SPSS - News Room

Opinion piece

Virtual-world identities providing real-world insights

Avatars introduce new sources of untapped information that businesses can incorporate to better understand online attitudes and behaviours, and use to make real-world business decisions. Heena Jethwa, Product Marketing Manager at Predictive Analytics specialist SPSS, explores the opportunities that this poses for brands wanting to get to know their customers better.

With industry analysts claiming 80 per cent of Internet users will have an avatar by 2011, virtual worlds pose significant opportunities for those looking to connect with their online customers. Companies are increasingly able to harness the virtual world to get better insight about their customers. Mining the rich information that forms the profile of the avatar, the chats and blogs associated with avatars, as well as feedback collected from an avatar-to-avatar survey within the virtual world, helps companies connect in novel ways to this growing technically savvy and potentially younger customer base. The type of information available provides greater insight into the behaviour of these “personalities”, which may often be more transparent online than offline.

Surveys can be gathered in a range of ways within the online environment. Rather than approaching people at random, companies can target those who have shown an interest through their online interactions.

Surveying consumers’ avatars or online personalities in virtual worlds can provide companies with information on current opinion regarding their services and products. Feedback gained in this way can influence marketing strategies, future product development, improvements in product offerings and customer satisfaction similar to traditional forms, but the freeform profiles and opinions of avatars often hold deeper and more vital clues to product improvements and needs that may not be articulated outside of the virtual world.

It has been found that consumers are bolder and more honest in their feedback when they can ‘hide’ behind the guise of their avatar, and character traits can be more diverse. However, this means it can pay to be a little cautious at first. People sometimes behave more flippantly in a virtual world, leading to
over-ambitious suggestions. It might be that the best scenario is to use the insights gained as a basis for wider research and drilling deeper via traditional methods when making expensive product decisions.

Virtual worlds provide an ideal vehicle for companies to communicate with certain demographics, such as the 18-30 year old male who is notoriously difficult to reach. This consumer is all the more likely to be interested in the more adventurous and innovative products which would benefit from up-to-the-minute research, or even road testing a new product in the online environment.

The advantage virtual surveys hold is being able to reach thousands of worldwide customers from a cross-section of the population, in real time, all from one place.

In spite of the potential benefits, we don’t propose that a company abandons their traditional research methods in favour of online communities all together but use these new techniques in collaboration with traditional techniques. The possibilities posed by gathering feedback through traditional online research, phone, paper survey or focus groups are still of great value, and shouldn’t be forgotten. It’s more a case of ensuring the right balance is reached, with a combination of the intelligence gathered via all of the channels, to provide a truly holistic customer view.

Organisations put large budgets towards market research, but often leave online communities and virtual worlds out of the process, and the potential insight from the virtual world shouldn’t be ignored. The opinions and trends found via this medium are not only relevant for brands looking to raise awareness and sell services online, but also to those which only operate offline.