US Residents’ Perception, Attitudes and Awareness of Coronavirus

SoapBoxSample Releases Data on US Residents’ Perception, Attitudes and Awareness of Coronavirus

Research study reveals a surprising number of Americans cannot accurately identify the symptoms of COVID-19

March 16 , 2020, Los Angeles, CA — Research firm SoapBoxSample announced today, the release of the first part of their ongoing series on COVID-19. As families across the US prepare for the disruption of their daily lives, SoapBoxSample launched a comprehensive research initiative designed to monitor public sentiment in the wake of the life-threatening Coronavirus. Results from the first survey revealed that a surprising number of Americans cannot accurately identify the symptoms of COVID-19. Additionally, 1 in 3 misidentified the incubation period of COVID-19 as 14 hours, when preliminary research from the CDC suggests it may be as long as 14 days. Over the coming weeks SoapBox will continue to measure changes in public sentiment and understanding, and make the data publicly available. The goal of this initiative is to promote awareness of the virus, thereby enabling the public to make responsible and informed decisions.

“Misinformation is such a catalyst of fear,” said Jacqueline Rosales, COO of SoapBoxSample and icanmakeitbetter. “Our hope is that by sharing this data with the public, health officials and the media, we can help identify and eliminate the knowledge gaps that could potentially lead to unintentional spread of the virus.”

SoapBoxSample’s first poll of 401 US residents, fielded March 4 – March 5, focused on awareness, prevention and attitudes. The survey measured Americans awareness of how the Coronavirus is spread, whether they can correctly identify the symptoms, their understanding of the origins and mortality rate, and how to prevent the spread of the virus. About a third of those surveyed said they believe they are at risk, while a surprising 22% incorrectly report they believe a flu shot can prevent Coronavirus. Only half of Americans correctly identified the source of COVID-19.

As the situation surrounding COVID-19 continues to evolve, the American public will be exposed to a myriad of news reports. Taking the pulse of the American public to understand what information they are retaining, and whether that information is accurate, is crucial to the US containment strategy. SoapBoxSample seeks to assist with keeping the public safe and informed, by providing this data to the public at no cost.

The results of SoapBoxSample’s second survey of public awareness, fielded March 4 – March 5 focused on prevention.  This survey measured Americans understanding of how to prevent the spread of the virus.  Thankfully, 89% of those surveyed were aware of methods they can use to stop the spread of COVID-19.  This includes washing hands for at least 20 seconds (90% of those aware of prevention methods), avoiding touching one’s face (81%), covering coughs and sneezes with an elbow (79%) amongst other correct methods (disinfecting surfaces, using alchohol based cleaners when soap and water isn’t available, etc.).  While this information in encouraging, there is an alarming number of respondents who believe that a flu shot can protect them from Coronavirus (22%).  This poll also touched on the top sources of information that respondents trust to educate themselves on this ongoing pandemic.  More than half (54%) of respondents use television and news outlets to learn more about the ever-changing topic of COVID-19.  The CDC had the second highest mention, with 41% of respondents using government agency as one of their sources of information.

Parts 2 and 3 will follow in the coming days. To receive ongoing information and stats, please follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram.

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NEW RECRUITING FEATURE – Skip Pending Status

Improve your recruiting flow with our new “Skip Pending Status” feature! When this new survey setting is activated, respondents recruited through a screener or join activity programmed on your community will receive immediate access to your private community after creating an account. New members do not have to wait in the holding room until the community manager allows them into the community.

This feature may be a great fit if you are recruiting and sharing a link to a join activity through an external survey, email, or anywhere off-platform and is ideal for pre-qualified customer lists when you want to provide a seamless and member friendly recruitment flow.

This new feature can be found in the Settings tab within an activity. You will see a checkbox for “Skip Pending Status” under survey settings, which will be unchecked by default.

For more details on how to use this, reach out to your dedicated account manager.

SoapBoxSample Announces the Launch of Customer Boardroom

New Research Approach Provides Powerful Micro Communities Built Around Great Conversation

January 22, 2020, Los Angeles, CA — SoapBoxSample announced the official launch of their new research product – Customer Boardroom (CBR), being introduced at the QRCA in Austin, TX on January 28. As an alternative to traditional online bulletin boards, digital ethnographies, in-depth interviews and customer advisory boards, CBR was built with the philosophy that qualitative research platforms should always enhance and never disrupt the flow of conversation. A simple, intuitive interface and glanceable data comes together to form a customer boardroom — where your customers have a seat at the table. CBR allows brands to become more customer-centric by staying on top of emerging trends while gathering the quick feedback they need to make strategic business decisions.

