Anders Palm
Fractal Design
Fractal Design designs and builds computer cases, case fans, and PSUs, mostly intended for gaming- and hardware enthusiasts worldwide – selling their products in 45 countries and counting. While the actual design and engineering takes place at the HQ in Göteborg, they also have offices in Dallas, Taipei, and China.
Fractal has always been a trailblazer. They started pushing the importance of the hardware design aspect at a time when no one else really seemed to care about it, and over the years their products have had quite an impact on the market. Constant product development is still at the very core of who they are, and an enormous amount of energy is spent on both perfecting their classic products to better suit an ever-changing world, and breaking new ground and challenging conventional wisdom – not least of all their own.
With their first panel, we at Panelista have seen Fractal Design break the record for every single engagement metric on our customer insight platform. We knew that Fractal Design has a very strong fanbase, but we did not expect this. We interviewed Alexander Ernryd who is the CMO at Fractal Design.
Why do you use Panelista?
Alexander: Our community is very important for our product development and brand. Fractal’s customers have detailed knowledge as well as high demands and expectations on the products they buy. And we at Fractal Design strongly believe that innovation happens together with our customers. Therefore, we want the opportunity to drill down into detailed customer input. This applies to both subjective opinions about design, color and shape, and more technical requirements linked to function and performance.
How is it going?
Alexander: It has been overwhelming! We have gathered input from our customers in a variety of channels and formats, but never had such clear, strong, and manageable feedback as now. The quality has been at a high technical level, which makes it easier to draw conclusions, and in turn, take concrete actions.
The video format itself has been really rewarding and fits in with our quest to be personal to both our brand ambassadors and consumers, and we have marketed Panelista as a direct channel to our product development department.
How did you recruit panelists?
Alexander: We work with a variety of channels and hardware forums with enthusiastic consumers, so locating willing panelists was very easy. We were able to quickly select a global group with varying backgrounds and knowledge.
What type of questions do you ask?
Alexander: The focus has been on both technical development as well as design and performance. There has been a mix of open exploratory questions such as “What would make you absolutely NOT buy the next version of …?", as well as straight to the point questions like “If you modified your chassis in any way, what did you do and why?".
What is it like working with Panelista and the Panelista team?
Alexander: Panelista is a really good tool for facilitating qualitative customer insights and a flexible framework for transforming customer feedback into insights. The use of Panelista has generated many new insights in terms of what is important for our customers, and it also helps us to understand differences between our different markets.
Collecting customer input and creating insights has always been cumbersome and required a lot of manual effort. Panelista has eliminated the biggest headaches and also been very easy to use with a good mix of self-service and personal support from the Panelista team. Highly recommended!
Thank you, Alexander and Fractal Design! Read more about Panelista here .
