Patent Application
20130035981
Embodiments presented in this disclosure generally relate to techniques for gathering market research data. More specifically, embodiments presented herein relate to techniques for conducting market research using social network games.
Business frequently engage in market research to evaluate a variety of business interests, such as consumer product awareness, consumer sentiment, brand preferences, loyalty, trends in awareness and sentiment, etc. For example, businesses often send surveys to groups of customers (selected randomly, or according to some demographic profile). Such surveys can be sent via the mail, but more and more such surveys are presented to users engaging in online transactions. For example, a user purchasing items online may be asked to participate in a survey to provide feedback regarding the online process as well as asked to answer other questions regarding consumer sentiment. Other approaches for conducting market research include telephone surveys as well as recruiting individuals to participate in a focus group.
However, surveys are an awkward, and frequently expensive, way of acquiring market research data, which often produces poor results. For example, producing a statistically valid result requires a large number of responses (1000-2000 or more), and vendors often charge a variable rate based on sample size, making large (better) samples prohibitively expensive in many cases. Further, a large consumer survey is difficult to deploy quickly and slow to generate results.
Further still, consumer surveys and focus groups often fail to provide an accurate measure of consumer opinion regarding fashions, trends, movies, celebrities, politics and societal and economic issues in general. For example, a persons' self-reporting may not always reflect their choices in reality. That is, these approaches may not accurately expose latent preferences that drive consumer decision making.
But perhaps the most significant drawback to relying on conventional surveys and focus groups to gather effective market research data is simply that it is difficult to find participants. Many people are simply unwilling to participate in market research (e.g., email messages or dialogs on a website are often disregarded by consumers) and many people feel uncomfortable providing personally identifying or demographic information online. As a consequence, relying solely on the cohort of people who are willing to participate in a direct consumer survey often skews the results. Lastly, a business may be too aggressive in trying to attract participants for market research surveys, and doing so may itself damage a business' brand. For example, if every time a user visits a website they receive multiple prompts to participate in a consumer survey, some consumers may simply avoid that website or develop negative opinions about such a business.
So that the manner in which the above-recited features of the present disclosure can be understood in detail, a more particular description of the disclosure, briefly summarized above, may be had by reference to embodiments, some of which are illustrated in the appended drawings. It is to be noted, however, that the appended drawings illustrate only typical embodiments of this disclosure and are therefore not to be considered limiting of its scope, for the disclosure may admit to other equally effective embodiments.
One embodiment of the invention includes a method of conducting market research via a game played by a group of game participants. This method may generally include receiving, from a first participant of the group, a request to play the game. The game presents the first participant with at least two alternatives and game play includes the first participant indicating a preferred one of the two or more alternatives and a prediction of a percentage of participants that will chose each alternative. This method may further include generating an instance of the game. The alternatives are selected for the instance in order to elicit game play events relevant to the market research data during game play based on the alternatives selected by the first participant and based on the predicted percentages. This method may further include providing, to the first participant, the instance of the game and recording the game play events relevant to the market research data elicited from the first participant during game play.
Another embodiment includes a method for obtaining market research data via a game played by a group of game participants. This method may generally include receiving, from at least a first participant of the group, a request to play the game. And in response, generating an instance of the game, wherein the instance includes at least a first interface and a second interface and wherein the instance of the game is configured to elicit game play events relevant to the market research data during game play from the first and second participants. This method may further include outputting the first interface for display to the first participant and outputting the second interface for display to the second participant. The first interface itself may include an indication of a game subject for the game instance, a plurality of keywords representing concepts and descriptors, and a control element which allows the first participant to share selected keywords, of the plurality, with the second participant. The second interface may include a panel used to display the selected keywords shared by the first participant and a control element which allows the second participant to guess the game subject. During game play, the selected keywords shared by the first participant and one or more guesses of the game subject made by the second participant are recorded.
Other embodiments include, without limitation, a computer-readable medium that includes instructions that enable a processing unit to implement one or more aspects of the disclosed methods as well as a system configured to implement one or more aspects of the disclosed methods.
