How mobile qualitative enabled more authentic research into Swingers

Overview

Guest post by Tom Woodnutt, Founder, Feeling Mutual

What's in a name? What did you assume when you read the word "Swingers"? Is it the kind of place you'd want to see springing up on your local high street?

Last year, I was approached by the entertainment company The Institute of Competitive Socialising. They wanted to evaluate the opportunity to expand their Urban Golf concept, "Swingers, the Crazy Golf Club," into America. They had to work out whether the name "Swingers" might provoke negative reactions, given the potentially risqué connotations.

Our mobile-first approach to the brief helped get us nominated in the 2018 MRS (Market Research Society) Best Independent Consultancy award. Here's an overview of it for anyone interested in online and mobile qualitative research. The method highlights the power of remote mobile qualitative research to conduct more authentic research and to handle studies remotely.

The founder of Swingers, Jeremy Symmonds, had seen lots of Millennials research when he ran a Youth Engagement agency. However, he was concerned that traditional focus groups would yield artificial results because of the artificiality of the setting and the group and researcher effects at play. He challenged us to go further to get authentic insight.

In our mobile-first approach, we asked Millennials to share video feedback of their nights out. We also got them to share screen recordings of mobile interactions with nightlife websites, along with their verbal commentary of the experience. And we went the extra mile to develop stimulus that really brought the Swingers experience to life for them. This included mocking up Facebook ads and magazine reviews as if it had launched in their city already. This helped participants judge the concept more meaningfully and allowed them to express themselves on their terms, both of which inspired the client to proceed with their launch.

What was the research challenge?

In recent years, The Institute of Competitive Socialising successfully launched "Swingers — The Crazy Golf Club" across two sites in London. Swingers is a premium mini-golf experience for Millennials that turns over £20m a year. They wanted to expand globally, starting with America. Research was required to ensure that the concept (and its potentially controversial name) would be a success if it launched there.

On this project, the client and founder Jeremy Symmonds (winner of Young Gun Entrepreneurs Award 2018 and a former advertising executive) came to Feeling Mutual with a healthily cynical attitude to traditional qualitative research methods. In his advertising days, he specialised in brand experiences for Millennials, but had reservations about the validity of traditional qualitative methods.

The client had two concerns. First, he felt that group discussions with Millennials often feel artificial — not just because young people aren't used to talking in such a formal setting, but also because they're more likely to be influenced by the others in the room. Secondly, he was concerned that if we took a typical approach to creating stimulus (using just written descriptions and photos of the event), there would be a risk that participants might fail to imagine what the experience would really be like. Their judgements would not be as predictively accurate.

It was essential that the research enabled the client to accurately judge how likely Millennials would be to attend Swingers if it launched in America. Not just to convince the client but also their investors. They challenged us to design a method they felt confident making decisions off the back of.

How did the mobile-first research approach work?

To achieve this, Feeling Mutual took a mobile-first approach to understanding Millennial youth culture and went further to develop stimulus that would help participants imagine the concept as realistically as possible.

We worked with the mobile research app Indeemo to manage the discussion. This allowed people to give their feedback via mobile video, text, and by annotating photos. Communicating by mobile is far more natural for young people than in a viewing facility. We used a feature that lets people record their mobile screen as they interact with a site or app, while recording their voice commentary of whatever they think and feel. That takes the researcher closer to real-world moments as they unfold, so feedback wasn't as post-rationalised, filtered, or based on fallible memory as it might have been with a traditional focus group.

Many research platforms also struggle when you have too much video content, which can be data-heavy in this HD, 4K world. Indeemo's tools allowed us to manage feedback easily, probe participants, tag comments, and trim clips to go from analysis to a media-rich video report without friction.

A sample of 12 young people was recruited based on their social behaviours, interest in competitive socialising, income, and where they live and work. They took part in the mobile qualitative study across a week. We looked at their level of social influence in their peer group (based on social media followers and engagement), so we knew we had genuinely socially influential "taste-makers" taking part. They were recruited from Facebook, working with Liveminds Behavioural Recruitment, so we could geo-target people based on an interest in golf and proximity to where the venue was being launched. This meant they had never done research before and were more engaged in the process as a result. A series of exercises were designed to take us closer to their lives, and overall we received over 10 hours of feedback. All feedback was in private, which reduced any research effect.

Participants were asked to keep a mobile video diary of the steps they go through when deciding where to go on a night out with friends. They shared conversations with their friends, screen recordings of social media interactions, local city reviews of where to go out, and more. This allowed us to understand the criteria they use to decide on where to go out. We also got them to share videos and pictures of their actual nights out, which let us develop a model of their decision-making process. It was clear which criteria mattered most to them. We used this as an evaluative framework for assessing their reactions to Swingers, which gave the client more confidence in the conclusions and their potential application in the real world.

How did the stimulus design make the research more predictive?