“We’re incredibly excited to offer our clients this new, specialized approach,” said Jacqueline Rosales, COO of icanmakeitbetter/SoapBoxSample. “Recognizing clients’ ever-changing needs and building a portfolio of products around those needs is the cornerstone of our business strategy. Customer Boardroom was built to fill a specific niche in the market – a low barrier to entry product for executives who need fast feedback and actionable data from their customers, competitors’ customers, or anyone with key insights without the cost or work of having a long term community.”

As consumers’ preferences and behaviors continue to evolve, research approaches must evolve along with them. The flexibility of Customer Boardroom allows for discussions that are synchronous or asynchronous, moderator-led or participant-led, and with open-ended or closed-ended chats. With survey functionality built in, moderators can use survey answers as a jumping off point for authentic private conversations, while keeping the entire group engaged. The Backroom Chat feature allows clients to observe conversations in real time and make suggestions to the moderator directly and anonymously. The result is a research approach that works and feels like a live focus group, but with all the power of digital communication.

The release of Customer Boardroom complements SoapBoxSample/icanmakeitbetter’s existing insight community product, which provides integrated quantitative and qualitative data in one simple platform. As the fastest-growing market research methodology, online community research brings brands and consumers into a collaborative partnership where organizational strategy and direction are always supported by market insights. Key features of SoapBoxSample’s insight community platform include community health reports, heat maps, live chat, journals, surveys, and qualitative/quantitative focus groups.

icanmakeitbetter Announces the Launch of Customer Boardroom

New Research Approach Provides Powerful Micro Communities Built Around Great Conversation

January 22, 2020, Los Angeles, CA — SoapBoxSample/icanmakeitbetter announced the official launch of their new research product – Customer Boardroom (CBR), being introduced at the QRCA in Austin, TX on January 28. As an alternative to traditional online bulletin boards, digital ethnographies, in-depth interviews and customer advisory boards, CBR was built with the philosophy that qualitative research platforms should always enhance and never disrupt the flow of conversation. A simple, intuitive interface and glanceable data comes together to form a customer boardroom — where your customers have a seat at the table. CBR allows brands to become more customer-centric by staying on top of emerging trends while gathering the quick feedback they need to make strategic business decisions.

“We’re incredibly excited to offer our clients this new, specialized approach,” said Jacqueline Rosales, COO of icanmakeitbetter/SoapBoxSample. “Recognizing clients’ ever-changing needs and building a portfolio of products around those needs is the cornerstone of our business strategy. Customer Boardroom was built to fill a specific niche in the market – a low barrier to entry product for executives who need fast feedback and actionable data from their customers, competitors’ customers, or anyone with key insights without the cost or work of having a long term community.”

As consumers’ preferences and behaviors continue to evolve, research approaches must evolve along with them. The flexibility of Customer Boardroom allows for discussions that are synchronous or asynchronous, moderator-led or participant-led, and with open-ended or closed-ended chats. With survey functionality built in, moderators can use survey answers as a jumping off point for authentic private conversations, while keeping the entire group engaged. The Backroom Chat feature allows clients to observe conversations in real time and make suggestions to the moderator directly and anonymously. The result is a research approach that works and feels like a live focus group, but with all the power of digital communication.

The release of Customer Boardroom complements SoapBoxSample/icanmakeitbetter’s existing insight community product, which provides integrated quantitative and qualitative data in one simple platform. As the fastest-growing market research methodology, online community research brings brands and consumers into a collaborative partnership where organizational strategy and direction are always supported by market insights. Key features of SoapBoxSample’s insight community platform include community health reports, heat maps, live chat, journals, surveys, and qualitative/quantitative focus groups.

January 22, 2020, Los Angeles, CA — SoapBoxSample/icanmakeitbetter announced the official launch of their new research product – Customer Boardroom (CBR), unveiling at the QRCA in Austin, TX on January 28. As an alternative to traditional online bulletin boards, digital ethnographies, in depth interviews and customer advisory boards, CBR was built with the philosophy that qualitative research platforms should always enhance and never disrupt the flow of conversation. A simple, intuitive interface and glanceable data comes together to form a customer boardroom — where your customers have a seat at the boardroom table. CBR allows brands to become more customer-centric by staying on top of emerging trends while gathering the quick feedback they need to make strategic business decisions.

“We’re incredibly excited to offer our clients this new, specialized approach,” said Jacqueline Rosales, COO of icanmakeitbetter/SoapBoxSample. “Recognizing clients’ ever-changing needs and building a portfolio of products around those needs is the cornerstone of our business strategy. Customer Boardroom was built to fill a specific niche in the market – a low barrier to entry product for executives who need fast feedback from their customers, competitors’ customers, or anyone with key insights.”

