innovative solutions that allow the category to evolve and bring value and benefits to the groups and sectors involved, with the aim of gaining differentiation and responding to future needs that can be glimpsed by analysing the relationships and discourses of the participants in marketplaces and that we might not be able to know otherwise. .