Why Behavioural Research Agencies use the Gorilla Experiment Builder
Marketing is evolving quicker than ever. And thus, commercial research agencies like yours are faced with ever-evolving client needs: Better and quicker insights to enable greater economic results while using less tracking data than just a few years before.
That’s a challenge!
And then there’s your research business you want to improve, too: More profitable while working fewer (crazy) hours so that you can enjoy a calm, meaningful life.
Here are a couple of situations our commercial research clients face. If you recognize yourself in one of them, then we should explore whether the Gorilla Experiment Builder or Gorilla Studio — or done-for-you research service — are a good fit for your business:
- “Our clients need access to customer intentions and behavioral insights, but I can’t get them with just survey data. What do I do?”
- “My clients want better quality data that offers better insights — and quickly! How can I offer them that without breaking the bank?”
- “Using focus groups and interviews to understand consumer behaviors is so time-consuming, expensive, and frankly doesn’t generate a lot of actionable insights. There must be a better way.”
- “I need to run studies in different markets to capture local differences and maximize validity. Whom do I partner with?”
- “Brand marketing is notoriously hard to measure. But my clients want to know if their ad spend is sensible. There must be something I can offer them!”
- “I need to produce insights that are more attractive and interesting than my competitors can offer so that I can markup my prices. More scientifically valid and environmentally realistic simulations would blow even the fanciest questionnaires out of the water… What do I do?”
Gorilla Experiment Builder and Gorilla Studio help commercial research agencies generate better insights more quickly for their clients. Thus, those agencies can work more profitably by governing higher prices and outsourcing commoditized research, focussing on their valuable core offerings.
If earning more money and doing more interesting research are important to you, then you should talk to our founder Jo Evershed this week.

Gareth Harvey
Associate Professor of Consumer Psychology at HEG,
Director of Consumer Psychology at DECIDE
@LinkedIn
“Shop Builder allows us to recreate the sort of platforms that the larger retailers have and it gives us an opportunity to do things that, unless you have very large budgets, you just would never be able to achieve.”
Humans are surprising. Gorilla helps you uncover the method to their madness.
At first glance, Humans sometimes behave in surprising ways. But if you look under the bonnet, there is method to their madness. Our tools and service allow you to get the data to uncover that method. And create user-centric products or services that just work.
Gorilla Experiment Builder is our online research platform. It’s the toolset you need to run almost any behavioral science task you can dream up. We offer the classics, like traditional surveys, and all-time favorite psychology tasks like Flank, Stroop, or executive function tasks. We enable you to run eye-tracking tracking tasks without needing eye-tracking hardware.
Or gamify your tasks, to get longitudinal data. Of course, you can also add multiplayer components or simulate real-life or online shopping experiences… or even whole social media platforms. And all that without having touched a line of code. (But yes, our platform can be extended using custom code. The possibilities are endless.)
And when you are done setting up your experiment, recruit participants with the click of a button from ten different recruitment platforms. Aaah… time to have lunch, come back and crunch the results of thousands of participants.
In short: The Gorilla Experiment Builder replaces a host of different research tools you’ve used before and integrates their abilities, reducing the expensive complexity of your business. Ditch your survey platform, let your developers focus on cutting-edge instead of generic tasks, and offer insights to your clients you couldn’t offer before — at least not at those margins.
Gorilla Studio is our done-for-you research service. You can outsource the legwork of your offering to us. We offer two different packages.
The Design Package is the right choice for you if you can describe the effect you want to measure, but don’t know how. We’ll design a protocol for you to implement.
The Implementation Package is the right choice if your protocol has already been designed and you want us to implement and run it in Gorilla Experiment Builder. We’ll build out the experiment, recruit for and run it, and deliver the cleaned and analyzed data to you — all that’s left for you to do is to write your report.
With Gorilla Studio you’ll not need to hire people to do work related to generic tech, design, data, or analysis tasks. You speak to your client, manage the project and focus on high-value tasks.
Get inspired: What commercial researchers have done with Gorilla
We have collected a series of videos from projects that we’ve been involved with demonstrating the wide variety of tasks that can be built in Gorilla and used within a Gorilla Experiment.
We’re sharing them here to give you a flavor, but if you’d like to find out more about what’s possible, please book a demo and we can have a more detailed conversation about how we can support your research needs.