As consumers’ preferences and behaviors continue to evolve, research approaches must evolve along with them. The flexibility of Customer Boardroom allows for discussions that are synchronous or asynchronous, moderator-led or participant-led, and with open-ended or closed-ended chats. With survey functionality built in, moderators can use survey answers as a jumping off point for authentic private conversations, while keeping the entire group engaged. Backroom Chat feature allows clients to observe conversations in real time and make suggestions to the moderator directly and anonymously. The result is a research approach that works and feels like a live focus group, but with all the power of digital communication.

The release of Customer Boardroom complements SoapBoxSample/icanmakeitbetter’s existing insight community product, which provides integrated quantitative and qualitative data in one simple platform. As the fastest-growing Market Research methodology, online community research brings brands and consumers into a collaborative partnership where organizational strategy and direction are always supported by market insights. Key features of SoapBoxSample/incanmakeitbetter’s insight community platform include community health reports, heat maps, live chat, journals, surveys, and focus groups.

Automatic Survey Close

CLOSING YOUR SURVEY

Let the platform do the work for you. We’ve automated the process of closing surveys, allowing you to “set it and forget it”. You can close your survey by manually selecting close from the status field of your survey…  

… or you can set the close criteria in the Settings Tab of your survey.

This also where you can update the “Closed message”. This is the message members will see if they try to complete the survey after you have closed it for data analysis.

You have the option to:

  • close the activity automatically by setting a number of responses, i.e. completed surveys.
  • select a close date. If you choose the “close on this date” option, the survey will close 1 hour after Midnight CST of the date you select.

The activity will show as “Active” until it is manually closed by the community administrator.

Note: Be mindful of your sample management. If you have a lot of respondents completing a survey at one time, you may go over your set number of responses or close date. The survey will NOT prevent active respondents from completing their active survey session.

For example, if you set your survey to close after 100 completes, and you currently have 90 completed surveys and 30 members going through the survey, they will all be able to complete the survey before the software will prevent new entrants to access the survey. This means, only send as many invites as you expect to need to achieve your completed surveys. Consider your audience and past response rates. Don’t blast out to your entire community.

Technical Details: A respondent is considered active if he/she submitted a response to the survey in the past 30 minutes. A respondent who submitted his/her last response 31 or more minutes ago is inactive and considered to re-enter the survey and won’t be able to do so if the maximum completes or date cap has been set and met.

Lets See What’s New in 2020 from CES

Highlights from CES 2018 and Why Researchers Should Care

Where can you play ping-pong with a robot, fall into love with a mechanical puppy and see inside a refrigerator without opening the door? At CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. Every January tech companies from around the globe convene on Las Vegas to showcase their products — gadgets and gizmos that consumers can look forward to one day owning — sort of. They won’t be coming to a store near you anytime soon, and a lot of them leave you wondering – who would actually want that? In the aftermath of CES 2018, many critics pointed out that most of the products on display would only appeal to two types of people – people with money to burn and lazy people with money to burn. But we don’t have to rely on guessing who would buy these things, because we can actually ask people and find out. (Yay research!) SoapBoxSample conducted a mini poll* to gauge people’s awareness of CES and to find out if consumers would actually buy any of these high-tech gadgets. (You’ll find the results sprinkled throughout this article. I had to find some way to get you to read the whole thing.)

The research industry has been accused of being slow to adapt. While analysts are locked in rooms figuring out how to produce non-biased sampling frames, people are out making robots with Artificial Intelligence. The very same robots you can see at CES. The tech industry could benefit from paying attention to what consumers actually want (something research can supply), but researchers should be paying attention to the tech industry because big changes in the way people use tech in their everyday lives provides new opportunities for gathering data.

“Alexa, let’s do a survey”

At CES this year, Google came out looking like they were trying too hard. They built a three-story installation in the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot. They also clearly shelled out big bucks for an advertising presence that plastered the entire town with the phrase Google wants you to remember – Hey Google. Amazon didn’t exhibit at all. They didn’t need to, because every other device at CES boasted about being “Alexa compatible.” All the free marketing garnered by Amazon, in contrast with Google’s flashy displays made Amazon look like the cool kid who doesn’t have to try to be cool.

People love the Amazon Echo. They consider Alexa to be a trusted part of their family. This is good news for researchers. When people are taking voice-activated surveys through Alexa (coming soon), the higher levels of trust will evoke more accurate, detailed, and honest responses from respondents.

Car tech – knowledge drives enthusiasm

You can’t talk about CES without bringing up the cars. They’re sleek, they’re stylish, they glistening under the showroom lights. I’m not a car person at all (my car has roll-up windows), but these vehicles were really beautiful. As a non-car-person, what I appreciated about the new smart dashboards and infotainment systems is that they were built to provide the driver with more insight into the inner workings of the car, something that I wouldn’t be able to assess by opening the hood.

