EXPLOR Award Winners AOL and BehaviorLens Use the Topology of Moments to Understand People

At last year's TMRE,
Chuck Miller, President of DM2 and Founder of the prestigious annual case study
competition, EXPLOR; Alec Maki, Vice
President of BehaviorLens Research and 2012 EXPLOR award winner; and Vicki
Draper, Senior Manager of Media Insights at AOL and 2012 EXPLOR award winner, sat
down with IIR's Marc Dresner to discuss what stood out about the winner's submission.

The EXPLOR award recognizes breakthrough innovation in
technology as applied to market research. 'At the end of the day, the EXPLOR
winner really needs to resonate in terms of organizational impact,' explained Miller.

BehavioraLens Research did just that.

The company's case study represented a few things, according
to Miller. First, it was the insights into the mobile space, which is a channel
that marketers are trying to figure out, and is something researchers are
struggling to collect data in. Secondly, is the data integration element. More
often, researchers are being challenged to use multiple data streams, get out
of our comfort zone of primary survey data, and this is a case that truly represented
that with an ethnography study, a mobile survey, and metered and behavioral
data.

'The combination of those three things really derives
insights as something that stood out from everything,' added Miller.

It all began when AOL came to BehaviorLens with a big idea. 'They
wanted to rethink mobile,' Maki said.

Maki and his team talked with them and tried to understand
what their hypotheses were in terms of the marketplace. It turns out, AOL wasn't
sold that the conventional wisdom of the market was quite right, but they weren't
exactly sure what the right way of looking at the marketplace was.

'We realized we had to go beyond the 'what' and 'how' people
are using mobile apps and websites to understand why they were using those apps
and websites,' Maki explained. 'So, we thought of our approach of understanding
moments and using those moments as the unit of analysis would be ideal
application to better understand what is going on with mobile and what is
really driving mobile.'

By applying that idea, BehaviorLens was able to integrate research
information across multiple modes qualitatively to understand the topology of
moments. According to Maki, moments are 'the context of engagement for brand or
a product in terms of where people are, what they are doing and what their
goals are.'

BehaviorLens then took this information and put it into a
survey to be able to measure these moments across 3,000 different moments, and
segment the moments based on the motivators of choice. Ultimately, Maki and his
team recast the marketplace based on different segments of behavior that were
characterized by their motivators of choice, providing phenomenal results.