Building a custom panel of tube-fed patients and carers

A leading multinational FMCG company approached M3 Global Research with a clear goal: to establish a more agile, patient-centric approach to their market research in the tube feeding space. The client wanted to gain deeper, ongoing insights into the lived experiences, behaviours, and unmet needs of patients using tube-feeding products, as well as the carers who support them. Their ambition was to build a pre-recruited panel that would allow for faster study launches, more relevant data collection, and the flexibility to conduct market research whenever required. The insights gathered would be used to inform their product strategy, uncover innovation opportunities, and improve their understanding of patient routines, attitudes, and challenges.

Tube-fed patients and their carers represent a particularly hard-to-reach population. Traditional recruitment methods often fall short when trying to access these niche audiences, and the level of engagement required to build a sustainable panel made the task even more complex. The client needed a solution that not only delivered results in a key market, Germany, but could also act as a scalable pilot for future international expansion. They were looking for a trusted partner who could overcome these recruitment challenges and establish a reliable, agile panel for continuous research.

M3 responded by designing and executing a custom panel build tailored specifically to the client’s needs. Over the course of 2024, M3’s expert patient panel team successfully recruited 50 tube-fed patients and their primary carers in Germany, growing this number to 63 participants by March 2025. The recruitment strategy was multi-faceted and innovative. It included outreach through M3’s proprietary patient panel, social media campaigns, partnerships with patient advocacy and support groups, peer-to-peer referrals, and highly targeted work with social media influencers who had lived experience of tube feeding. These influencers played a critical role in connecting with this niche audience, building trust, and driving awareness of the panel opportunity.

Research and engagement outcomes
Thanks to the successful panel build, the client was able to conduct nine separate studies—both qualitative and quantitative—within just nine months. The pre-recruited panel allowed the client to bypass time-consuming recruitment efforts and move directly into insight-gathering activities. In total, the studies captured over 90 valuable data points related to patients’ and carers’ experiences, needs, and perceptions. This included insights into their daily routines, lifestyle habits, product usage, attitudes, and areas where current products were falling short. The ability to repeatedly engage the same participants enabled longitudinal insight development and a deeper understanding of how preferences and needs evolve over time.

With ongoing access to this custom-built panel, the client was able to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of their market research operations. They no longer needed to initiate fresh recruitment cycles for each new project, which reduced internal and external costs while allowing them to act quickly when new questions or ideas arose. The rich insights collected helped the client make more confident, evidence-based decisions around their product strategy, marketing direction, and innovation efforts. Ultimately, this agile approach positioned the company to deliver solutions more closely aligned with the real-world needs of tube-fed patients and their carers—enhancing both commercial outcomes and patient experience.