Video interviewing can enhance market research greatly and even take it into a new dimension, including sentiment analysis. To find out why and how, I have interviewed Carl Wong, the CEO and Co-Founder of LivingLens who spoke to me from Liverpool. Carl talked to me about some of the innovative ways of carrying out consumer research, the use of video and massive data analysis, all based on his experience at LivingLens, a Medallia company.
When video interviewing gives market research a new dimension
The rise of video can help rehumanise marketing data
Video adoption has been steadily climbing for a couple of decades from the first camera phones in Seoul, South Korea and Japan in the 2000s to iPhone video recording in 2009 to billions of hours of video watched every day on platforms like YouTube or Facebook.
The last six months or so, we’ve seen a dramatic acceleration in the use of live video conversations. Have you used Zoom this week? Have you been doing a Tik Tok dance? Have you taken or shared a video on one of the three-point five billion smartphones on the planet?
Now, lots of us are using video every day, and that’s what we tap into.
We built LivingLens to help organisations drive change. Big data has revolutionised marketing but at the same time, it has dehumanised that data.
So, every time an executive sees a video of customers talking about their wants and needs, every single time they see engagements, they see empathy.
Why wasn’t there much more customer video in organisations up to now?
It’s because historically, it was really hard. It was cumbersome, expensive, you need some specialist piece of software and it’s very difficult to scale.
So that’s the problem we solve. Video is translated into the tangible data of what people say, how people feel and what they do. And that means we can understand trends at scale, build video libraries as real knowledge bases and create compelling stories that drive change really, really quickly.
And you are using video interviewing to do away with long-winded surveys
Absolutely. There are billions of surveys every year, and we’re all, I guess, suffering from survey fatigue to an extent, since surveys can be very long, and we are filling in less and less of them. We are in a place now where maybe there are one or two questions, the data-specific data points that need to be captured.
But more importantly, what is intended is to tell us how your experience was or give us your feedback or show us how you’re feeling. That’s it, it’s a single question.
And by clicking on the opportunity to leave a video or indeed audio, we open up. Typically, we would see six times the amount of words somebody will say in a video than the number of words they would type in an open-ended text question in a survey.
Also, people will describe more than one issue versus when they are typing away, where they may just stick to one. But we often see four or five different themes that emerge from people talking on camera.
We have seen the rate of response increase significantly over the course of the last 18 months. We are all just becoming more used to video and sharing our faces and using it from a technology perspective.

Now, the real challenge is to send this to hundreds of thousands of customers. That makes up a lot of data!
It’s a massive amount of data, but the world is awash with big data right now along with the infrastructures, the processing and the machine learning capabilities to analyse it.