Embodiments of the invention provide techniques for conducting market research using social network games. One embodiment provides a platform for creating and hosting online games which can identify latent consumer sentiment (and other market research data), while simultaneously providing an entertaining and engaging experience for the game participants. More generally, social network games may be tailored where elements of game play elicit responses from participants that reveal the desired market research data, e.g., consumer product awareness, consumer sentiment, brand preferences, loyalty, trends in awareness and sentiment, etc. Providing an engaging online experience provides an element of situational distraction, leading to more authentic responses from the participants as well as greater participation rates. Further, by providing games through social network websites (and applications used to access such online social networks), participants may be recruited by the users of such networks, helping to alleviate one of the most difficult aspects of conducting market research—finding willing participants.
In one embodiment, a game platform provides an evolving suite of games, which may be repeatable for different market research tasks. That is, a game played once to identify consumer sentiment or awareness relative to one product may be replayed using different data to identify consumer sentiment or awareness of another product. Further, by having the same participant play one or more games repeatedly, a user demographic profile, e.g., an expected predicted age, location, age-range, gender, and education level of the first participant, income, personality trait, or predicted behavior, etc., may be derived from the answers given by that participant. Additionally, a psychographic profile may be derived for a participant, i.e., profile of any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles of a participant. Doing so allows game content to be targeted to groups of users having a desired demographic or psychographic attributes.
The game platform itself may be accessed from a variety of network-enabled devices, including computing devices with a web browser, e.g., a desktop laptop, or tablet or mobile telephone. Similarly, custom applications may be executed on these and other devices (e.g., game consoles, network capable music players etc.). Regardless of how a given user accesses a given game (or games), by creating an engaging experience, users are more likely to participate in games, resulting in statistically relevant amount of research data being collected at lower costs then possible with conventional survey or focus group approaches.
While the game platform described herein may support a broad variety of games, one example of a game configured to elicit consumer preferences (and general sentiment) is an online game which allows participants to select between at least two alternatives (usually two products) and then to guess what percentage of users will chose each alternative (revealing perceptions of consumer preferences). The user (or users) who correctly predicts the overall ratio could win the alternative they chose. When a given a user plays several iterations of this game, a profile of that participant can be developed, e.g., by inferring gender, age, location, etc. Another example game would be one where users make predictions by answering questions. Each answer could be associated with a game token. The game tokens can then be played in a variety of games that follow familiar rules, e.g., dominoes, gomoku, jenga, etc. When the predictions mature, tokens with correct predictions contribute positively to the score in each particular game. The points could be redeemed for product related to the game (or for other value).
Still another game could include one where participants are randomly matched with one another (or matched based on friendship status on a social network site or matched on demographic characteristics). Matched participants play a guessing game with one another where one is given a secret keyword (e.g., a product name or move title) and set of descriptors with concepts related to the keyword. The first player selects what descriptors or concepts to reveal to the second player, who in turn attempts to guess the keyword. The descriptors and concepts selected by the first user (as well as the guesses made by the second user) are used to interpret of consumer opinion relative to a target product. Further, after completing a round of this game, the first and second user could interact via a chat room. In such a case, any conversation between the participants about the target product, or the concepts and descriptors, could be mined as a secondary source of market research data.
Another variation includes presenting the first user with a question related to a product (or brand or celebrity, etc.). The second user is then presented with the first user's answer to the question along with multiple possible products. The goal for the second user is to select the correct product, based on the first user's answer (or selection of descriptors or concepts). Again, doing so reveals valuable information regarding consumer sentiment and awareness of the target product. Still another variation includes a game where two participants are presented with a product (or brand or celebrity, etc.) and a common set of descriptors or concepts. Each user then selects a set number of the keywords, and each matching keyword results in points for the two users. Again, the points could be redeemed towards the products presented in the game (or for other value), giving participants a stronger incentive to play.
Of course, one of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that many games may be configured to elicit relevant game play events that may be interpreted to derive market research data for a brand, product, service, individual, etc., including games for a single participant, games for multiple participants, games which include cooperative or competitive game play aspects (or both). And further, that the games playable through the game platform described herein (and corresponding approaches for game play events relevant for market research) are not limited to the specific examples of social network games presented below.
