Conversational Quant: having deeper, more dynamic conversations at scale 

If there’s one thing we know at Firefish, it’s brands and their communication. Not just about what they are, but how they work, how they are built and developed, and how people engage with them in the real world.  

You don’t just have to take our word for it. We have won many an award for it. And we have global and local partner clients that come to us for their biggest strategic bets when it comes to them. Brand (Re)Positionings & Their Launch Comms. Superbowl Ads. Global Brand Campaigns with Local Nuance…even brand strategy & creative agency partners that come to us to sense-test their pitches before they try and win the accounts of some of the world’s biggest businesses.   

The reason we have become such trusted partners in this way over our 23 years is that we think both strategically and tactically. We think global and local. We think culture and connection. We also are very good at having the more sensitive and productive conversations when something isn’t working. And what everything really comes down to is just that: Conversation. The vital part of what good client relationships – and good qualitative work – are all about. But where does that leave quant? 

In the world of pre-testing, where large systematic approaches are essential for validating and refining creative ideas in total before they launch to the masses…but are sometimes prone to reducing the learning to something more average; to glazing over deeper nuances that are actually necessary to really optimise the ideas and have a bigger impact when they are out in the real world…this can be a struggle.  

To thrive in today’s environment, brands need to open up the discussion and have deeper, more dynamic conversations and they need to do that at scale, to make sure that they are getting the rigour they need that delivers the confidence to justify the size of spend that these sorts of campaigns require.  

And why is that rigour so important today? Because brands are attempting to manage conversations and environments that they cannot fully control. With ever-more divided and vocal audiences. Whether its outspoken evangelists, surprising dissenters or unknown silent majorities, anyone’s opinion can shift the sands in the world we live in today. These are the voices that brands need to – and try to – plan for but are so often looked past in the necessary process of large-scale quantitative research.

So where does that leave things, in this paradoxical world, where qualitative insight is essential for effective brand and communication development, but can be met with scepticism when big-bet decisions can make or break a brand on launch – but when traditional quantitative struggles to validate these powerful, nuanced qualitative insights at scale in the right way to deliver the confidence needed?  

Ask no more. Let us introduce you to Conversational Quant.  

It is our approach that can add value to your existing creative development process by infusing more considered quantitative insights earlier in the cycle. This (standalone or add-on) quantitative approach nurtures your creative – just like our strategic qual does – giving every voice the chance to truly be heard. And it means that you can go into your final stage benchmarking test with the utmost of confidence. 

How do we do it? Well, we use a modern platform that blends robust, planned quant questions with individualised, real-time probing that happens through the power of a trained AI chatbot. 

It is these tailored conversations that allow conversational quant to come into its own in a way that high-quality qual does. It can also deliver deeper-seated opportunities as well.

A few examples include: 

Identifying Hidden Risks:
Whether it’s one person or many, we can uncover any potential controversy before your creative goes public, by paying attention to individual responses at scale using AI sentiment analysis and human review.  

Highlighting Emerging Opportunities:
With a more sensitive view of the individual sub-audiences you might want to explore, we can identify specific creative optimisations to make a potentially polarizing concept make work for all. 

Giving Strategic Direction:
Open conversation allows people to surface their thoughts, feelings and ideas centred on what they find personally relevant, taking the conversation off the scripted path and uncovering more useful feedback than your standard survey ever would. 

Then it is about combining all of this with strategic thinking and the findings from any qualitative work we have done, to give you more powerful and useful creative guidance, nurturing the ideas to deliver the growth you seek. It’s about helping you and your agency’s ideas work the way they’re intended to, regardless of whether they fit a “golden copy testing” formula that other, more standardised testing seeks to squeeze you into. 

 The best thing about it is we can do it at-pace as a standalone project. We can integrate it into the qual. And we can do it with any audience that you would normally send a more traditional survey out to in quant, in almost any market you would do that with too, using language localisation – all sense-checked through our expert partner network in-market, of course.  

Think of it as having the same quant rigour you’re used to, just done in a smarter, more conversational way, delivered with the expected, directional, story-driven reporting you expect from Firefish.  

Sounds great, right? So, get in touch and we can take you through it in a little more detail, explore your challenge with you, and see how it can unlock better, more culturally resonant communication for your brand. 

NEED A LITTLE MORE? Here’s another article you can read about how we used it on a seemingly-impossible yet business-critical ask from a client in 3 markets, delivering results in roughly 4 days.