Brainjuicer case study

Let the creatives create and the market decide: The panel power behind Creative 6ers™ and predictive markets

Customer profile


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John Kearon, Founder and CEO of BrainJuicer, told an Innovation Conference audience recently, "The paradox of success is you need failure to achieve it". In this context, failure actually means the courage to experiment and tolerate a huge amount of trial and error, until you achieve true innovation. A serial innovator in market research, Kearon founded BrainJuicer Group plc in the UK in 1999 to do just that: put new methodologies to the test to improve the insightfulness and inspiration in market research through the delivery of highly predictive quantitative data, with rich directive qualitative diagnostics. His conviction was based on the firm belief that the largest buyers of market research could make a step change improvement in their innovation processes if they had access to more profound consumer intelligence than was otherwise available, and to deliver it rapidly and cost-effectively. This was reinforced at the time by the emergence of the Internet as a data collection platform that could be leveraged to deliver research in a quicker, more creative and ultimately more effective way than ever before.

Today, BrainJuicer realizes that vision with a portfolio of quali-quant research methodologies and technologies that have brought new-to-the-world research tools to accelerate decision-making, especially in the fuzzy front-end of the innovation funnel. To Kearon's delight, these are becoming the preferred research solutions for 15 of the world's 100 largest global companies and over 100 household name brands. This tremendous growth is due in part to BrainJuicer's commitment to experimentation in the development of their own new research tools, in what they call LABs. Kearon explains: "In BrainJuicer's LABs, we incubate, test, fail, improve, re-test and rigorously validate all of our new research methodologies against traditional ones. If our new solutions are better, more insightful, scalable, cost-effective and timely than traditional solutions, we take them forward. It is not just about taking quant online. BrainJuicer solutions that make it through the LABs process are giving marketers the whys behind the whats, which they couldn't get in traditional quant, online or not. We are empowering clients to make timely, bold decisions with confidence. As we say around here, innovation, especially at the front-end of the innovation funnel, requires boldness, and boldness requires confidence that a new product concept resonates and addresses a valid consumer insight. From where we're standing, the two are inseparable."

In 2002, BrainJuicer landed Nike, its first significant client. In January 2003, Unilever Ventures took a minority stake in the company, and the agency listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in the UK on December 5th, 2006. Currently valued at $36 million, BrainJuicer recently reported organic revenue growth in 2007 of 42% to $13.14 million, with profits up 128% to $1.68 million pre-tax profit.

BrainJuicer now employs 55 people worldwide, with office locations in the UK (London, Brighton), the Netherlands (Rotterdam) and the USA (New York, operations in Los Angeles), with intentions to expand wherever clients have regional offices. "Since our inception, we have been steadily and patiently building our team, our client relationships and our software technology," explains Ari Popper, President, North America for BrainJuicer. "We now conduct innovative research projects for over 80 clients, including 15 of the world's top 100 corporations, in more than 50 countries and in 30 languages, ranging from ad effectiveness testing to insights validation, ideation to concept screening in the early stages of the innovation process in new product development, to webcam-based online ethnography and mobile research."

BrainJuicer has won numerous awards for their work, including Best Methodology for FaceTrace™, their groundbreaking tools for using face to measure emotional engagement, at the ESOMAR 2007 Annual Congress, and Best Methodology for Measuring Advertising Effectiveness at ISBA 2007. Clients include 15 of the top 50 companies in the world of FMCG, CPG, food and beverage, durable goods, consumer electronics, telecommunications, mobile phone services and financial services.

For more information on BrainJuicer, please visit www.brainjuicer.com.

The challenge

Very often, BrainJuicer partners with its clients to fund some of the experimentations that the agency is renowned for. The new research approaches that are repeatedly tested and validated in BrainJuicer's LABs end up ultimately solving clients' pain points and challenges in ideation, insights validation, concept testing, and the communication of branding, advertising and marketing messages.

To stay at the forefront of market research innovation and provide their clients with great return on their investment, BrainJuicer needed a reliable panel partner that could offer cost-effective consumer and specialty panels on tap, fast, anywhere in the world. Early on, Kearon recognized the potential and value of partnering with an innovative panel provider like GMI. "Back in 2002 when we started working with GMI internationally, you could see there were natural synergies between our two entrepreneurial companies. We were both growing to become challengers in a far too complacent industry at the dawn of online research," explains Kearon. "Sharing a similar innovation gene in our respective DNA, we recognized a mutual passion for creating game-changing technologies. We both seized the opportunity to regain some of the experimental courage of the early pioneers of this business, when household names in market research were still clinging to the more traditional modes of data collection, and struggling to demonstrate the real value they were delivering to their clients. It has continued to be a collaborative and fruitful partnership."

