Occasion-based and motivation-based studies are powerful tools that help brands understand the context and emotions that influence consumers' decision-making. These types of research go beyond demographics and behavior alone – they explore the underlying situations and drives that lead to purchases, usage, or preferences.

Occasion-Based Research: Uncovering When and Where

Occasion-based research focuses on identifying the specific situations or moments when a consumer chooses to use a product or service. These are often tied to time of day, location, social setting, or special events. The goal is to understand how context affects consumer behavior so brands can tailor marketing, product design, and messaging accordingly.

Examples of usage occasions might include:

• Choosing an energy drink before a workout versus during a work deadline
• Snacking behavior while commuting compared to relaxing at home
• Using skincare products as part of a daily routine versus for a special event

By mapping these moments through occasion-based research, brands can identify new occasions to target or better service their existing ones.

Motivation-Based Research: Understanding the Why

Motivation-based studies focus on the underlying needs, emotions, and drivers behind consumer choices. This type of study digs into the psychological or functional triggers that explain why someone selects a product, brand, or service in a given moment.

Common motivational dimensions might include:

• Seeking pleasure or indulgence
• Achieving health or wellness goals
• Saving time or money
• Reducing stress or avoiding risk

Motivation-based research is especially useful in emotion-based research and contextual research, revealing how consumers feel when making decisions – and what unmet needs your brand can fill.

Why Use These Together?

While powerful on their own, combining occasion-based and motivation-based research provides a more holistic view of consumer behavior. When you know both when a behavior occurs and why it happens, your strategies become more precise and consumer-aligned. This paired approach strengthens market segmentation, messaging frameworks, and innovation plans.

For example, in Toluna, you might build surveys that explore both the occasion ("Where were you when you last used this product?") and the motivation ("What goal were you trying to achieve?"). By layering these insights, businesses paint a richer picture of the consumer journey.

In short, these research methods help brands meet people where they are – both in the real world and in their emotional world.

Toluna is a powerful DIY research platform designed to help teams move quickly and cost-effectively – without sacrificing the depth and quality of insights. For brands aiming to understand usage occasions or emotional motivations, Toluna offers a suite of tools that support agile, contextual research at scale.

Designing Smart Surveys That Go Beyond Demographics

Central to Toluna’s value in occasion-based and motivation-based research is its ability to go deeper than just who the consumer is. The platform allows you to design custom surveys that explore:

• Where and when consumers are interacting with your product (usage occasions)
• Emotional and functional drivers behind purchase or usage (motivations)
• Situational triggers that prompt brand recall or action

Because Toluna reaches a wide and highly segmented global audience, you can effectively target specific occasions (like working parents after 5pm) or motivations (such as reducing stress during travel). This is especially useful for brands looking to apply contextual research to drive more relevant and timely experiences.

Examples of How to Use Toluna for Segmentation and Triggers

Let’s imagine you’re a beverage company planning to explore new product positioning. Using Toluna, you could create a study that asks consumers:

• “When do you typically drink a flavored sparkling water?” (captures occasion)
• “What benefit were you seeking at that moment – hydration, energy, relaxation?” (captures motivation)

This dual-layered data gives you insight into when people need your product – and why they choose it over alternatives. Over time, you can build powerful consumer profiles that go beyond age or location, and into dynamic elements like mood, intention, or context.

Built-In Speed Meets Human-Led Expertise

While DIY research platforms like Toluna offer great autonomy, they work best when paired with strong research fundamentals. That’s where many companies are turning to On Demand Talent – experienced consumer insights professionals who step in to guide and elevate your approach. These experts can help:

• Design smarter, bias-free survey questions
• Ensure motivations and occasions are explored without leading responses
• Align your research goals with your market research strategy

Think of On Demand Talent as your agile insights partner – someone who understands best practices for DIY research platforms and ensures your investment in Toluna delivers real strategic outcomes. Especially for teams embracing leaner budgets, shorter timelines, or AI-enabled workflows, the combination of scalable tech and flexible expertise is a future-ready approach.

In essence, Toluna provides the speed and reach, while On Demand Talent ensures the quality, relevance, and impact of your occasion-based and motivation-based research.

Once you understand the value of capturing usage occasions and emotional triggers, the next step is building a research framework that connects these insights to your business goals. Whether you're developing new product ideas, refining messaging, or identifying growth segments, a structured approach helps make sense of raw data collected through DIY research tools like Toluna.

Start With the Consumer Perspective

Great occasion-based research starts by asking the right contextual questions. Consider everyday scenarios where your target consumer might be using your product or service. Are they alone or with others? Are they celebrating or solving a problem? The more context you capture, the clearer the insights.

For example, a fictional beverage brand isn't just curious about "when people drink." They want to know if customers are grabbing a refreshing drink after a workout, enjoying it during a moment of relaxation, or sharing it during a social event. Each of those moments (or "occasions") reveals not only timing and setting, but also emotion and intent.

Link Emotions to Motivations

In motivation-based research, you’re going deeper to uncover the psychological and emotional reasons behind choices. Ask: What emotional needs is your product fulfilling? Comfort, convenience, happiness, health, control, pride?

