If you’ve been burning the midnight oil, I think we can agree that a vacation to an amazing place like Bali is necessary.
But it’s not necessarily cheap.
Fortunately, we’ve come up with 7 reasons your employer should pay for your holiday. (Sure, we’re kidding… but are we…?)
1) Customer experience research: Taking a work-endorsed trip to Bali will allow you to conduct a cross-cultural customer experience study to identify new types of customer experiences that could be applied to Canada. Use a standardized n of 1 mystery shopping design for maximum validity and visit a wide variety of stores, including food and entertainment establishment, to increase reliability.
2) Food and beverage innovation research: Whether you shop at Sobeys, Loblaws, Longo’s, Metro, Zehrs, or somewhere else, most grocery stores in Canada have much the same brands and products. If you’re a brand manager tasked with developing innovative new food and beverages, you need inspiration to maintain your edge. That edge comes from exploring edge cases such as cultures that are completely unlike home. Enter Bali. Their supermarkets are bound to stock unexpected products and brands that will spark new ideas to test and develop for the Canadian population. Bring on the sensory tests, iHuts, and package tests!
3) Package design research: Remember when you first saw bottled water being sold in a box? Of all strange things. But then, milk has been sold in cartons for decades so why not water! As with all things, people get accustomed to how things are packaged. Certain things go in cans, others in boxes, bottles, or bags. But there is no ‘right’ way to package anything. With food and beverage innovation comes packaging innovation. While visiting various retail outlets, take the time to buy a wide assortment of products such as chips, chocolate, alcoholic beverages, and other similar items. Examine the packaging to identify similarities and differences. What are the advantages of the differences and how could those be applied to packaging back home in Canada?
4) Retail design research: Canadian stores have a fairly standard layout. Lots of aisles, special items displayed at the end of aisles, and tempting goodies displayed at the cash register. But our way isn’t the only way and it’s certainly not the best way. When you’re visiting the broad range of retail outlets, focus on the design of the store to better understand the options that Canadian retailers could be taking advantage of. Document where various categories are placed throughout the store (are the eggs at the cash register?) and discover how and why those differences evolved. Which learnings will your clients be eager to test and implement (hopefully not eggs at the cash register!)
5) Advertising research: From province to province, Canada has some fairly standard rules and processes around how advertising is created and launched. But naturally, other countries do things completely differently. Immerse yourself in a new culture of display ads, newspaper ads, billboards, TV commercials, magazine ads, product placement, event marketing, and more so that you can identify new and innovative methods of presenting brands and companies worthy of testing among Canadian audiences.
6) Medical market research: If, and please don’t aim to test this, you fall victim to food poisoning, a broken limb, or something worse, gain a better understanding of how doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers present medical devices and pharmaceutical choices to patients. Identify communication barriers, package design issues, and other product improvements that might be relevant to a Canadian audience, particularly to immigrants who are still unfamiliar with the majority culture.
7) Reinvigorate your understanding of Canadian culture: Wherever you live in Canada, you’ve become accustomed to the culture and lifestyle within your region. Perhaps you’ve even become complacent and have started to fail to notice the nuances that differentiate us from people in other countries – are we really more polite, more peaceful, more tactful? What better way to rediscover what it means to be Canada and how to translate those nuances into our work than by experiencing a very different culture. Hello Bali, here we come!
To make things a little easier for you, feel free to copy the following note along with appropriate amendments to the blank areas and email it to your manager.
I have just returned from my in-situ training experience in Bali, Indonesia. Thank you for providing this intensive week-long workshop that allowed me to gain many new insights into _____________ and _____________. I look forward to testing these insights within the Canadian population and appropriate segments of people.
It doesn’t sound like a vacation anymore, just solid hard work. If you need help planning mystery shopping, package tests, or medical market research during your intensive training, please get in touch with us so that we can pack our suitcases.
Good luck! (and enjoy!)
You might like to read these:
- What are the key features of a perfect package test?
- How To Design an Effective Mystery Shopper Process Flow
- Qualitative Research Techniques: Eight Characteristics of an Effective Market Research In-Depth Interviewer
- Launching High Quality IHUTS and Product Tests for Marketing Research Studies
With nearly 40 years of experience, Canadian Viewpoint is a field and data collection company that specializes in English and French offline and online services. We offer sample, programming, hosting, mall intercepts, pre-recruits, central location recruitment, mystery shopping, site interviews, IHUTs, sensory testing, discussion boards, CATI, facial coding, and other innovative technologies. Learn more about our services on our website. Canadian Viewpoint is a founding board member of CRIC (Canadian Research Insights Council).
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