Introducing Lifelines Social Landscapes
In 2010, we created Lifelines™; a way to illustrate rich customer experience insight and make it more measurable, without losing the first-hand narratives that make this research so compelling in the first place.
Since then, many more customer experiences are being published on social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as countless blogs and forums. These customer stories are usually brief, but they bring the potential to add thousands voices previously unheard.
We call these landscapes, because rather than create graphs showing size and volume, they focus on distilling similarities of feelings and interests. Lifelines Social Landscapes reveals patterns of how groups form and come together.
Rick Harris - Customer Faithful
In 2017 we launched a companion tool, Lifelines Social Landscapes™, which captures people’s shared experiences posted in social media to build up a picture of their needs, habits and sentiment across geographies and different social groups.
Lifelines Social Landscapes™ taps into our years of experience of interpretation and coding techniques developed for the original Lifelines™ methodology. This means we still rely on real people to develop meaning from comment patterns, but we’re helped along by the latest generation of social media software. It offers the best of both worlds, whilst still maintaining the skills of research practitioners.
How Does It Work?
In our case study below, we extracted raw data from social media platforms – including Twitter and Facebook – and used interpretative techniques to explore anti-social behaviour, to identify not just the acts of problem behaviour but the lasting impact they had on the community (see red boxes).
Landscapes that convey this kind of insight enable ideas that can potentially change behaviour and can then be road-tested in focus groups or online surveys.
Like Lifelines™, these landscapes remain visual and illustrative; an aid to understanding rather than a quantitative assessment. Lifelines Social Landscapes™ can draw upon quantified numeric data, but that’s not the end goal. Instead, like all our Lifelines™ research, the ambition is to organise clues illustrating how people experience and describe aspects of their lives.
What Can You Use Lifelines Social Landscapes™ for?
The overarching benefit is to help organisations become more customer-life-centric. This is easy to say in theory, but what does it mean in practice?
We use the phrase customer-life-centric, because it is simply more specific. We’re encouraging organisations not to just profile a customer’s age, or location or product history in order to improve marketing messages. Instead, we suggest there is more value in understanding their lives, what makes them happy, what frustrates them, what they depend on. This is where brand loyalty lies, for those organisations that put the importance of customers’ lives at the centre of their business.
If your business wants to grow by being more relevant, more suitable, more trusted, more intrinsic to what your customer wants, then Lifelines Social Landscapes™ will help you to achieve it.
How long does Lifelines Social Landscapes™ take to deliver?
Lifelines Social Landscapes™ are fast-paced – designed to be commissioned and completed in a matter of weeks – enabling clients to quickly move from research into implementation and delivering value.
As well as appealing to our existing clients in the complex worlds of healthcare, travel and retail, we are keen to see Lifelines Social Landscapes™ reach new industry sectors. Feel free to contact us to see how we can help your organisation identify what really matters in your customers’ lives, beyond what they may tell you directly!