Impact report real-world focus groups. This is the space where participants might have shared a joke, agreed with one another, or completed someone elses sentence. Bulletin boards have always been there when we were looking at a product test over a few weeks, for example, or a longitudinal study but now were using them for more of a deep dive. Its also critical for the industry to bring contemporary use of modes into research, such as social media, argues Dubreuil. We need to reflect real life and make it a more authentic experience for participants, he says. He cites social media listening for segmentation and measuring the impact of a new product launch as a mode thats growing in significance. Its about looking at social sentiment and using algorithms to group what it really means around engagement and key words. Its about using insights that are already there and running analytics to get a wider appreciation of the subject. Similarly, Basis discovered that deep insight could be generated by tapping into the WhatsApp dynamic, where people already feel at ease. During the pandemic, Basis trialled WhatsApp as a qual platform for a digital-only study of women in Nigeria. It believes it learned more via WhatsApp than it would have done in a face-to-face group, because the women were already using the platform for commercial and social purposes, and felt relaxed in this environment. Discourse analysis has also been key for researchers looking to put transcripts under the microscope for deeper analysis and insight. Discourse analysis looks at the way people subconsciously use metaphor to describe their relationship to the world, and these can change subtly in times of flux. Its helped us to understand issues such as fear, anxiety, wish fulfilment or desire in the pandemic, adds Acacia Avenues Lee. Fluid and nimble Mixing research methods focus groups with ethnography, or semiotics and one-to-one interviews is nothing new, but everything is more nimble in a virtual world. Kantars Prosser likes the fact that there is more fluidity during the qual process than there used to be. When youre setting up an old-school viewing facility, the stakes are higher. But online, if its not quite right, its easier to recover, he says. If we do an online community, we can get back in touch with those people. Its less about the quality being awry and more and methodologies to extend our insight. This is how we should work anyway. Many one-to-one video interviews are now naturally falling into ethnography, with people grabbing props to illustrate a point. Basiss Smith recently conducted a project for a financial client researching super-high net worth individuals in the UAE, Singapore and China. Normally, we would have visited in person, she says. But that audience is very mobile and hard to get hold of. This time, we could speak on a video call in a relaxed environment. A shift towards online quant, away from telephone and face-to-face interviews, has inevitably sped up over the past year. Unilever in China, for example, accelerated its process to make all its brand tracking 30 Impact ISSUE 33 2021_pp26-35_Report.indd 30 26/03/2021 10:03