Albert Heijn: online conversation with your customer

Super well thought out and totally contemporary. With such a campaign, you naturally want to know what a specific part of your target group (in this case parents with children) thinks about the action.

To find out, you engage in conversation with consumers. Albert Heijn is already busy doing this, including an AH community and customer panels.

But if you want to make such a selection of your target audience, a closed community is especially useful. That way you can reach exactly the people you have specific questions for.

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Private online platform for research

We recruit suitable respondents for your survey and set up the private online platform entirely in the look and feel of your company. You can always use the platform for a different target group and a different issue.

And do you want to stop researching temporarily? That's possible too, the community goes offline. As soon as you have a question you want to put to your customers again, we'll turn the community back on for you at the push of a button.

Community as a combination of qualitative and quantitative research

Communities offer a unique way of conducting market research; because it is a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. You interview people in a qualitative way and go into much more depth than with just a questionnaire. But because of the large number of people, the numbers are much more than indicative.

Using a community is a fine intermediate form that combines the best of both worlds. You enter into a conversation with your target group, just as in qualitative research, but it is less defined in advance. It is a real dialogue; you ask questions, get answers and can respond to them directly. And the beauty of a community is, you can reach a larger group of people (between 100 and 200 people), than is the case with a group discussion, for example.

The Benefits of an Online Research Community:

• No one-way traffic, you have the ability to ask questions yourself, ask through, but members can also create their own topics that they want to talk about and you can also deploy additional assignments (e.g. having a collage made or photos sent in)
• You reach a larger group of people in 1x, outcomes are based on a reasonable number of people so outcomes are 'not a coincidence'
• Results are descriptive and practical, you can start using them right away

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Successful pilot at Albert Heijn XL

Last year, the AH XL in Purmerend was the first AH to be connected to the private online community. Because this was a new store, AH was curious about the first impression customers had of the revamped XL, talked about the layout and look and feel, but also all the new modules in the store were topics of conversation.

Blauw selected 200 customers from Purmerend to participate in the community for five weeks. Very valuable because you are so close to your customer. You can adapt as much as you want to to the wishes and needs that are involved. The lines of communication are short, which makes it very practical.

Deploying a community can go with any budget

Recruiting respondents and building and managing a private community is quite an investment. We understand that using this tool is not for everyone. For companies with a more limited budget, there is also a cheaper alternative.

Do you have an urgent question you want to check with consumers, but don't have enough budget or time for your own platform? Then the Blauw Community is the solution. This multiclient community consists of enough members to make this group representative of all shoppers in the Netherlands. You can submit your questions starting at 1500 euro and have the results within 24 hours.

Insights and opportunities above board

Albert Heijn deliberately chooses to use both communities. That way they always have two panels to choose from. One for specific questions to a select part of their target group and a platform for general questions or issues with a general target group.

Also useful to use in sequential studies to avoid that one will influence the other. For example, you can use the closed platform while developing a new concept and use the Blauw community to test the outcomes (among a fresher, broader) target group. With a community, you find out information that is surprising and valuable. For example, we asked people to keep a journal about eating and buying vegetables. You might expect that cooked vegetables are "out," but nothing could be further from the truth; that's still the norm. However, there was a clear difference between the outcomes of people from urban and rural areas. And you can also come up with questions for certain themes or periods. During Christmas and New Year's Eve, we asked all kinds of questions in the communities about consumers' preparations and needs during the holidays. It showed that in terms of location and company, New Year's Eve is planned earlier than Christmas. These kinds of results are very useful for AH to know and to respond to them with their planning and assortment.

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