Spotlight: Humanizing Research for the C-Suite
By Marty Molloy
As we continue to evolve beyond the pandemic and ever more embrace digital interactions, the need to intimately understand consumers is increasingly apparent. Clients have embraced digital tools, self-service platforms, and AI-driven interviews to gather insights at scale—but they’ve also shared that these approaches often fall short of delivering the depth and nuance they need.
We recently explored this in our post, Meeting People Where They Are: The Value of In-Person Research. In a digital-first world, in-person research methods like shop-alongs and in-home interviews still offer unmatched depth and context. By meeting people where they are, researchers uncover real behaviors and decisions that might otherwise go unseen.
For years, clients have looked to W5 not just for research, but to help bring the voice of the consumer into their organizations. Lately, that ask has evolved—they want us to help their management and non-research teams truly understand how consumers live day by day. The questions can be broad and open-ended, but the goal is clear: make consumer realities tangible and real for decision makers.
In this month’s spotlight, we showcase how W5 approached a research request that helped a client’s internal team and senior management get a glimpse into the lives of consumers.
Case Study: Management Team Immersions
Approach
Our research began with a simple client request: help our senior stakeholders really understand how moms with young children really live. The chief goal was to allow these stakeholders to not only observe the real environments of consumers but ask questions. With that in mind, W5 designed a three-fold research approach:
Prior to the research, W5 worked with the client’s research team to interview its management team and understand their knowledge gaps and areas they were curious about. W5 also conducted quick virtual research 101 training class to give them some guardrails for the research and ensure they knew what to expect.
Phase one took place in the consumer’s home with their children present. A W5 moderator led the conversation but designed the interview guide so client stakeholders could probe on specific areas they found interesting or surprising. The focus was on how consumers really live and how they incorporate the client’s category into the flow of their lives.
Phase two took place in-store as the team accompanied consumers on a brief shopping trip to better understand where they shopped, what they noticed, what was missing, etc. focused on what the consumer liked and what they still needed.
Results
Our research connected the client’s management team and key stakeholders to the behaviors, preferences, and unmet needs of their target consumers. Informal conversations between sessions were eye-opening as they helped them understand where their strategies were and weren’t addressing consumer needs. W5’s key insights included day-in-the-life sketches that further illustrated behaviors and need states that inspired and guided client product teams.