How to Use a Consumer Panel?

What Is a Consumer Panel?

A consumer panel consists of creating a group of people and collecting their opinions about a product or digital service. The people selected should be as diverse a sample of the target audience as possible. It is also important that they commit to being honest since all the data obtained will form part of the market research that will determine whether or not changes need to be made before launching the product or service.

Types of Consumer Panels

• Trend-setting consumer panel: made up of people who are trendsetters or who often serve as a source of inspiration for others. Their opinion can be key to whether a product or service will sell or not.
• Generic consumer panel: participants are chosen randomly from the target audience.
• Brand-loving consumers panel: the group is made up of loyal customers who are satisfied with the brand’s products or digital services.
• Creative consumers panel: this panel is made up of regular consumers who are knowledgeable enough to detect a problem and provide a solution.
• Transient consumer panel: the purpose of this panel is to extract data that can be used to understand how an event or phenomenon has influenced the consumption of a certain marketing product or service. This means that interviews are conducted before and after this specific event.
• Continuous consumer panel: serves to obtain marketing information on the behavior of a group of consumers over a relatively long period of time.

How do consumer panels work?

Build your survey

The first stage is where the client creates and builds out the survey they want us to send for them within the Smart Survey platform.

Select your target audience

The next stage requires understanding the specific audience criteria they need us to send it to and volume of responses they require. We have a huge amount of profiling options they can choose from. These range from different age groups, occupations, educational groups and income levels to respondents in particular locations. We pool these from 20 million respondents across 70 countries.

Launch your survey and collect responses

Next, we’ll quote the client with a cost based on their desired sample size, targeting criteria and survey length. We’ll then launch their survey and allow them to start viewing responses in real-time, as and when they come in.

How Does it Differ From Other Types of Customer Research?

A consumer research panel gives you the opportunity to evolve your ideas. Involving the same target group throughout for feedback on your iterations. This helps you ensure that you’re moving in the right direction. As you make changes to your product, marketingservice, brand or message.

Using a panel is, therefore, in stark contrast to focus groups or other one-off surveys. These tend to be “once-and-done” endeavors, where you receive feedback in isolation. Based solely on what put in front of the group or survey recipients at the time.

How to use consumer panels in marketing research?

Using feedback to test new products and services

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been working in an industry for, there’s always a risk when launching new products. However, you can significantly reduce that risk if you test new products and services, to get feedback from the people you plan to launch them to.

Testing ads and other campaigns

We all know how important these two areas are to the marketer. Well, consumer research panels offer a great opportunity for you to test out different designs and concepts with panellists first. Based on their feedback, you can then select those that you believe will have greatest impact for your real advertising and campaign launches.

Identifying and analyzing your competitors

Do you know who your competitors are, or do you just need to find out more about them? Whatever stage your business is at, you can use the panel feedback from your marketing research survey. In order to improve your understanding of your competitors and how you can better compete.

Measuring your brand awareness

When it comes to your success your brand has a major role to play. Everything from your name, logo and brand color scheme to your personality, reputation and values can influence how you perceive your target market.