Focus Groups Going Green Makes Good Business Sense

The Green agenda is on the forefront of everyone’s mind these days.  Not only for the obvious environmental reasons of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, but also to reduce costs and improve company reputation.  Many companies today are including a green strategy within their corporate culture and treating it as an investment into their future.

Vancouver-based Inception Market Intelligence (IMI Group) is focusing on making market research greener with their new PULSE48 reports, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional focus group.  IMI Group offers over 20 years in the field of market research for companies worldwide.  The purpose is to provide market research focus group type reports in an eco-friendly, cost-efficient manner.

PULSE48 software technology is identified as "precision and recall" theory which scans the internet on a prescribed topic and comes back with a collective public opinion on the topic. This is different from word recognition that most analytics utilize. Focus groups can cost over $10,000 per location where the same results can be completed for $2,000-4,000 per report.

Gathering opinions from a focus group requires time, energy, and resources.  A traditional one can take weeks even months to conduct, requires multiple participants, and add to this the significant cost to a business and it can be unreachable for many small businesses.   PULSE48 completes the work in a timely, energy efficient manner. The reduction in the paper trail alone will account for a greener environment within a company.

As companies implement green strategies, the focus is often to move towards online technology.  The natural progression would be to move focus groups online; a focus group that has inadvertently already happened.  "PULSE48 reports are more efficient than focus groups because our technology eavesdrops on public conversations on the internet “, says Robert Greene Director of Sales and Marketing for IMI Group (www.inceptionintel.com).

"The beauty is that you can track opinions and attitude and how they change over time without calling back participants, dealing with scheduling and additional costs.  For companies conducting market research who have green initiatives to fill, PULSE48 is the logical choice.”

Sustainability has become an integral part of many organizations and companies realize the concept of going green extends to every aspect of their business.  Sustainable and eco-friendly business practices can make a company more desirable than their competition.  A traditional focus group can yield hundreds of pages of research that need to be reviewed and analyzed where a PULSE48 report can provide that same information in less than 20 pages.  Just as focus groups can eliminate undesirable participants, PULSE48 can rule out internet chatter, paid bloggers, and non-users.  Meaning resources such as paper and energy consumption are reduced.

 

Finding success by implementing sustainable initiatives needs to extend to every aspect of a business. Organizations who have felt market research was beyond their reach can now have software that will scan social media sites and collect an opinion on what is said about them in a sustainable, eco-friendly manner.

 

About the Author: Robert Greene, from his 10 years sales and marketing experience, has authored many white papers and articles in the areas of green marketing, sales, customer service, and business development. After working in the green energy and not for profit sector, he is currently the Director of Sales and Marketing for Inception Market Intelligence.  You can reach him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter, @Pulse48