Bellevue, WA – GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.) a leading technology and services provider to global online researchers, enabled Sony Music UK to deliver interactive and engaging online survey experiences, a creative approach that has revolutionized Sony Music UK’s move towards artist research.
GMI Interactive™ service, with its technology platform’s state-of-the-art animated graphics and interactive techniques, has enabled Sony Music UK to develop a new hybrid approach for artist insight gathering that crosses the divide between qualitative and quantitative research. Born out of a need to scale their research activity, Sony Music UK worked with GMI to develop an online survey that can emulate the quality of insight generated from qualitative research and enable them to conduct research faster and more cost effectively.
The Sony Music UK solution involved rethinking the online survey experience, looking at it from a respondent’s point of view. This involved developing more innovative, engaging questions; integrating a greater range of visual stimulus material; adding sound and video; and giving respondents more intelligent and interesting tasks to do. The aim was to immerse respondents in the artists’ world, much the same as in qualitative research, to get more thoughtful insights.
At the heart of this approach sits a new piece of technology developed by GMI, to recycle live feedback from respondents back into their survey. In traditional focus group research, participants listen to and respond to other thoughts and opinions, leading to a more free form level of discussion. GMI adopted this model, developing proprietary algorithms that pick up respondent comments and present them back into the survey on a real-time basis in a variety of ways. This enables respondents to cross evaluate other opinions, triggering a highly engaging experience and actionable insight. Respondents spent upwards of 30 minutes completing surveys that, on paper, contain around 17 minutes of questions. As a result, they were delivering back up to 3 times the volume of open ended feedback that would be expected from similar surveys of this length. Over 90% of respondents in follow up interviews said they really enjoyed doing these surveys.
These surveys have helped Sony Music UK gain richer insight into how fans feel towards their artists. This has made quantitative research much more palatable to a creative organization and has enabled its marketing team to develop more innovative marketing for artists.
After successful trials, using GMI Interactive’s research methodology in the UK over the last year, Sony music has announced that they are adopting this new approach to implement a whole pan European research program. “GMI’s Interactive solution has enabled us to create a fun survey experience, reflective of powerful artist brands, quickly and cost effectively resulting in high quality, reliable insights,” said Mark Uttley, Head of Insight, Sony Music UK.
“Using the tools we have developed we are capable of processing large amounts of structured and unstructured data. This enabled new ways of gaining quantitative consumer insights with a qualitative dimension, a unique approach that has greatly enhanced Sony Music UK’s approach to artist insight” said Jon Puleston, Senior Director, GMI Interactive.