The solution

BrainJuicer started collaborating with GMI in 2002 internationally. The agency relies particularly on GMI's global panels to power two of its most popular research solutions: Creative 6ersTM and Predictive Markets, both part of BrainJuicer's Let the Creatives Create and the Market Decide methodology.

The Creative 6ersTM methodology was born from a simple question: is there a way to measure and identify creativity? After 18 months of experimentation with a representative panel of 5,000 consumers, BrainJuicer found that creativity, just like any other attribute, could indeed be captured and understood. "When you look at the normal distribution of the population, some people are very creative, some are somewhere in the middle, and some are not creative at all," explains Popper. "We named our methodology Creative 6ersTM because we found that as a rule of thumb, 6% of the general population are highly creative. Once found, the Creative 6ers are available to work on any client brief."

BrainJuicer's Creative 6ersTM test is hosted on their web site for any online visitor to take at any point in time. A range of scores generated from the survey tells each participant how creative they are. To supplement this sample, BrainJuicer also sends regular invites to GMI's global panelists, directing them to the web site to participate. On any client brief, BrainJuicer uses 50 Creative 6ersTM at a time, shares the client brief with them and gives them four days to think about their ideas – since creativity doesn't happen to order, and asks each creative for at least eight ideas each.

"With the help of GMI's panels, we have run these creativity tests around the globe, and have even busted a few stereotypes in the process," adds Popper. "A lot of people still think that the best way to generate creative ideas is in a brainstorming environment, e.g. with 10 people in a room. Our Creative 6ersTM methodology has actually proven otherwise. People tend to be more individualistic in nature, and think more outside of the box when they are on their own. Brainstorming may build team bonding and consensus, but there is no guarantee that creative ideas will result. And the double bind is when brainstorming actually results in the team buying into bad ideas. This is one of the advantages of online research: it enables companies to tap into the most creative minds without the pressure of the group setting."

Predictive Markets, launched at ESOMAR 2005 and awarded Best Methodology, is another one of BrainJuicer's LABs graduates powered by GMI's global panels. Based on James Surowiecki's book, Wisdom of Crowds, the premise behind Predictive Markets is that crowds make better decisions than experts when they are diverse, independent and faithfully aggregated. Surowiecki also suggests that a crowd of people operating through a market mechanism could be just as accurate as the best research approaches we typically know. Under certain conditions, a large group of crowds solving a problem or predicting an outcome could be more precise than using a targeted group of individuals.

Along these lines, BrainJuicer created a predictive market-type test environment where respondents are asked to treat new product concepts like a stock portfolio. Respondents can trade these ideas like they would stock: they can double their shares in an idea or a concept if they think the market would respond well to it, or sell them if not. By asking people not to respond for themselves but rather in terms of how the market operates, BrainJuicer gets less expensive, more accurate and effective results than a monadic test, which typically asks different respondent groups to evaluate a single concept, and struggles to differentiate the strong from the weak. The Predictive Markets research projects that BrainJuicer runs are deployed among GMI's global consumer panel. Up to 500 randomly selected respondents get exposed to all of up to 15 different concepts. Every respondent gets to answer the survey independently, then the data is aggregated. Predictive Markets screen and sort effectively, providing right qualitative diagnostics behind the outcomes, thus allowing clients to make decisions early on in the product development process.

"We work with more and more clients in this area, and in many different industries, from insurance and medical to products for kids," comments Popper. "Another part of the value this methodology offers is that it normalizes the differences that we normally see across regions, and seems to reduce some of the typical cross-border survey response bias."

The results

BrainJuicer's partnership with GMI supports one of the agency's own key differentiators. It enables timely and cost-effective alternatives to other research solutions available in the marketplace, while simultaneously delivering richer, more effective and actionable insights for clients around the globe to make faster, better informed business decisions. GMI's 24x7x365 approach to delivering global sample has been critical in enabling BrainJuicer to effectively serve its clients in a timely fashion, and GMI's competitive pricing has allowed the agency to reach economies of scale, thus saving money in the process.

"Our goal is to continue to innovate and develop new products, establish a greater and broader international presence, and become a leading market research house," concludes Popper. "We are now rapidly expanding our business in EMEA and APAC, and will rely on GMI to provide the global panels we need to power some of our methodologies in the regions. As a preferred global panel partner, GMI will help us remain on the cutting-edge of innovation in global online research."

For more information, please contact:

Muriel Guilbert
Senior Director, Global Marketing
GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.)
Phone: +1 206-315-6480
Email: mguilbert@gmi-mr.com