Digital Immersions

Drop into the World of your Target Audience

Digital Immersions is a technique that offers many of the benefits of ethnographic research, but at a fraction of the price and without requiring you to leave your office.

You can think of it as an in-depth interview on steroids. In a typical Digital Immersion we spend days, sometimes weeks with consumers in your target audience; joining them in their living rooms, accompanying them on trips to the theatre, to events or to the shops. By the end of the study we know them as well as if we had spent a weekend in their home.

Building up the story layer-by-layer

Each respondent recruited for a Digital Immersion is given their own blogging space which they can fully customize. The user interface is incredibly easy to use – we can train consumers to use it in less than five minutes – and allows them to upload photos and video, tag websites and of course, blog.

Typically we begin each study by talking to each respondent about themselves, their friends, family and lifestyle. We ask them for pictures of the most important people in their life and ask them to take us on a video tour of their home so that we understand the context for their attitudes and behaviors.

Once we have a good feel for the type of person they are and the way they live, we move on to the main topics of interest, covering each one over a number of days so that we can probe deeper when needed.

Multiple ways for consumers to express themselves

Digital Immersions are very flexible in allowing consumers to respond in ways that enable them to best express themselves. They can type away to their heart's content and upload images from their hard drive, screenshots from their laptop or links to the websites they love the most.

The blogging platform synchs seamlessly with the respondent's webcam, allowing them to record their responses on video and talk directly to us face-to-face. They can explain how they are feeling, show us around their home or demonstrate how they use new products, surf the internet or watch TV.

With consumers every step of the way

Digital Immersions go further than many other research techniques. In fact, as a technique it goes wherever the consumer goes, thanks to a simple app that brings the full toolkit to the respondent's smartphone.

Text, images and video can be added to the blog directly from the respondent's smartphone, meaning that whenever the consumer is facing a key moment of truth, we can be right there beside them. Shopping trips, events, visits to a movie theater and nights out with friends – whatever your audience is doing they can take us along for the ride.

From experienced researchers

Digital Immersions are part of a new generation of research techniques; they allow us to spend more time with consumers and in more immersive ways. However, the core principles of good qualitative practice still hold.

Each Digital Immersion study is recruited offline by experienced, qualitative recruiters. After all, building a rapport with the respondent starts at the recruitment stage and this is much easier to do by phone than online. Thereafter, a moderator is in contact with each respondent every day during fieldwork; probing deeper on interesting topics and offering words of encouragement. At the end of fieldwork, all analysis is carried out by expert market researchers with many years' experience of researching media, technology and entertainment.