NEWS26 April 2012
US— Consensus Point is willing to bet that its new prediction market platform can cut research costs while improving respondent engagement.
The Huunu platform invites research participants to take part in a game where they wager points against the product concepts or campaigns they think are most likely to succeed, with the winner decided by who makes the best return.
“We’re asking people to make judgements, not offer their opinions,” says business development VP Brian Evans.
About 200–300 people take part in each prediction market. They are asked to consider each concept and commit points, usually between 500 to 2,000 each time, depending on how confident they are a product will either succeed or fail.
Before placing their bet they can see the aggregate confidence score for each concept, based on the betting patterns of other participants. Movements in the confidence score up or down determine how much of a return the respondent makes.
After each trade, participants are invited to submit and open-ended response to explain why they bet the way they did.
Once the market closes, Consensus Point analyses the data in a number of ways. It can rank concepts by general consensus, say, but it can also deliver a spread analysis that will show the range of feelings towards a concept. It might be that a concept that has a middling consensus score actually had the greatest weight of positive reaction.
Courtesy of Communispace, from their 2012 white paper, Invested, available at www.communispace.com
In pilots with Communispace, which builds and manages research communities for brands, Evans said the results of a Huunu market where shown to match those of a traditional survey (as shown above). But there’s also a cost advantage too. Unlike surveys, Evans says Huunu does not require target market representation in the sample, nor does it require as big a sample.
Respondent engagement and satisfaction scores are also positive. “95% of our community members would happily participate in the research again,” reports Communispace SVP Julie Wittes Schlack.
Similarly, as others using prediction markets have found – including BrainJuicer – the approach has shown itself to be more discriminating between ‘good’ product concepts and those that are merely ‘average’.
Aside from Communispace, Huunu also has projects under way with five other research organisations, though it declined to name them at this time.
Research agencies can provide their own respondents to take part in prediction markets or Consensus Point is able to do so itself through a partnership with Survey Sampling International.