If we think about a consumer experience around a product or brand, we can divide it into three distinct layers: Behaviors, Context and Emotions. 

Revelation’s Activity-Based approach will help you get at each of these layers.  Today I’m going to focus on Behaviors.   Behaviors represent what actually happen, what consumers actually do.  They are impacted by the Context (environments, processes, life events) in which they occur and are often driven by underlying Emotions.  In Immersive Research, when we want to capture what consumer behavior actually happens, our go-to Activities are diaries.  

We’ve done a lot of thinking about diaries and there are actually four types of diaries:

• Usage diaries
• Spotter diaries
• Process/Purchase diaries
• Behavior diaries 

Each of these types of diaries captures different aspects of consumer behaviors. Let’s dig into these a bit deeper. 

Usage diaries focus on how a consumer interacts with a particular object: a phone, a piece of software, an appliance, and food or beverages (consumption is a type of use).  You could even say a diary of a day at an amusement park would be a usage diary on how the consumer is using the park.  With usage diaries, the data capture is around the moment of use, the what, when, where, why, and specifics of the use. If a product has multiple types of uses, i.e. a smart phone, then you’ll want to capture the dimensions of the use that are pertinent to your research question.

Spotter diaries focus on capturing people’s encounters with things out in the world: brands, categories, foods, advertising, etc.  In this case the diary is less about behaviors per se, but more about understanding the presence of things in a person’s life.

Process/purchase diaries focus on things that often evolve over time versus around a specific use:  the rhythm of laundry in a household, preparing a tax return, buying a car.  Often when someone makes a significant purchase decision, they go through a process: they’ll research, talk to their friends, see ads, and go to stores.  It unfolds over time and you need the whole narrative to understand the behaviors.

Behavior diaries are more open-ended explorations and may not be focused on a particular object, category or process. They do tend to focus on a topic, for example hair care over the course of a week or month.  A hair care diary could encompass tools, consumables, and going to a salon or barber.  The goal is to get the whole picture of consumer behaviors around the topic. 

Revelation supports all four types of diaries and you can find examples in our Activity Library. For any of these kinds of diaries, you can use media in the form of photos and videos (though photos tend to be much more efficient), closed ended questions that Revelation will tabulate and open ended text.   And of course, we offer mobile diaries for iPhone (Android coming soon!) integrated via Revelation Mobile.

Capturing consumer behaviors in the moment they occur has never been more within your reach!