Hello there, and welcome back. Another form of market research is observational research, that would be a situation where you're observing behavior. Forms of observational research could be as simple as counting the number of cars in the parking lot, or looking at their license plates to see what states are coming from. In today's modern age, it could also be counting or observing website activity. This is used less frequently, but it's valuable in some cases, such as in the retail shopping experience, or with digital behavior. At the end of this lesson, you will be able to consider when observational research might be valuable to your client, let me start with an example. I recently had an experience where I discovered I was the subject of observational research. I was on a Katy Trail in Missouri riding bicycles on a recent vacation, and we blew tires up between the three of us. Along the way in key spots we kept running into these cameras on the trail. We found out later that they were counting us to find a number of people on different trails, that's observational research right there. In terms of retail transactions, there's been a number of experts out there that have measured how they can increase retail sales by changing the environment that the person shops in. Let's take an example of a Hallmark store, when you go into a Hallmark store, you often buy a Christmas ornament at Christmas time. And you've heard music and it creates a better experience for you. And these observational researchers quickly learned that when you start pumping in evergreen smells, it also makes the retail experience a better experience for you. There's a lot of market research studies that will test these behaviors. That will see how they influence retail purchases. They'll watch overall people traffic and they'll watch people's behaviors through different stimuli or different interactions. There are also people, or market research companies, or technologies that study digital footage in terms of the retail experience. As a result, they know where to place kiosks or point of presence displays in specific areas, based on analysis of people traffic. There's a lot of science behind the whole retail experience, and a lot of it is based off observational research. You can also do observational research of digital behavior, this includes web analytics or social media experiences. Some debate whether this is actually secondary research, but if you're observing customer behavior, it really does fall under observational research. There coud be overlap in the way people categorize it. You can set up an experiment to look at your website and observe how people shop in the whole web useability experience. And all the clicks and time they spend on your website in each page. When you have an online store your digital interface is your store front. If you had a storefront in downtown Sacramento and you could actually count people going by, you can count people that come up to your window, you can count people that come up to your door. Now the website is the same thing. There are technologies obviously where you can count people, and there are technologies now that let you know who people are. And you can actually reverse engineer to find out where they're coming from and what behaviors and demographics they hold. You're actually watching and observing how people behave in your digital space. You're observing where they go, where they click, and how long they stay there. There are market research groups here that will test different images, different positions, and basically do consumer tests similar to that they would have done in a face to face setting, but using digital communication technology instead. You can design websites and mobile sites to do the same thing. There are a number of market research groups that specialize in this, but the whole digital side of things, if applied correctly, fits the definition of observational research. Some people will describe a mystery shopper as being part of observational research, I categorize it under primary research. When you're mystery shopping, you're going into a business and you're making transactions, or purchases, or interactions where you're observing what actually happens. However, you're also engaging in collecting information along the way, you're influencing the other party. That's why I see it as going beyond the bounds of strictly observational. So to summarize, observational research involves observing behavior of customers or perspective customers, to answer business question or provide information to solve a business problem.