In the second part of the study, we shared the idea of Swingers with participants as vividly as possible, so they could really imagine it and judge it meaningfully. The client was worried that written descriptions of the experience and photos alone would not be enough. We worked with their video and design teams to create stimulus that made it look as though Swingers had already launched. We drip-fed this stimulus to participants, replicating how they might have realistically come across the venue in the real world. We were able to get their gut reactions to genuine touchpoints, in the same context and via the same medium in which they would have encountered them in reality.

The stimulus included a mocked-up journalistic review from a local night-out review site, and a mocked-up Facebook ad as if it had already launched. We also used video footage from the existing London venue. That meant participants were responding to content about the venue as it would appear to them in the real world. We were more confident about their judgements than if we'd shown them typical written concept descriptions.

Throughout the research, we listened for mentions of negative sexual connotations associated with the brand name "Swingers, The Crazy Golf Club." Some issues were raised early on, but when participants saw how impressive the venue quality was, those concerns faded. The video of the venue that helped them feel like they were actually there made all the difference.

The third part of the study was dedicated to tuning the brand experience to local culture while staying true to the original concept. We asked participants to suggest local food and drinks brands and to review our suggestions for local partner brands. We got them to share ideas on how the mini-golf course design might be developed to fit American tastes. Because participants were selected as social taste-makers, they represented a harder audience to convince, which made positive reactions particularly meaningful.

The research method created a template for evaluating risk and potential reward pre-launch. It has since been rolled out across other markets as the brand continues to grow.

What impact did the research have?

Jeremy Symmonds, founder of Swingers, said this about the impact on their investment decision:

"Before launching Swingers, I worked for an ad agency, targeting Millennials so I know what a hard nut to crack they are. You have to understand culture first and get into their actual lives in order to truly understand them. Call me cynical but I do not trust traditional methods which can be too artificial and hypothetical. Tom's approach allowed us and our investors to make more confident decisions about the global roll out. He challenged us to mock up content to make it look as if the venue had already launched. This meant they were reacting to stimulus that they would likely have encountered in the real world. Also it was great to see feedback in video; it made the study a lot more compelling. The fact they answered by mobile, in a real world context and responded to stimulus that mimicked real world touchpoints, gave us far more confidence in their feedback. The research gave us confidence to proceed with the launch. It helped us stay true to our UK brand identity while also understanding local nuances. We had concerns with the name 'Swingers' given the possible connotations — and these were allayed. It helped us to commit to a particular site within the city since we had detailed local insights. I like the idea of letting young people express themselves in ways that are natural to them. Mobile feedback is far more natural than traditional focus group settings with their two-way mirrors and the group discussion context. We plan to roll this method out across future launches around the world." — Jeremy Symmonds, Founder, Swingers

Why does mobile qual work for Millennial research?

Mobile qual encourages greater authenticity by getting into people's real worlds and stripping away the artificial research and group effects of traditional research. It pays to engage Millennials on their terms. Mobile feedback is more natural for them than traditional focus group settings, and a shift in methodology towards media that are more natural for this audience is a key step for any brand trying to understand them.

About Tom Woodnutt

Tom Woodnutt is founder of Feeling Mutual. He specialises in global online and mobile qualitative research, and regularly speaks at industry conferences. Feeling Mutual were nominated for Best Independent Consultancy by the MRS (Market Research Society) in 2017 and 2019. Get in touch with Tom at tom@feelingmutual.com to find out more.

About Indeemo

Indeemo's mobile ethnography app and qualitative research platform helps researchers, designers, insights teams, and brands capture authentic, in-context, in-the-moment behaviour and feelings — so they can better understand what really matters to their customers. By combining mobile, video, and private social networking technology, Indeemo's agile mobile ethnography solution delivers rich, contextual insight at scale and in real time.

This article originally appeared on Insight Platform.

Frequently asked questions

Why is mobile qualitative research better suited to Millennials than focus groups? Millennials are used to communicating through their phones and social media rather than through formal in-person discussions. Mobile qualitative research captures feedback in the format they already use naturally, which produces more authentic responses and reduces the group bias of focus groups.

What kinds of projects work well with this approach? Brand evaluation, concept testing, path-to-purchase research, nightlife and hospitality studies, and any project where the researcher needs to capture real-world decision-making rather than post-event recollection.

How many participants do you typically need for a mobile qualitative study? This study used 12 participants across a week, producing over 10 hours of feedback. Most mobile qualitative studies work well with 12 to 30 participants because each person contributes rich, multi-format data across the fieldwork period.

How do you design realistic stimulus for concept testing? Mock up stimulus in the formats participants would encounter in the real world — social ads, journalistic reviews, video footage of the venue. Drip-feed the stimulus the way it would appear in real life. This lets participants judge the concept the way they actually would.

Can mobile qualitative replace focus groups entirely? It depends on the research question. For discovery, path-to-purchase, brand evaluation, and other real-world moments, mobile qualitative often produces stronger results. For controlled group dynamics or structured debate, focus groups still have a place. Many programmes combine both.