When Procter & Gamble was developing scents for a new product line, it asked members of its online community to simply record the scents that they encountered over the course of a day that made them feel good. By week’s end, they had images, videos and simple text messages about cut grass, fresh paint, play dough, and other aromas that revealed volumes about how scent triggers not just nostalgia but feeling of competence, adventurousness, comfort, and other powerful emotions.

This scents project illustrates how mobile enables discovery around a specific sensation. But P&G also embarked on an ambitious attempt to get a more holistic understanding of its consumer—who she is, where she goes, what she sees. So, using a research application, community members were asked to share beauty moments—the sensory experiences and encounters with beauty products and brands that they have during the week, both at home and out in the world. A great deal was learned about how they feel at different times of day, in different contexts, about what triggers them to use an existing product or try a new one.

Beauty is a highly subjective attribute and feeling beautiful is a highly dynamic state. So P&G enlisted its community members to help it go deeper, not just through more personal, one-to-one sharing via these mobile apps buy through collective collaboration. After all, while emerging new tools and apps make people more accurate reports, they still have to be willing to do it. That’s why it’s so important to be able to establish intimacy, trust and relationship in one venue, like an online community or series of advisory group meetings or online chats that you can then apply to mobile projects, and vice versa.

In this example, P&G was trying to discover the parallels and discrepancies between how other see them. So community members simply used their phones to take pictures of themselves in the moment—at home or at work—and post them, along with their own critique. Then other community members privately and anonymously commented on the images. “This is me after work. I am still wearing work clothes, tired, but feeling good,” wrote one brave volunteer beneath her uploaded picture. “I see my smile, yet again, I also see that my face needs powdering and my eyes are tired.”

Questions 

1. Do you think P & G used the right research method to answer the research question? What about mall interviews or IDIs?

2. How does a company recruit the “right” respondents for its online and social media communities?

3. Researchers talk about getting “richer understanding” from online communities. What does this really mean?

4. How might a firm like Estee Lauder use this information? Should they also create an online community? Have they done so already?