Jackie Anderson [Posted by Jackie Anderson]

As I mentioned back in October  we have an MROC that we use here at Forrester.  (For those of you who missed Tamara’s dive into MROC’s check out her posting here.)  We believe that MROC’s are an important piece of the research puzzle and allow market researchers to get closer to a fuller picture of what’s going on with their consumers. Check out Tamara’s report on MROC’s to learn more about all they have to offer.

Our MROC is made up of about 500 community members that are recruited from our online quantitative surveys, allowing us to link our qualitative and quantitative data together. This allows us to target specific consumers for deeper insights and also lets us look at quantitative data that matches to issues we see surfacing among segments of our community. Our community members help us test ideas or concepts before we put them into surveys and also offer color to issues we might see pop up in data we’ve just received back from the field.

In fact, I was reading an article at Gallup.com recently and felt like saying outloud, “I could have told you that!” Why do I like to talk to myself outloud you ask? Well, in this case, I had heard these issues surfacing in our community over the past couple of weeks and knew this was top-of-mind for consumers. So having the quantitative numbers to support their concerns didn’t surprise me at all. Our members had been commenting on the upcoming holiday retail season; talking about everything from the stores they were going to shop at to the ways they’re keeping their finances under control. The overwhelming response of the members was that they were cutting back on their spending and keeping watch for the biggest and best deals (which they were hoping would surface). So of course, if you’re spending your time thinking about ways to trim spending to preserve your finances, the issue of the economy overall is going to be front and center for you. Thus, the numbers matched perfectly with the insights our members had already shared.

While we use our community for our own internal research we also open the doors to clients to explore the community as well. We find it’s perfect for clients who are interested in a foray into the world of online communities but who don’t necessarily want to or aren’t ready to build one of their own quite yet. If you’re interested in some of the ways you could leverage our existing MROC for your research needs feel free to reach out to me, I’d love to see if we can help you out.