Why You Should Organise an Immersion Trip for Your Next Project

Summary

Grab Ventures relies on on-the-ground immersion trips to uncover real consumer behaviors and validate hypotheses that desktop research cannot address. Placing cross-functional teams directly into target markets reveals nuanced consumer motivations, such as Indonesian grocery shoppers prioritizing physical product freshness and price sensitivity over mere convenience. Effective immersion trips require pre-fieldwork reconnaissance by local residents, collaborative hypothesis generation across business and tech disciplines, and non-leading question design. Research teams should operate in small groups of two or three alongside experienced local translators while holding structured end-of-day debriefs to synthesize contextual observations. Within the Double Diamond framework, these field insights support the Discover phase and directly feed into design sprint workshops for problem framing.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Field research in Indonesia disproved the assumption that online grocery adoption is driven by convenience, revealing that physical verification of freshness and price sensitivity are the primary consumer motivators.

2. 2

   Observational shadowing revealed wet market vendors organically coordinating grocery orders over WhatsApp, accepting e-wallets or bank transfers, and utilizing bike drivers for delivery.

3. 3

   Immersion teams should split into groups of two or three and dress like locals to avoid triggering facility security interventions or intimidating interview participants.