What’s up on WhatsApp: How native messaging apps can make the difference

In our fast-moving world, how can research agencies keep up with the way consumers express themselves? Tereza Lachmanova, who heads up Pulsar’s online research communities and helps researchers manage and draw insights from community data, discusses how using publicly available digital tools can benefit self-ethnographic research in this new white paper.

We use social data combined with other sources to really understand consumers. Pulsar has a fully functional qualitative research arm which gives us the ability to get inside the target audience. This qualitative arm extends into the world of ethnographics, co-creation, focus groups, and in-home interviews - among other methodologies - allowing us to create a detailed picture of the people behind the keyboard.

And in this instance our research fused social data and qualitative research via WhatsApp communities.

Tereza says: “With technology rapidly changing, market researchers have been faced both with great opportunities and challenges when it comes to working with online communities. We are constantly evaluating how to get our communities most engaged with our research, and this paper discusses our findings on testing the use of existing mobile messaging apps rather than using research-specific ones.”

“Having worked on a wide variety of self-ethnography projects, Tereza tested numerous approaches to ensure community members would feed back ‘in-the-moment’ content, meaning they communicate experiences, preferences and emotions as they happen, rather than communicating them as a prompted task at a fixed time of day.”

To read the full white paper, you can download it for free on the Pulsar website here.