As car manufacturers are scrambling to bring the first self-driving cars to market, they also have to convince people that self-driving cars are safe. Last quarter SoapBoxSample published the results of an internal study on the public’s perception of self-driving cars. Almost half of those surveyed believe that self-driving cars are dangerous and would not feel comfortable sharing the road with them. Only 28% said they looked forward to owning one. Developing smart dashboards that give drivers detailed information about how the car is operating is one way that car manufacturers can combat negative views of their product’s safety.

Related: Who’s in the Driver’s Seat? An Infographic About Self-driving Cars

Beauty tech – look better, feel worse

I tried out the HiMirror, one of CES’s #beautytech products. The HiMirror measures your pores, dark spots, wrinkles and dark circles. Just what women need, right? A super judgy mirror. Their marketing promised that the in-depth analysis would result in better “skin care goal-setting”. But what is the goal, to stop aging, or to sell products? The next generation of the HiMirror will probably show targeted ads for skin care products. I think I would rather skip the recommended products, and not know that my dark circles had increased by 3%. Turns out most people agree with me. Our poll showed that 68% of respondents would not want to use a high-tech mirror that measures skin imperfections.

It’s not so much consumer electronics, as it is competitive electronics

Is there really a consumer demand for a laundry-folding robot the size of a washing machine that requires you to manually tag each item of clothing you own, and can only fold adult-sized clothing? (And by the way, it takes longer than folding by hand.) Of the nearly 1,000 people who answered our poll, 79% said no thank you to the $980 laundry-folding robot.

Are the companies that produce these robots more focused on giving consumers what they want, or trying to out-do their competitors? What you might notice about this year’s line of robots is that their designs are very similar. White casing, black trim — almost without exception. Did the robot manufacturers forget to do their competitive analysis? (Shameless plug – did you know that SoapBoxSample’s passive metering application is great for understanding how people interact with your brand’s competition online?)

Can Americans fall in love with a robot dog?

I’m not a dog person, or even a pet person, so I didn’t expect to catch feelings for SONY’s robot dog Aibo. But it won me over instantly. Aibo is life-like, expressive, and responds to voice and touch. Knowing that his OLED eyes were mechanical did not make them any less puppy-like. Aibo is currently only available in Japan and costs $1700. SONY has said that they expect to sell at least 150,000 units. Could Aibo gain the same type of popularity in the United States?

Americans are waaaaaay into their pets. Here are some highlights from SoapBoxSample’s 2016 survey of U.S. pet owners to prove it – more than 60% of pet owners sleep with their animals, 40% of dog owners dress their pets up in costumes, and 73% of pet owners believe their pets are “smarter than average”. Could a robot dog one day occupy the same space in our hearts (and in our beds)? According to the results of our poll – heck no. When asked if they could see robot pets becoming more popular than live pets, 89% said no.

Related: Valentine’s Day Pet-fographic – We Know Americans Have a Close Relationship with Their Cats and Dogs But Just How Close Are They?

The future is full of glitches

If robots had emotions, the Aeolus would have experienced total confusion during its live demonstration. The booth presenter repeatedly ordered the bewildered bot to pick up a remote control off the floor, which it finally did after about a minute or so. (This scenario would be nothing new for the 8.4% of U.S. households with teenagers.) But the limitations of the robot’s responsiveness are no hurdle when compared to its price tag. The company wouldn’t name the actual cost, other than to say it was “less than a vacation for a family of four.” For the purposes of our poll, we guessed the price to be $10,000. Turns out most people don’t really see the value in it. Over 83% said they would not be picking one up anytime soon.

I need a fridge with a camera in it

The ThinQ smart fridge unveiled by LG has a 29-inch touchscreen on the door. If you knock on the screen twice it becomes transparent so you can see the contents inside. But my favorite part was the wide-angle camera inside the fridge. How many times have you thought to yourself, “I wish I could look inside my fridge while I’m at the store so I can see what I need to buy”? Maybe never, but you know who else wants a look inside your fridge? Researchers. The smart kitchen of the future is a paradise for people who hate making lists, and for research ethnographers. With cameras inside every appliance, researchers can see inside the homes of their subjects without setting foot in the door, and more importantly, without disrupting the routines they are attempting to study.

Within the 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space occupied by CES, there were devices that could change our everyday lives, and some other ones that were pretty dumb. There were also plenty of opportunities for researchers. Tech companies seem to have bought into idea that they should be creating things that the public doesn’t know they want yet. Based on the public reaction to some of the products at the show, this might not be the best plan. Tech companies need consumer research more than ever to tell them if there’s a market for what they are attempting to create. Researchers should keep a close eye on developments in tech — there are lots of opportunities coming along for research to become less invasive, cheaper, more efficient and more accurate. The two industries should work together as we move into the next phase of consumer technology.

*P.S. By the way, this poll was a lot like the exhibits at CES, fun to look at, but lacking scientific validity (probably biased and non-representative).