How Gorilla can pay off for you and your business
During one’s professional life small miracles happen again and again: You discover a way to achieve the same result with less effort. You find a tool that saves you hours of work. You work on your messaging and — boom — new clients are happy to pay you more. However, all of those miracles don’t happen by chance, but because you invest time into transforming your business.
By using the Gorilla Experiment Builder or delegating work to Gorilla Studio,
- your business can be more time-efficient by using Gorilla rather than your in-house tech for commoditized research (e.g. surveys or pre-built tasks).
- your business can be more cost-efficient by focusing your in-house employees on offerings which make up your competitive advantage and outsourcing other stuff to Gorilla.
- your business can be more profitable by adding Gorilla’s unique offerings to your proposals — for which you can charge a high margin.
Thus, you can transform your business into one that
- isn’t comparable to your competitors. You can not only charge more, but you’ll become the only choice in the market for your type of research offering. A true moat!
- is more profitable. By reducing the costs of doing research in general and leveraging your employees better, you’ll take home more pay while working the same hours. Or even less hours.
- is known for the specific type of research you do. Say goodbye to hunting for work. If you play your cards right by talking about your client’s successes and where your potential clients are, they will come flocking to you, eager for similar results.
Frequently Asked Questions about Gorilla for Commercial Researchers
Any questions? We are happy to answer them personally. However, if you are in a hurry feel free to check out our FAQ.
Why should I use Gorilla?
We believe that you and we have the same mission: Let’s work together and create an evidence-based world that’s psychologically healthy for humans.
What’s the ethics of nudging consumers?
The ethics of nudging depend on how it is used and for what purpose. In general, nudging can be seen as ethical as long as it is transparent, does not manipulate or deceive consumers, and respects their autonomy and freedom of choice. Nudges need to be designed in a way that does not take advantage of consumers or exploit their vulnerabilities.
However, there are also concerns about the potential for nudging to be used to further the interests of companies or governments at the expense of consumers. For example, there may be concerns about the use of nudges to influence consumer behavior in ways that are not in their best interests, such as by steering them towards products or services that are not the most beneficial for them.
To ensure that nudging is used ethically, it is important for there to be clear guidelines and regulations in place to govern its use and to ensure that it is not abused. It is also important for consumers to be aware of how they may be influenced by nudges so that they can make informed decisions about their own behavior.
Changing things like colors have tiny effects in the real world. How do you know it’s worth it?
The effects are tiny, but they can be measured and are statistically relevant nevertheless. A tiny change that impacts millions of people is still a big one in the end.
What kinds of behavioral studies can we run on brands, pricing et cetera?
Gorilla enables you to quickly adapt classic behavioral research tasks to improve the performance of your brand. For example, Implicit Association Tasks (IATs) are a powerful way for brands to gain insight into how consumers think and feel about their products. By using IATs, brands can measure how quickly a consumer associates certain words and images with their brand, as well as how strongly they associate specific attributes with the brand. This can be used to identify opportunities for improvement, as well as to assess how successful a brand’s current marketing and advertising efforts are. Brands can also use IATs to measure the impact of changes in their products and services on consumer beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. This research can be used to inform decisions about how to best position their products relative to competing solutions, optimize their marketing strategies, and ensure their products are meeting customer needs.
What can we do that’s more than just a survey?
Of course, Gorilla offers the usual surveys, but it also lets you add conditional flows or connect to any other of our tools. That includes traditional psychology tasks, multiplayer experiments, gamified tasks, or on- and offline shopping simulations. We measure reaction times, eye movement, and keyboard and mouse inputs and can record audio and video.
How can we show that the research is valid?
Behavioral consumer research using simulation tools like Gorilla Shop Builder are valid, even if participants don’t use real money to make real purchasing decisions. The research can still provide useful insights into how people make decisions and what factors influence their decision-making because it’s the best approximation short of measuring real-life behavior. Gorilla Shop Builder is sufficiently ecologically valid to provide insights at a scale and cost that wouldn’t be possible in the field.
Can we outsource using Gorilla Experiment Builder?
Of course. That’s what Gorilla Studio is for. Trained behavioral scientists can design and/or implement your paradigm and deliver cleaned data as well as basic analysis to your inbox.
Why shouldn’t I build a solution myself?
It’s simple: Opportunity cost and allocation of resources. A tested and proven solution already exists — the Gorilla Experiment Builder. Each hour you dedicate to building a custom behavioral science toolsets like ours could be devoted to serving (and billing) your clients instead. Half a dozen developers and designers work on continually improving Gorilla: Imagine the costs of coding even a fraction of our functionality.
