Why Zappi is the insights platform for you

Katie Sweet & Kim Malcolm

Your ads won’t land and your products won’t sell if they don’t appeal to your consumers. 

Hopefully that’s something we can all agree on. 

The challenge is that no matter how well you know your business and your category, and no matter how hard you try to stay close to your consumers, you can never truly put yourself in their shoes. You spend all your time thinking about the brand and category. It plays a much larger role in your life than it does in your consumers’ lives.

The best way to create ads and innovation that work is to bring consumers into your creation process from the beginning. Rely on them to inspire your ideas and then keep checking in with them to make sure you’re moving in the right direction.

Every decision you make in the process is an opportunity to check in again —because even a small change can make a big difference.

Unfortunately, consumer insights tools haven’t allowed businesses to check in with their consumers as quickly or as often as they need. But Zappi is different. 

Here are 10 reasons why Zappi is the right insights platform for you.

1. Fast, actionable insights

If you’re going to bring consumer insights into each step of your creation process, you can’t afford to wait around for data. You’ve got to get feedback quickly so you can learn from it and iterate on your idea. If you have to wait weeks between rounds of feedback, you’re likely to find that the team has moved on without it.

With Zappi, results are typically ready in just a few hours. In many cases, you can set up your study in the morning and get results by the end of the day. 

“An example of how our day works. We have a couple of edits. We throw them into Zappi in the morning. Within 3-4 hours we have both qual and quant feedback on all key metrics — favorability, uniqueness, consideration. We can walk away and say ‘OK, these are the changes we need to make’ and by the end of the day I have 3 new edits.”

Lauren Stafford-Webb, CMO at SoFi

2. More insights for less

If you want to truly bring consumers into your creation process, you can’t just run research once to check your work. You’ve got to check in with consumers throughout the entire journey so you can make sure you stay on the right track. 

But you can’t do that if the research is prohibitively expensive.

Luckily Zappi’s automated insights are more cost effective than traditional research so you can get more insights for the same cost. 

Zappi gives you the freedom to experiment more. You can try new things. You can take more risks because you can test ideas early so you don’t waste any additional time and energy on an idea consumers don’t like. 

You can stay curious and find those truly incredible ideas consumers will love. Then bring them to life perfectly!

Why researching ads early and often makes all the difference

Check out our article on the costs of doing research late, why researching earlier will result in better outcomes as well as what to focus on when you get there.

3. Tried and tested research methods

We often find that people believe they have to sacrifice 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 the Zappi platform. At Zappi’s core is a deep expertise in research practices. Our dedicated team of research experts have designed and tested questions 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.

Plus, that expertise has been built into the platform so you can benefit from it quickly, easily and affordably to drive the right decisions.

4. Easy steps to tailor your research

But of course, each brand and company is unique with its own KPIs, internal language and ways of thinking. Zappi gives you the flexibility to account for that.

You can complement our tried and tested methods with your own questions that are important to an individual brand, country or overall business. Make these ad hoc questions or ask them consistently across studies for learning and comparison. 

You can also customize the wording 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. 

It’s always easier to get your business to understand and act on your findings if you’re speaking the same language!

5. Ready-made or custom audiences

Next you have to make sure you’re reaching the right audience. With Zappi you can easily reach out to a relevant group of consumers, whoever that group may be. 

Category-relevant samples are already available in the platform for you to use day one, or you can build your own sample to use time and time again to bring speed, consistency and quality learnings to your organization. 

Then the platform will automatically launch your survey and collect the data. 

6. Highest quality responses

With Zappi, you can act on insights with complete confidence knowing the data can be trusted. 

We’ve built all the important checks and balances into the platform so no poor quality or fake responses or respondents make it into your valuable data set. 

We automatically detect how engaged individuals are when completing a survey and we dynamically remove respondents who present low-quality behaviors and replace them with high-quality respondents. 

Some of our checks include: 

  • Panel vetting: All suppliers meet ESOMAR & ISO certification 

  • Bot detection strategies: Is the respondent real?

  • GEO-IP fingerprinting: Is the respondent being honest about their location?