Note, the following description is presented to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the proposed techniques. Descriptions of specific embodiments and applications are provided only as examples and various modifications will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art. The general principles described herein may be applied to other embodiments and applications without departing from the scope of the disclosure. Thus, the present disclosure is not to be limited to the embodiments shown, but is to be accorded the widest scope consistent with the principles and features described herein. For purpose of clarity, features relating to technical material that is known in the technical fields related to the proposed ideas are not been described in detail.
The client systems 1301-2 communicate with the game server 105 over the network 120 to access games 106 hosted by the game server 105. Participating in the available games 105 elicits game play events used to derive market research data 107 from game participants, which may be evaluated to determine, e.g., consumer product awareness, consumer sentiment, brand preferences, loyalty, and trends for the market research topic identified in the received set of data, purchasing behavior and purchasing intent, etc. Games 106 hosted by the game server 105 may also be accessed over a social network website (or application used to access such a site) hosted by the social network site server 110. For example, the game server could include a number of game templates, customized to conduct market research related to a specific product (or brand, service, concept, person, movie, television program, etc.). In such a case, the resulting games 106 could be published to the social network site (or other network accessible location), allowing members of that social network to access games 106, as well as recommend a given game to friends. As noted, doing so may be an effective approach for recruiting individuals to participate in market research, albeit doing so indirectly—by having users recommend (or invite) friends to play games 106 published from the game server 105. In each case, however, user game play elicits response relevant to the desired market research which may be communicated back to the game server 105 (or other computer system) for evaluation.
In this particular example, client system 1301 represents a computer system running a web-browser 132. Accordingly, client system 1301 is representative of desktop PCs, laptop computers, home-theater PCs (HTPCs), and other computing systems capable of running a web-browser. Similarly, client system 1302 represents a mobile device such as a mobile telephone, tablet computer, portable MP3 player, etc. As shown, the mobile device 1302 includes a mobile web-browser 135 as well as dedicated game “apps” 131.
In one embodiment, the games 106 are accessed using the web browser 132 or mobile browser 135, e.g., by accessing the social network website hosted by server 110. Alternatively, games may be distributed as stand-alone application programs (or “apps” 131) executed on the mobile device 1302. In such a case, a game “app” 131 could include the basic template for a given social network game and access new content each time a user desires to participate in game play. For example, a game “app” 131 could be configured to present a user with a new choice of alternative products every day, where the user specifies their own preference, as well as guesses what percentage of users will chose each alternative (revealing perceptions of consumer preferences). As the same user plays each day, a demographic profile or psychographic profile of that user may be derived from the daily selections. Further, changing the selections each day helps retain user interest, as does offering participants a chance to win their selected alternative by accurately predicting the overall percentages.
Consumer electronics device 1303 represents a set-top device connected to both network 120 and a display 140 (e.g., a flat-panel television). Accordingly, consumer electronics device 1303 is representative of digital cable boxes, digital video recorder (DVR) systems, video game consoles, and other media devices capable of rendering web content or executing a game application. Further, display 140 may itself be an integrated device capable of connecting to the network 120 and rendering web content. For example, some flat-panel television displays include integrated applications that can connect to a social network site, stream media from video on demand services, etc. In each of these cases, a user interface presented by the consumer electronics device 1303 may provide a mechanism for a user to participate in social network games configured to derive market research from elements of game play.
The insight engine 220 provides a software application configured to identify sentiment, preference, awareness, and predicted outcomes. That is, the insight engine provides the analytics for the game platform 200 to interpret relevant game events that occur during game play to derive the desired market research data. The analytical findings may be distilled into actionable market research returned to customers 225, e.g., business conducting market research to a brand, product, etc., via the games published to the game layer 210.
The general workflow for conducting market research via the game platform 200 is shown in
Once the game data associated with a given game type is provided, at 310 the resulting game is published to a network accessible location, allowing users to participate in game play, as well as invite friends to participate. At 315, user participation in online game play may elicit both primary and secondary research data. Primary or “relevant” data generally includes any information or events reveled or occurring as part of game play (directly or indirectly) related to the market research topic (e.g., consumer brand awareness or sentiment). And secondary data generally includes other information revealed by a participant related to the market research topic. For example, for games that include multiple participants, chat messages exchanged among game participants may include information useful to the market research topic.
