Motivating Marketing Research Respondents to Provide More Elaborated Answers

Modern marketing research faces a challenge how to increase the respondents’ productivity and encourage them to give more elaborated answers in the open-ended questions. It’s relevant both for CAWI quantitative projects and the qualitative approaches. The initial research in this area shows that gamified tasks including storytelling enhancements might be a solution to the stated problem. The research project was aimed at the verification of effectiveness of the gamified methods, i.e., questions including a storytelling context, with the use of a bigger, quantitative sample of the regular marketing research respondents – participants of the professional research panel. The research was conducted with the use of the CAWI method on a nationwide sample of 300 people aged 18–40 in an experimental scheme with one control and one experimental group with a gamified task. The participants’ task was to watch TV commercials and fill out a form with an openended evaluation of various aspects of the advertisement. The word count was used as the indicator of the respondents’ engagement. The results of the initial experiments in this field were replicated: application of the storytelling elements to the regular marketing research questions resulted in significantly more elaborated answers in comparison to the traditional approach. However, this effect was valid only for the first impressions check and not for the more detailed evaluation of the commercial. This research project proves that storytelling can be an effective tool to increase the engagement of marketing research participants. It’s a first step in the search for motivating techniques that can be used in different research approaches.