Market dynamics are shifting fast and furiously to mobile shopping, increasingly challenging brands to get ahead of the ever-changing consumer, according to Bill Bloom, CEO and Founder of FastFocus, who here explains the basis and benefits of a useful marketing tool that’s become known as the ‘Passion Score’ – a refined indicator of consumer purchase intent.
Today, regularly taking the customers’ pulse is essential to gaining a significant competitive advantage. Brand stewards need to know: Which products, packaging, marketing messages and features, are most effective in today’s dynamic market. Unfortunately, traditional market research tools – surveys and focus groups – fail to adequately engage consumers in vetting their offerings in the mobile commerce environment.
FastFocus created its prediction and preference survey environment for the purpose of more fully engaging consumers, encouraging more thoughtful responses, and gleaning profound insights quickly, while minimizing survey fatigue.
The FastFocus Passion Score allows differentiating between the top options by identifying the size and intensity of consumers feelings about the idea.
The behavioral FastFocus respondent experience emulates the actual digital shopping experience. Survey participants (consumers) are given a limited amount of virtual currency (tokens) and asked to invest them in the ideas they predict will be most successful in the marketplace. Using a gamified experience to mirror the typical mobile commerce experience, the survey enables brands to measure their creative content at all mobile commerce customer touchpoints
The Passion Score calculates the percentage of customers who are passionate about an idea or prediction using a proprietary algorithm that considers the number of tokens available to be invested, the number of ideas/predictions presented, and the investment patterns of individual respondents.
Experimental Setting and Respondent Experience:
- Stage 1 – Respondents are provided instructions regarding the FastFocus survey environment.
- Stage 2 – Ideas are posted in a random order and the respondent allocates tokens positively or negatively for the ideas they believe will succeed or fail or the ideas they are most or least likely to purchase.
- Stage 3 – FastFocus requests a text explanation as to why the respondents felt the way they did about specific token allocations.
Calculating the Passion Score…
Once all the data is collected the Passion Score is calculated. This metric is created by exclusively focusing on those consumers who are most passionate about purchasing or who believe strongest in an idea’s success or failure. Additional metrics, such as Affinity and Controversiality, add color and provide direction for decisions based on these insights.
In case analyses we’ve found that Passion Score, Affinity, and Controversiality together capture a range of respondents’ preferences and beliefs that is more detailed than produced by traditional survey techniques. The Passion Score alone can often differentiate between ideas that might otherwise appear homogeneous, while Affinity and Controversiality provide a rich set of dimensions to understand potential consumers and inform investment decisions.
Passion Score Calculations
The Passion Score is exclusively driven by “positive passion” or ideas that respondents are excited about. This is done through individual thresholding, e.g. 30% of people were excited about an idea. A “good” passion score, in the 25-35% range, is relative to the experiment because respondents face tradeoffs among choices.
Re-weight the data to uncover actual sentiments…
- Transactional density – token allocation and gusto for an idea are nonlinear. Ideas more enthusiastically invested in get more weight. Negative token value – respondents are less likely to spend tokens against an idea; thus, negative votes are weighted more significantly.
- Normalizes for comparison. Scores by idea are normalized to represent how well an idea did whether you have 3 or 20 questions. This normalization also helps compare responses across similar markets.
- Statistically analyzes to makes decisions. Responses are analyzed using a non-parametric statistical test to ensure that response sample sizes by idea are significantly large to determine a clear winner.
The importance of scarcity
An environment of scarcity is more likely to guide the respondent to behave similarly to how they would in an actual shopping experience. A shopper is not going to buy every item she likes; rather, the shopper will consider purchasing the best items compared to the alternatives.
The survey provides the respondent a limited number of tokens (approximately 1.5 tokens per idea). Across a variety of experiments we have found that approximately 80% of respondents demonstrate a strong opinion (positive or negative) about at least one idea.
Passion Score Benchmark
The key element most researchers seek in a study with Passion Score is a separation of 1-3 ideas from the rest of the pack. The Passion Score can vary according to the survey content, but the Passion Score for top choices tend to vary in the range of 25%-35%, depending on how often at least one of idea pops out to a respondent.
Scores are Dependent on the Choice Set
The respondent is choosing zero, one, or just a few of the available options to be passionate (positive or negative) about. As you change the choice set (i.e. better or worse competition for an idea), the results may differ.
While the FastFocus Passion score is exclusively driven by “positive passion”, or ideas that respondents are excited about, the FastFocus Controversiality Score provides a powerful complimentary score that adds significant dimension.
Controversiality is defined by the ratio of “positive passion” to “negative passion.” Negative passion are ideas that respondents allocate negative tokens above an individually adjusted threshold. We’ve found through repeated studies that this “negative passion” (what drives controversiality) is primarily based on ideas triggering disgust. The controversiality score is simply a ratio (positive passion: negative passion) scaled to 0-100. So 100 = 1:1, 50 = 2:1, 20=5:1 and so on.
A controversiality score of 50 means two people loved it for every person who hated it. In most studies clients have used Passion Score to quickly capture what percentage of people loved an idea.
Conclusion
In today’s fast paced, super competitive marketplace brands needed a faster, better, more cost-effective mobile-first market research solution! FastFocus’ Passion Score in the answer. According to Data Scientist, Jacob Miller, “The FastFocus Passion Score enables brands to predict what customers will do, not just what they think or say they will do. The research delivers more nuanced consumer insights than many other expensive and resource consuming competitors.”