At 320, the market research data revealed/elicited during game play, is evaluated to determine, e.g., user preferences, demographics, outcome and trend prediction, sentiment, awareness, etc. Further, given the rapid response and potential large participation rates for a given game, the results learned from one game mechanic, can be used to design additional market research topics. For example, assume a motion picture studio is preparing to release an animated feature with a primary target audience of families and children. In such a case, the studio could identify from the results of one preferences test that pre-release marketing of the film had resulted in a consumer perception that the animated feature was primary a “girls” movie. In the appropriate case (i.e., depending on the actual content of the movie), the motion picture studio could engage in new advertising campaigns to change this perception (e.g., by advertising aspects of the movie that would appeal more to boys). Further still, given the rapid development and deployment of games provided by the game platform, the impact of such a change in marketing could be determined in near-real time. More generally, the game platform 200 and workflow 300 may be used to evaluate trends in consumer sentiment over time, and allows a business to correlate different marketing campaigns with different audiences (demographic cohorts) over time.
CPU 405 retrieves and executes programming instructions stored in the memory 420. Similarly, CPU 405 stores and retrieves application data residing in the memory 420. The bus 417 is used to transmit programming instructions and application data between the CPU 405, I/O devices interface 410, storage 430, network interface 415 and memory 420. CPU 405 is included to be representative of a single CPU, multiple CPUs, a single CPU having multiple processing cores, and the like. And the memory 420 is generally included to be representative of a random access memory. The storage 430 may be a disk drive storage device. Although shown as a single unit, the storage 430 may be a combination of fixed and/or removable storage devices, such as magnetic disc drives, solid state drives (SSD), removable memory cards, optical storage, network attached storage (NAS), or a storage area-network (SAN).
Illustratively, the memory 420 includes a web-server 422, application server 424, and a database management system (DBMS) 426, collectively configured to respond to requests for web pages or for game content. Additionally, the memory 420 also includes an insight engine 428. As noted, the insight engine 428 provides a software application configured to identify sentiment, preference, awareness, predicted outcomes, etc., from market research data elicited, revealed, observed, or derived from game play. Of course, one of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that the insight engine 420 may be executed be on a separate computer system from the game server 105, and that the game server 105 itself is representative of multiple computer systems used to create games to publish to a network accessible location, e.g., social network site (or to users), to load balance requests for game content, to store market research data generated as a result of game play, and to evaluate such market research data using the insight engine 428.
Illustratively, the storage 430 includes a collection of game templates 432, custom game play content 434, game participant profiles 436 and game play data 438. In one embodiment, each game template 438 corresponds to a game type or game mechanism that can be customized to identify consumer sentiment, awareness, trends, purchasing intent, etc., relative to a given brand, product, etc. Custom game content 434 generally corresponds to information used to tailor a game to a desired market research topic or subject prior to being published on a social network website (or made available to users via another network accessible location). Once a given game template is used to generate a game, and the resulting game is published, participants may begin playing that game. The game play events used to derive market research data is stored as game play data 438.
Similarly, the game participant profiles 436 provide demographic profiles or psychographic profiles (or both), corresponding to game participants generated, over time, as participants engage in game play. For example, in one embodiment, users access a social network site using a user name and password. In such a case, each time a given user accesses the social network site and participates in game play, responses elicited during game play can be correlated with statistical data to derive a predicted demographic profile of that user. Thereafter, where a market research sponsor desires to conduct market research data for a given demographic cohort, the game participant profiles 436 may be used to select participants that satisfy the desired characteristics. Note, doing so does not require any personally identifying information about game participants to be supplied directly. Instead the participant profiles 436 may be built-up over time as a given user plays multiple games. Of course, in one embodiment, the participant profile 436 may include information supplied by the user (e.g., as part of a user profile associated with a given user name and password).
Like CPU 405, CPU 505 is included to be representative of a single CPU, multiple CPUs, a single CPU having multiple processing cores, etc., and the memory 520 is included to be representative of a random access memory. The bus 517 connects CPU 505, I/O devices interface 510, storage 530, network interface 515, and memory 520. The network interface 515 is configured to transmit data via the communications network 120, e.g., to obtain games from the game server system 105. Storage 530, such as a hard disk drive or solid-state (SSD) storage drive, may store game data files along with other content.