Why shouldn’t I let students build a solution?
Gorilla is designed specifically for this kind of research and records all the right measures. Plus it’s fully supported so your team and you won’t get stuck. Gorilla itself is used by people all over the world, so we are confident your students will pick it up quickly and spend their time on research, not programming.
Are components set in stone or customizable?
All components have settings that you can configure, which most of the time is all you need. However, you can also code your own components or expand existing ones to build any custom behavior you might need.
Do you have representative niche samples we can test?
Very probably yes. There are three major ways to get participants for your experiments: Crowd-sourced recruitment, email recruitment, and third-party recruitment.
You can generate a simple link to your experiment and send it to your participants. You can upload a list of email addresses and we send personalised links to them. Or you can connect to a third-party service like Prolific, Sona Systems™, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Cloud Research, Qualtrics, Qualtrics Panel, Kantar Profiles, and more.
If you have your own sample, just send them the link to your experiment or let us do so via email.
Which reactions or interactions are measured with the tool? Clicks, mouse movement, gaze?
Nearly everything. We can measure clicks, and movement of the mouse, record audio or video and offer state-of-the-art eye-tracking. All under one roof, all under one user interface.
Can a researcher without a background in code implement small changes without paying a developer?
Yes. A simple graphical user interface and a drag-and-drop editor are one of the main benefits of Gorilla. You’ll only really need a developer if you need to script some custom behaviour, but only a very small proportion of our users ever need to go this far.
How’s data security and what about preventing/handling breaches?
Gorilla is built to support the existing BPS (The British Psychological Society) and NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) standards which have strict codes of practice to adhere to, in addition to the legislative requirements of the GDPR and DPA2018. We take data security very seriously — learn more about our approach here.
How easy is the data to parse?
Gorilla data comes through as a simple spreadsheet where each row is one response, so it’s easy to aggregate in Excel or similar tools. You can also download them as CSV files which you can then import into your favorite analysis tools.
How does Gorilla fulfill purchases? What’s the validity of research using tools like Shop Builder?
Shop Builder is a simulation of a real shopping experience, and so is more realistic than, say, answering questions on a survey. If you gave participants money and fulfilled their purchases, it’s still not realistic, as they’re not spending their own money.
Why Gorilla and why not any of the others like Surveymonkey, Qualtrics Conjoint or UserTesting?
Surveymonkey is a fine survey tool but doesn’t offer conditional flows or advanced functionality a behavioral scientist might need. Also, it’s pricey considering its functionality. With Gorilla, questionnaires are included in our price.
Qualtrics is a powerful tool, but is very expensive. It also lacks reaction-time tasks, games, multiplayer, or shopping simulations. The support desk costs extra. All that is included with Gorilla.
Conjoint is another fine tool. Their support is top-notch, but the interface is a bit dated and the pricing — especially for larger sample sizes — restricts the sizes of your samples quite quickly. But large and representative samples are key to measure effects: Gorilla’s pricing doesn’t scale with the number of participants in your experiments.
UserTesting.com (as well as Useberry.com) and Gorilla are two different types of platforms that are used for different purposes. UserTesting.com is a platform that allows businesses and organizations to conduct usability testing and market research by gathering feedback from real users, often during one-on-one video calls. It is commonly used to test websites, mobile apps, and other digital products, and provides tools for recruiting participants, conducting user interviews and surveys, and analyzing data. Whether you should use UserTesting.com or Gorilla depends on your specific research goals and the type of data you are looking to collect. We are happy to jump on a call, just book a demo.
Can we use the Gorilla Experiment Builder ourselves or do we need your help?
Thousands of researchers use Gorilla without our help. If you can mock-up your experiment in PowerPoint, you can build it in Gorilla. If you run into a roadblock, our friendly and helpful support team will clear the road for you. If you are not sure how to design your experiment or don’t want to spend the time to implement it, then Gorilla Studio is the right choice for you.
Don’t put it off: Find out whether Gorilla can dramatically improve your business or not in 30 minutes.
Gorilla Experiment Builder is the powerful, next-generation online research toolset for behavioral science.
It allows research consultancies to be more time- and cost-efficient, less replaceable, more prominent in their market, and thus more profitable.
If that sounds attractive, book a call with our founder Jo Evershed. Together, you’ll reason whether Gorilla is right for you or not.
PS: Not ready yet? Take a look at what other research consultancies achieved with Gorilla.