Using Toluna's survey logic and profiling tools, you can structure studies that explore these connections across key consumer groups. Emotional motivations can differ widely based on context. For instance, someone choosing a snack at work may be driven by energy and productivity, while the same product at home might fulfill indulgence or relaxation needs.

Build Segments That Reflect Real Life

Consumer segmentation becomes more powerful when it's grounded in real-world usage contexts and emotional drivers. Rather than just dividing people by age or income, your framework should group them by:

• Shared situations (e.g., weekday lunch at the office, weekend family time)
• Common emotional needs (e.g., stress relief, achievement, self-expression)
• Decision factors tied to motivation (e.g., convenience, sustainability, status)

This kind of hybrid segmentation provides actionable layers for product design, messaging, and innovation pipelines. Toluna’s platform allows for testing of these segments in real time, helping you iterate quickly and validate what really matters.

Tie Research Inputs Back to Strategy

Ultimately, strong frameworks don't just organize research – they drive better business decisions. Make sure to connect each study touchpoint back to larger goals, such as entering new markets, enhancing brand positioning, or identifying whitespace opportunities. A framework rooted in usage occasions and emotions makes that blueprint much clearer.

DIY research tools like Toluna are built to empower teams with speed, flexibility, and access to large audiences – but without expert guidance, interpretation and planning can fall short. While Toluna streamlines processes like sampling, survey scripting, and reporting, translating results into strategic insights still requires human expertise.

Why Navigation Still Needs a Compass

Think of Toluna as a high-performance vehicle. It’s fast and powerful – but even the best car needs an experienced driver who knows the terrain. Without support from market research professionals, even well-designed studies can lead to:

• Biased or unclear questions that skew results
• Missed opportunities to probe into emotional layers
• Unbalanced samples that don’t reflect target audiences
• Insights that look interesting – but don’t drive strategy

This is especially crucial when planning complex research like occasion-based or motivation-based surveys, where nuance matters and context is everything.

Bringing Expertise Into the DIY Process

Many teams turn to DIY research for budget or timeline reasons – but bringing in the right kind of expert support doesn’t slow you down. In fact, professionals with experience in platforms like Toluna can help you:

- Align your surveys with brand and category strategy
- Build more accurate and flexible respondent profiles
- Integrate emotional and contextual variables into testing
- Interpret results with clarity and confidence

These experts act as partners, not gatekeepers. They don’t take over the tool – they enhance your ability to use it effectively and independently.

Preserving Strategic Focus Under Pressure

In the rush to deliver fast insights, quality can slip. With increasing pressure to do more with less, insights leaders are relying on leaner teams and digital tools to cover more ground. But without experienced input, it's easy for research to lose direction, feel disconnected from brand goals, or deliver findings that are nice but not usable.

In these moments, partnering with consumer insights experts – especially those familiar with DIY platforms – protects the integrity of your work. They help ensure your occasion-based research doesn’t just collect moments, but uncovers meaning within them.

Occasion-based research offers rich, actionable insights – but to unlock its full value, you need more than access to a tool. You need experienced minds who can apply best practices, ask the right questions, and bring context to life. This is where SIVO’s On Demand Talent solution becomes a game-changer.

The Extra Spark Behind the Platform

Using Toluna for segmentation and contextual insight is powerful, but the most effective studies aren’t built in isolation. When you tap into On Demand Talent, you're engaging seasoned professionals who have led similar research for startups, iconic brands, and cross-category challengers. They know what works – and what to avoid – across different consumer touchpoints.

For example, a fictional snack brand exploring weekend movie-time usage might wonder if “fun” or “comfort” is the bigger draw. An On Demand professional helps frame that question precisely, identifies emotional triggers worth testing, and ensures that respondent profiles reflect real-life scenarios.

What On Demand Talent Brings to the Table

• Strategic framing: Experts help align your occasion and motivation research with high-level market research strategy.
• Survey craftsmanship: They ensure questions are clear, unbiased, and emotional cues are captured authentically.
• Audience segmentation: Talent can structure segments based on usage patterns and motivations, not just demographics.
• Rapid ramp-up: Get support in days or weeks – especially useful when internal bandwidth is limited.

Training and Long-Term Capability Building

One unique benefit of working with SIVO’s On Demand Talent is the dual impact – they don’t just execute high-quality research, they also build internal capability. This means your team gets stronger with every collaboration, learning how to make the most of research tools like Toluna confidently and independently.

The Flexible Support You Need

Whether filling a temporary role or supplementing your team for a campaign, On Demand Talent adapts to your needs. Unlike freelancers or traditional consultants, our experts are integrated partners – available part time, full time, or just-in-time. And with hundreds of professionals across categories and roles, you're not waiting months to find the right fit.

In a world where usage contexts and emotional motivations evolve quickly, flexible access to expert guidance isn’t a luxury – it’s essential. On Demand Talent helps you respond faster, stay focused on what matters, and turn Toluna studies into real competitive advantage.