Oatly is testing group discussions online and gains in depth knowledge about consumer buying motives

Qualitative surveys are a great tool when you wish to know more about the needs, thoughts and ideas that a target group possesses and how they actually think.
Online focus groups is a new testing method with group discussions online, when the aim is to find relevant problematics within e.g. a mapping of a market, or testing ideas and communication at an early stage.

Qualitative surveys cause ideas that lead to product- and service development and generate interesting hypotheses.

Online focus groups is a new method and a fine complement to the quantitative surveys otherwise offered by Zapera. We are working with so called “bulletin boards”, which can be compared to an online pin-up board where the contributions from the respondents can be viewed by everybody in the survey. The discussion is open for several days.

"I am very positive," says Malin Jansson trade marketing manager at Oatly AB, whose main products are milk and soy free oatbeverages. Ever since the Oatly brand was introduced to the market in 2001, we have consistently made tracking surveys with Zapera and we have great experiences with the use of quantitative surveys online.

The next step for us is to go in depth with our knowledge of the reasons for buying dairy free products in general and Oatly in particular.

A sample of 45 respondents is invited to 4 online forums – the so called "bulletin boards".
The respondents were users of dairy free products, two of the groups as a result of allergies and two of the groups because of health reasons only. The respondents were chosen from a group of people who had participated in earlier surveys done by Oatly.

The leader of the survey, the moderator, started up the forums by posing a few opening questions on the online bulletin board. When the respondents had answered they were asked to specify their answers. The answers were visible to everybody in the forum, which functioned as stimuli to the discussion. On the second day of the discussion the moderator continued with new questions as a result of the answers from the day before.
Day three continued with showing images of packaging in order to get the viewpoints of the respondents.

"We experienced that everybody were participating actively in the discussion and no one dominated the discussion, which is often the case in ordinary focus groups," says Malin. Even though we were not able to analyse the respondents’ body language we still believe that we got a deeper understanding of the consumer’s motive for buying, with the use of online focus groups. This is something that is of great usage to our product development and the structuring of our market communication.

In comparison to ordinary focus groups there are great advantages, both economically and in terms of the quick feedback.

The sampling can be done either through a screening of Zapera’s respondent database or based on an earlier survey done by the client. Thus it is easy and quick to get the exact target group needed. With the online surveys it is easier to get a hold of target groups that are normally difficult to recruit e.g. young people, families with children and B-2-B target groups as they have the possibility of answering the survey when they have the time.

Online groups are a lot simpler to participate in and can cover larger geographical areas in comparison to physical focus groups.

As an alternative to the bulletin boards a new chat forum is now also available. At the chat forum the respondents are online at the same time for approx. 1-2 hours. The chat groups give a quick result for simple and not too complicated problem statements.

Qualitative surveys generate interesting hypotheses. With Zapera’s quantitative online surveys it is possible to explore whether an attitude or viewpoint is shared by the rest of the target group or only a few members of it.

Source: Zapera News, Issue 24, November 2006