Hear their stories, in their words.

Focus groups provide the ideal forum within which to gain broad contextual learnings on a target and understand how people feel about a given category, brand or experience and explore new ideas. Sensitive and skilled moderation is key to success and we are lucky to have a team of moderators who know how to manage complex group dynamics and are experts in structuring sessions. We can conduct groups either face-to-face or online. For online groups we tailor our moderating strategies to ensure we are getting to the heart of the matter and leveraging the ability to draw people out individually, whilst also building a collaborative bond between participants. Our experienced researchers create a guide that applies behavioural science thinking to explore behavioural change and the response to new ideas.

Ethnography is all about getting up close and personal. We can either observe behaviour in-situ or ask our participants to use self-ethnography and upload video footage onto an online platform. Both approaches allow us to delve deep and see behaviours in context. Capturing footage of this behaviour us understand how brands live in peoples’ everyday lives. People may report anecdotally that they do certain things in certain contexts but both observed ethnography and self-ethnography allow us to see these behaviours in real life (and both provide rich visual texture for our clients so they can step inside their target’s environment and see the world through their eyes).

Depths – either face to face, online or over the phone - are ideal if the challenge is to understand the nitty gritty of an experience or relationship. We employ this approach to unearth deeper understanding of individual emotions and behaviours. This approach is often used as a complement to groups and other methodologies such as online communities. We capture key learnings in the form of Vox Pops to bring the human understanding vividly to life for client teams. At times we may interview key stakeholders and experts to help us gain rich insight and test out hypotheses.

Online communities allow us to explore lives and behaviours and to co-create and interact as a community. We may set people specific tasks, ask them to document their experience or film themselves so we can understand certain behaviours. We provide clients with backroom access to these communities so they can log in and observe what is happening in real time. This means that clients can engage and interact, adding their own probes and questioning. Increasingly we are using communities to gauge response to new ideas as it gives time for participants to think about response and mirrors the context of browsing and interacting with brands and communication online. People can also get creative and show how they would make a new idea stronger.

At Walnut Unlimited, we believe that there is scope for traditional qualitative research to be blended with modern research techniques. This means we’re equally equipped to supply focus groups and depth interviews as well as our innovative SensoryQual and NeuroQual – where sensory science and neuroscience are layered into the data collection process. Whatever route you decide on, we ensure human understanding is delivered at every stage.

Combine sensory science with qualitative research to get a better, more trustworthy understanding of how your consumers feel. A mixture of sensory profiling and exploratory qual, this unique and innovative methodology is especially valuable with tricky audiences or a testing unfamiliar markets.