Fastuna: The Alexa for Marketing Professionals

Agile research tools are fast becoming a personal assistant for marketing professionals.

One relatively recent addition to many households have been smart speakers, including Amazon Echo’s, Alexa. Her success comes from her ingenious design. She is essentially a giant smartphone but based on voice recognition powered by chatbot technology which enables her to react quickly and accurately.

Then there is the ease of use. Users just have to say, "Alexa" somewhere around the speaker and say an instruction like, "tell a joke". It’s really that easy. So much so that any member of the household can use it; parents, kids and even pet parrots.

Alexa’s primary benefit is that she makes people’s' lives easier. Alexa provides information, or entertainment, almost instantly. Based on her output she enables people in the household to multi-task and get things done faster. She makes their lives better and more efficient. Alexa has become the closest thing to a human personal assistant for households.

For marketing professionals agile research tools are similar. Alright, they don’t have voice-recognition just yet, however in a business environment agile research tools are the ultimate personal assistant for marketeers and other decision makers. Marketeers can quickly and easily understand the pulse of consumers and help users complete projects or tasks more efficiently.

Let’s first look at the design. Unlike Alexa agile research tools are an intangible service so it’s main touchpoints are landing pages rather than a speaker. On the landing page, various testing options are offered depending on the business question a user wishes to answer. Users simply click on the relevant solution and away they go. It’s that simple! Whereas Alexa’s wizardry is in a box with agile research tools, it is integrated within each solution.

Another similarity is ease of use. With agile research tools users simply need to click on a solution, upload their stimuli, define their target group and select their testing option. Setting up a test doesn’t take much longer than to say, "Alexa, play me an Elvis song". As it is so intuitive anyone can start new tests. No research knowledge is required.

Like Alexa, agile research tools react quickly once an input (a test) has been submitted. Results are usually available within a few hours while users can see consumers' responses in real time. They enable fast decision making and efficiencies to marketing workflows.

Increasingly tactical marketing decisions are being made using agile research tools. Just as Alexa makes life easier for people at home, agile insight tools are now becoming a personal assistant for marketing professionals. The ultimate benefit of agile research tools is that they help create an innovation driven culture within organisations.

It is not just marketing professionals in organisations who can benefit. Agile research tools enable anyone, regardless of function, to test new ideas and concepts. Well almost anyone. Without voice recognition agile research tools can’t be used by the company’s pet parrot quite yet.