  • Deduplication and respondent quarantine: Is this a unique respondent?

  • Speeder analysis: Is the respondent engaged, not just speeding through?

  • Adherence to all regulations: Including GDPR and CCPA

  • Evaluation of open-ended responses: Dynamically detect poor quality verbatims:

    • Gibberish answers: Nonsense answers, such as when a respondent has just smashed their keyboard

    • Illogical responses: Not a coherent answer to the question

    • Repetitive answers: Same response across the survey

    • Black list: All respondents deemed poor quality, are referred back to providers with a behavioral flag

4 types of bad verbatim responses: Why they 'Shall Not Pass' at Zappi

Check out our article on how we combat bad quality responses.

7. Automated charts and the ability to slice and dice data

When you’re dealing with a lot of data or have a lot of questions to answer, you have to be able to find what’s most important to you. With Zappi, you can easily surface and share insights to inform decisions all within the platform. 

Our charts automatically populate as data comes in to give you a clear understanding of performance at a glance. When you want to go deeper, you can slice and dice the quantitative data within the platform itself. Explore sub groups of consumers that matter to your brand and benchmark these sub groups too.

And to help you make sense of qualitative open-end responses, we use autocoding to group verbatims in real time. This makes it easy to spot the bigger themes and then look through individual responses at the click of a button.

Then decide what you’d like to share with your team. Manage permissions and share projects with anyone you’d like, both inside and outside the platform — so everyone can benefit from the insights.

8. The ability to make any relevant comparison on the fly

If you’re just looking at data on one ad or innovation in isolation, it can be tough to interpret it without context. That’s where benchmarks come in. Benchmarks help you understand the relative performance of an ad or innovation concept so you have something to compare against.

In the Zappi platform, you pick your benchmarks so you can always compare against something that’s meaningful to your business. That could be: 

  •  A total market

  • Category average

  • Campaign average

  • “North star” creation (one of your most successful ads or concepts)

  • Key competitor campaigns

  • Your own historical performance

  • Or whatever makes sense for your brand

With all of your data stored and accessed together in one place, you can automatically access and compare across creations. And you can swiftly switch between benchmarks to compare against multiple audiences, characteristics of ads and products, markets, categories and more in real time.

6 benchmarks to put your consumer research in context

Check out our blog on the six benchmarks that will help you put your consumer research in context.

9. No “single use” data

One of the key benefits of having all of your data within a single platform like Zappi is that it gives you the ability to re-use your research to learn for the future

If all your data is delivered via PowerPoints, you can’t quickly access older research, compare performance over time or identify patterns for success. When you have to dig around in many different places, you’re never able to see the bigger picture.  

But with Zappi, there is no “single use” data — it is always growing more and more valuable over time and it’s always available for you to access. Your team can see how their creations are improving year on year. They can look at the characteristics driving success of the creations versus characteristics which are holding them back. They can make sure existing knowledge is used again and again for success.

The platform not only stores and organizes data in a way that enables learning, it also provides automated analytics to identify patterns and relationships quickly and easily to create an ongoing cycle of improvement.

10. Systematized insights

For large organizations, the ability to scale is critical. If all your markets or categories have different ways of generating insights, you can’t learn from each other. 

Zappi offers the ability to approach your research in a consistent, repeatable way. You can create guardrails for insights and non-insights folks alike to run research in a safe and standardized way. 

When you systematize your research across markets, categories and brands, you’re able to learn, compare and make every part of your business better.

Pernod Ricard proves it’s possible to democratize insights

Get a behind-the-scenes look at how Pernod Ricard empowered marketing users to run their own creative research, freeing up the insights team to do more strategic work.

Final thoughts

Data doesn’t slow you down or stifle your creativity. It fuels creativity. Getting feedback from your consumers throughout your creation process makes your ads and products better. It should never be used to “grade” your creations. 

But it takes the right data. That’s why we’re here. And don't just take our word for it, hear what our customers have to say.

Ready to chat?

Reach out to us so we can show you how the Zappi platform can help you create ads and innovation people love.

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