Three for the pot

Such was the standard of entries to this year's Prosper Riley-Smith Research Effectiveness Awards that it was the toughest one to date to judge. In the last issue we featured the winner, Green Light Research's Amelia Coulam and Andrea Higgins, and their "Making Memorable Moments" project for Center Parcs. In this one we feature three of those who made it on to the shortlist, entries from Discovery Research, Jigsaw and Flamingo International, so that readers can get a taste of their calibre.

Alan Hathaway, Discovery Research

Facilitating Change For Betfair

To sustain growth, Betfair — home to the world's biggest online betting community — identified the need to reach a mainstream football customer base. Great you may think. A project about football, easy. But as Betfair's culture centres upon building technologically advanced products that appeal to rational horse racing punters, the project had to deliver more than just findings. It needed to be collaborative and evolve Betfair's culture; challenging the fabric of many internally held beliefs. As I said, easy!

Step one required the client to absorb the world of its new customer, to create the bedrock for brand change. This was achieved by cutting immersion session findings into well edited profile DVDs. Armed with this information, Betfair produced outline scenarios for the development of the site and a product portfolio that was customer, rather than technology, driven. As the client now felt more confident with its audience, the project moved on to co-creation sessions to allow the development, refinement and replacement of initial ideas. Further collaboration was attained with respondents through engaging them online over an extended time period using a qualitative tool, The Thinking Shed. This provided continued ownership and further insights. The final stage challenged thinking with an ethnography piece on match day experiences.

A key learning from this research was how the effective blending of approaches built internal client confidence which, in turn, provided permission for the research to grow with their needs. Imparting findings in accessible "real" formats assisted this process and the research was a real facilitator of change throughout the business.

Ali Pugh, Jigsaw Research

"Education is the best provision for old age"

Why we couldn't agree more with Aristotle

Customer research and insight is at the centre of all financial group AXA's CVM developments and our joint paper showcased a continuous two-year research programme, carried out by Jigsaw, to provide more information about customer needs in understanding complex products.