Trying anything new almost always comes with some trepidation. It’s easy to get comfortable with doing things one way and to avoid change. But honestly, retail today is not a stationary industry–it is a continuously evolving space, which means success in retail requires mobility and innovation.
When it comes to gleaning shopper insights for new retail concepts, taking a chance on new technology can help retailers and brands stay ahead of the curve, while saving time and resources. And leveraging virtual technology is a safe bet. Virtual can be integrated into your current research process, but replaces the real-world time and space constraints, and provides a risk-free environment to test new ideas. For example:
The Exploration & Selection Phase
As part of your research process, you want to find out how real shoppers make their decisions, as well as how they might react to various new in-store concepts and products.
By leveraging virtual simulations when it comes to analyzing shopper decisions, you’re able to capture how shoppers make choices in a virtual shopping exercise, using virtual shopper decision trees. This eliminates outside factors and takes purchase hierarchy research to a deeper level to answer strategic and tactical portfolio questions.
For qualitative research, using virtual stimulus in your focus groups allows you to see how shoppers will react in the real world, before investing in physical products, marketing and other store changes. So you’re not simply going by what members of the focus group say they would do, you’re watching what they would actually do in a real store.
Whatever you shopper research you might do in the real-world, you can do in a virtual world — plus so much more. Ready to learn how? Download our free guide to Best Practices in Virtual Research.
