How Shell Used Voxpopme to Better Understand Consumer Needs

Editor’s Note: Insights That Work is a showcase of how the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative Suppliers create solutions to some of the biggest challenges in insights today. This year’s edition provides case studies on brands like Nestle, Shell, Frito-Lay, and more.

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Challenge

Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies with an average of 86,000 employees in more than 70 countries and is ranked as the ninth-largest company in the world according to the 2019 Forbes Global 2000. Shell focuses on using advanced technologies and takes an innovative approach to help build a sustainable energy future.

Shell Global Insights was invited to participate in an innovation workshop, designed to better understand consumer friction and pain points, develop game-changing ideas, and prioritize key solutions to solve real consumer problems.

Prior to the hackathon, additional research was needed to bring key consumer needs and frictions to life and to lay the groundwork for the discussions to be had over the three days. The Insights team utilized rich quantitative research data for this event but saw an opportunity to easily incorporate contextualizing qualitative insight using video footage.

Solution

As part of a larger segmentation study, the Insights team had identified six broad need states to focus on, which felt the most fertile for the purpose of innovation. With the need, states identified, Voxpopme was able to screen for respondents that fit each segment and capture video responses from consumers in both the United States and China.

500+ responses, rich in-depth and context, were collected over the course of approximately four days, a significant reduction in time and resources compared to traditional in-person qualitative methods.

The results from the qualitative insights were quickly analyzed using Voxpopme’s automated video analytics technology, allowing Shell Insights to identify key themes and sentiment amongst their target segments, enrich the quantitative data, and truly bring the results to life.

Outcome

Armed with key data on consumer friction and new context and insights from video responses, Shell Insights was ready to bring the consumers into their global innovation workshop to influence and guide their decisions.

By sharing the consumer videos alongside their quantitative data points, Shell Insights was able to truly connect with consumers in a way that data alone doesn’t allow. Listening to consumer feedback in their own words emphasized their findings, and created empathy among the teams, allowing them to relate to the consumer challenges through actual examples.