on-site + mall interviews

Even in the Age of the Internet, touch, taste, and face-to-face contact are still critical.

People are sometimes surprised to hear how many survey projects we conduct in malls, interviewing facilities, and in store aisles. The majority of our survey work has been online since the turn of the millennium, but projects conducted in malls and other central locations have always held their own.

That’s because some things have to be done in person:

• We conduct an enormous number of product benchmarks and tests, and sometimes there’s just no substitute for face-to-face interviews in a dedicated facility, especially when the supply of test product is limited, professional preparation or assistance is necessary, or the need for product security is very high.
• We frequently distribute test product for in-home use testing from central locations in cases when we need to have people bring material back after the project.
• Although we can capture videos of shoppers in the aisle at the point of purchase, close observation and in-depth follow-up really need an on-site presence.
• And although you might not have thought much about it, there are important segments of the population that can’t be reached any other way. Un-acculturated Latinos, for instance, are more readily interviewed in malls with large Hispanic populations than by phone or online survey.

We started conducting on-screen interviews in the mid-90s, using a system we built and called CRIMSON that would have been considered “online” if the Internet had been more widely available.  One of the first things we discovered about the system was that it was great for getting people recruited to mall facilities to follow directions very closely. Who would have thought that our earliest application of online interviews would be mall-based taste testing?

We’ve tested many food and beverage products, personal care products, clothing, hardware items, computer equipment, games, toys, and hard goods since. There’s nothing like the real world for finding out what happens in the real world.

Recommended for | concept testing, product benchmarking, product testing/CLTs, package testing, shopper insights, latino