Illustratively, the memory 525 includes a web browser 132, which itself includes game content 522. The memory 520 also stores an application 522 which executes game content 522, outside of the context of a web browser. And storage 535 stores cached game content 535 and user configuration setting as needed to facilitate game play. As described above, the web browser 132 may access a social network site to obtain game content, allowing a user to participate in game play, as well as capture game play events based on the game play choices made by a participant.
For example,
At step 610, the game server prompts a research sponsor to specify the content needed to create a social network game for the selected game template (or research type). At step 615, the game server generates a game using the information provided by a research sponsor. And at step 620, the sponsor publishes the game at a network accessible location to allow participants to engage in game play.
For example, the interface 700 of
In addition to specifying the product alternatives for the “consumer preferences” game type, a research sponsor may also specify a name for a given instance of this game using text box 715 as well as store notes regarding a given game instance—allowing the sponsor to access this instance later as well as review all games created by a given sponsor. Similarly, the name may be used to identify the game data generated by individual participants during game play.
After supplying the information necessary to create a game of a given game (or research) type, the sponsor can publish the game using button 720. Continuing with the preferences example, the specified alternatives may be grouped with instances of this game type, allowing this instance of the “consumer preferences” game to be presented to participants. Once the preferences of a specified number of participants have been obtained (or after a prescribed time period), the results may be determined and a “winner” announced.
In one embodiment, game participants can chat with one another following a given game. For example, some games may allow two (or more) participants to engage in cooperative and/or competitive game mechanics. In such a case, at step 820, the participants are presented with a chat interface, allowing the participants to discuss the events of a particular game. At step 825, the chat interface may monitor the ensuing conversation of game participants to capture additional market research data related to game play events (and to the objects/subjects of the target market research). An example of such an interface is discussed below in reference to
For example,
The interface 1100 shown in
For example,
Game play proceeds where the second user enters guesses until time runs out or correctly guesses the keyword presented to the first user. If the second player guesses correctly, the participants are considered to have “won” the game, and could be rewarded, e.g., with a discount movie passes, assuming the word choices indicated the first and were interested in seeing this particular movie. If not the users could be offered other value. At the same time, the word choices selected by the first user (as well as the guess made by the second user relative to a growing set of concepts and or descriptors) provide valuable market research data to a research sponsor (e.g., in this case, the motion picture studio producing and marketing the animated film).
In cases where the second user fails to guess the keyword, the second player could be prompted to indicate what keywords would have “given it away.” The first user could also be prompted to indicate which keywords they would have most wanted to have available. Doing so provides an additional source of market research data. In one embodiment, the responses could be used to update the word choices made to available to the first player.
Further, after completing a round of this game, the first and second user could interact via a chat room. In such a case, any conversation between the participants about the target product, or the concepts and descriptors, could be mined as a secondary source of market research data. For example,
While the exemplary embodiments shown in
While the forgoing is directed to embodiments of the present disclosure, other and further embodiments of the disclosure may be devised without departing from the basic scope thereof. For example, aspects of the present disclosure may be implemented in hardware or software or in a combination of hardware and software. One embodiment of the disclosure may be implemented as a program product for use with a computer system. The program(s) of the program product define functions of the embodiments (including the methods described herein) and can be contained on a variety of computer-readable storage media. Illustrative computer-readable storage media include, but are not limited to: (i) non-writable storage media (e.g., read-only memory devices within a computer such as CD-ROM disks readable by a CD-ROM drive, flash memory, ROM chips or any type of solid-state non-volatile semiconductor memory) on which information is permanently stored; and (ii) writable storage media (e.g., floppy disks within a diskette drive or hard-disk drive or any type of solid-state random-access semiconductor memory) on which alterable information is stored. Such computer-readable storage media, when carrying computer-readable instructions that direct the functions of the present disclosure, are embodiments of the present disclosure.
In view of the foregoing, the scope of the present disclosure is determined by the claims that follow.
