Made with REAL Ingredients

REAL Insight has a compulsion to conduct research that authentically reflects reality so that the insights lead to specific recommendations and decisions that help brands grow and avoid costly mistakes. Made with Real Ingredients is a claim that has defined REAL Insight’s work over its 30+ year history, although this is our first time using this language. In terms of research, “real ingredients” means having the right people in the right mindset behaving and responding in the right environment.

Finding the right people is an ongoing challenge for everyone in the research industry. Coming from an intercept background, REAL Insight has a low tolerance for professional respondents—who often respond as experts rather than as themselves—and those too familiar with the process. As we entered this pandemic stay-at-home chapter, we immediately got to work developing a better recruitment solution that prioritizes quality and purity while being cost effective.

What emerged is REAL Recruitment, our proprietary in-house approach to recruitment that avoids overused panels, gives us the control to recruit people we feel good about engaging with, and passes along significant savings to our clients.

Recruiting the right people is important, but so is making sure those right people are in the right mindset for the mission at-hand. With intercepts, shoppers are already in a shopping mindset; with pre-recruits we need to be more intentional about priming respondents to get their mindsets in the right spot to authentically behave and respond on a specific aspect of their life.

Environment is also a critical ingredient because context has a huge impact on mindset. For instance, a delicious piece of pie looks amazing and will be an easy sell when presented in isolation. But a delicious piece of pie presented on a dessert cart (are those still a thing?) with other delicious looking options suddenly becomes less of a no brainer. New products, packaging, and new service opportunities never live in a black hole.

The moral of the story: ingredients matter. The right manufacturing process (research methods, technology, and strategic analysis) matters, too. We will talk more about those next week.

Missed part one? Check it out here!