Zappi sits in the sweet spot between smart technology and research expertise

If you’re like many of the insights professionals we’ve worked with, when evaluating market research partners you categorize them into one of two broad categories: research experts or technology experts. Each potential partner either has long-standing research expertise and has built some technology around that, or they started with a tech platform and are working on adding research expertise into it. 

So where does Zappi fit into that story?

To help visualize the landscape, we can plot out “research-led” and “tech-led” on a graph with high expertise to low expertise along each axis — giving us a matrix with four quadrants. 

1. Gut instinct (low tech, low research expertise): With little to no technology and little to no research expertise, you’re just relying on your gut instinct to make decisions — which happens in large enterprises all the time for many reasons.

2. Traditional research agencies (low tech, high research expertise): These traditional players have long histories in market research, predating the automation revolution in the industry. To their credit, they have built some technology to keep up with the evolving landscape, but they are limited by how they have collected, stored and used data historically — making it much harder to benefit from their data asset in a meaningful way.

3. Research platforms (high tech, low research expertise): On the flip side, there are the research platforms that came out of the automation revolution. They were built technology-first, so they are often fast and easy to use. They offer the opportunity to get quick, one-off answers, but lack the architecture to give repeatable, learnings. And they don’t have years of research expertise baked into their platforms, so they’re difficult to use if you don’t have years of research expertise yourself. A non-research professional wouldn’t be able to get the same quality of research out of them as a traditional research agency. 

But what about that last quadrant? 

Zappi has both smart technology and research expertise baked into that technology — so you don’t have to choose between them. Let’s dive into both of those areas.

Research expertise with rigorous experimentation

At Zappi’s core is a deep expertise in research practices. Our dedicated team of research experts have designed and tested solutions you can count on to validate and inspire your creations to be as great as they can be. You don’t have to be a survey expert and write your own questions — we’ve already done the hard work for you.

And we haven’t just relied on our own research expertise, we’ve also worked with insights teams directly to co-create solutions that truly serve their needs. 

In one example, our Amplify Ad System went through multiple rounds of rigorous development with leading brands to find the methods that 1) related most to in-market outcomes and 2) delivered the most actionable insights to inform decisions. Each aspect of the solution was tested, including which scales provided the most useful data, which questions to include (and which could be removed due to high correlations with each other), and how best to capture system 1 emotional response. 

A platform, tailored to your needs, to deliver consistent results

Of course, none of this matters if we can't deliver our research solutions quickly, affordably and consistently. Our research expertise has been built into the platform so you can benefit from it time and time again to drive the right decisions. 

Within the Zappi platform, the solutions we’ve created can also be tailored to integrate your brand, category or business' best practices. Incorporate your own questions, build your own benchmarks, even customize metric naming and frameworks within the Zappi platform to use terms that are familiar to your business so you don't have to translate anything when you share the findings. For example, if Zappi refers to a metric as “behavior change” but your business calls it “brand consideration,” you can make that change.

With the right use of technology, you can: 

• Benchmark your ideas against the ideas, ads and innovations that are most relevant to your business. Switch benchmarks on the fly between country, category, brand norms, or even ideas with the same characteristics.

• Dive deep into the data — without waiting for new data cuts — to diagnose problems and find opportunities (with the ability to view powerful open-ended responses and moment-by-moment reactions, and slice and dice your data by sub groups).

• Analyze and identify patterns and themes across all of your research — creating a learning loop that informs your overall strategy and gives you a head start on your next great idea.

Plus, by using technology you can drive consistency and systematization in your market research so you’re not just approaching research project by project — you’re able to connect your learnings so your business can get smarter over time. 

Through consistency and owning our own data, we now have greater consumer centricity. We are getting smarter and smarter over time by connecting all our data across brands, countries, categories, on and off platform to give us meta learnings.

Stephan Gans, SVP Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer, PepsiCo

We often find that people believe they have to sacrifice research quality to get speed and cost. Because that’s the way it tends to go in life: Between fast, accurate and cost effective, you must pick two. You can’t have it all. 

But that’s not how it works with Zappi. We pioneered automated research over a decade ago, so technology is what we’re known for. But that technology has research expertise baked into it, so you can always feel confident that the data you’re getting isn’t just fast and convenient — it’s also accurate. You can trust it to make the right decisions for your business. 

Some numbers to note: 

• 1,000+ happy customers

• 100,000+ ideas tested

• 50+ research markets

• 60% more predictive of in market outcomes versus legacy solutions

• 30% increase in creative effectiveness

• Results in as little as 6 hours

And if you’re evaluating research platforms, here are the questions we suggest asking to help you narrow down your list.