The Recruit That Had to Be Perfect.
Big Qual recruitment for Kantar
The Challenge
One date. One 75-minute window. No second chance.
Kantar came to Zest to recruit for a Kantar Live session on behalf of a leading dairy brand, exploring UK consumer attitudes to dairy and a specific high-protein product. The session format left no room for attrition. Every person recruited had to be the right fit and, just as importantly, had to actually show up. A spec met on paper but half-empty on the day isn’t a recruit. It’s a problem.
Plenty of agencies can hand you 100 names off a panel, or fire out a survey and qualify whoever clicks fastest. Not many can get those people to turn up, and contribute well when they do.
The Audience and Methodology
The target was UK dairy shoppers aged 18-45, split evenly across Gen Z and Millennials, with a health- and ingredient-conscious profile. The kind of spec we recruit to every week. The difference here was the stakes: one session, one window, and a format where half-engaged participants would have killed the whole thing. We needed people we’d stake a session on, not just people who qualified.
How Zest Delivered
Every single participant on this project was called, spoken to by a named member of the Zest team, not just sent a link. That call checked two things: that they were genuinely right for the brief, and that they’d actually show up. A survey qualifier can tell you the first. Only a conversation can tell you the second.
The personal element matters more than it might sound. Panellists had a named contact at Zest throughout, someone they’d spoken to, not a faceless research company. Letting down an organisation is easy to shrug off. Letting down someone who took the time to call you is a different thing entirely, and it’s a significant part of why our attendance rates hold up when it counts.
Session day was no different. We were live on email, Teams and WhatsApp with Kantar throughout, watching numbers land in real time, sending chasers the moment anyone looked shaky. We treat session day as something we’re in together, not something we hand over and hope for the best on.
90 people showed up against a target of 75 from 100 recruited.
What This Says About Zest
The best feedback you can receive is repeat work. Kantar has since briefed three further studies using the same approach, all live or just wrapped, alongside many more through other methodologies.
Big Qual only delivers what it promises if the people in the room are the right people, properly prepared, and genuinely present. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone picked up the phone.
Methodology:
Kantar Live, Online Big Qual AI session
Respondents:
90 attendees from 100 recruited (target: 75)
Duration:
10 days, screener to session
Services:
Recruitment, screening, scheduling, blind recruitment management