French Market Research Firm Tests Second Life
Second Life resident Hiro Pendragon sends word of a new company claiming to be “the 1st market research institute on Second life.” Known as Reperes Second Life, it sounds like the firm will, among other things, keep a close eye on SL trends; offer consultative services, including some form of focus grouping; and provide a space for test launches. The company is the virtual arm of the French market research company of the same name, who seem to be doing interesting work in the real world. I’m not entirely sure if they’re actually the first such firm in SL, or if they’ve just caught a case of the recent first-itis that’s going around, but I’m not too concerned. I imagine there will be a lot of call for such services if SL continues to grow and companies start to find new, better and less intrusive ways of offering their goods and services there. The SL platform also offers unprecedented opportunities for market researchers, since there are many more metrics of interaction than can be tracked in the physical world. In the real world, for instance, it’s impossible to know how many people picked up your product without buying it, unless you do some elaborate work with either surveillance cameras, or clipboards and ergonomic shoes. In SL, it’s a much easier matter to figure out who’s clicking and buying, and who’s clicking and leaving. And there are many more such measurements that can be had. This space will get especially interesting if firms like Reperes start releasing public reports on the SL market. Any other companies like this out there?
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Reperes has already made some results public (http://www.reperes-secondlife.com/image/SL_perceived_residents.pdf). Today Reuters SL mentioned another study from Dutch think tank EPN (http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/12/12/study-on-second-life-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/). Both studies, however, were carried out using non-representative samples, and vary in methodology. Jumping to (questionable) conclusions while the hype is on?
Hi Mark, I wrote about another market research agency (Market Truths) in my blog recently: http://blog.msurveys.com/2006/11/mr-agency-in-second-life.html
As far as I know both Market Truths and Reperes currently conduct actual surveys via the web rather than in-world - I think there’s many more possibilities along the lines you describe (called virtual shopping and virtual product/concept tests) which go beyond the web survey idea and make use of the inherent capabilitities of a 3d environment like SL. Through LSL scripting and linking with back-end web based survey systems, 3d objects could both report on their use, and at the same time also be able to ask attitudinal questions - e.g through the chat interface - to find out reasons why someone has bought a product, what they like or dislike about it etc. I did some prototype work making my employer’s “normal” web survey software communicate questions and responses through SL’s chat interface, so short surveys can be “attached” to objects in-world. It will be interesting to see how this kind of thing plays out..