Recently I’ve had the experience of working with several clients who are in the not-uncommon position of being a one-person market research department. And across all of them, I have noticed a recurring challenge: they get stuck in reaction mode, much like a juggler. Let’s look at this challenge and some tactics to address it.
Is your organization doing more market research? Are people outside of the market research department becoming increasingly involved in research, either as “do it yourself” researchers or as members of cross-functional project teams? Imagine a baseball team made up of three professional ball players and six middle-aged guys from the local coffee shop. Wouldn’t those well-intentioned coffee drinkers need some practice before that first game? Well if you want your whole research team to play at their best, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Be careful not to oversell market research. Those of us who do market research professionally tend to get enthusiastic. We are typically people who enjoy designing and implementing research methodologies, who like to dive into mounds of data and extract meaningful results. In our enthusiasm for research, we have to be careful not to over-promise. Realistic expectations are the key to satisfied clients, especially for riskier types of projects.
Even if a market research project produces a pile of perfect data, we still face the fundamental challenge of analysis — making sure that we’re analyzing the results comprehensively and objectively. In other words, without bias.
Let’s say you’ve done an online survey. You identified your objectives, thought carefully about sampling, and designed a great questionnaire. You monitored data collection and carefully cleaned your dataset. Even after all this painstaking work, risk still exists. You still have to analyze the data, and it’s here that unexpected errors often creep in.
When bad surveys are circulated, the company that sent them out becomes less trusted. The “consumer” becomes an unhappy customer, and may even tell others about their bad experience—with surveys in general or with the specific company.
Typically when we think about market research surveys, we think of questionnaires that have 20, 30, or even more questions. Getting qualified people to complete these questionnaires has become a serious challenge. One alternative is the single-question poll. After all, you’re much more likely to get high response and low dropout rates if you can simply say, “Hi, we have a single question we’d like your opinion on”, rather than requesting a novel’s worth of responses.
Facebook is making polling insanely easy these days…
Do you cringe when you hear the word “policies”? Most people do. After all, policies often mean bureaucracy. But in the case of market research, clear policies will minimize the risk of data quality headaches, customer over-surveying, ethical breaches and more.
Did you learn everything you possibly could from your last project—not just from the final results, but by examining the process itself? Conducting a detailed review, a post mortem so to speak, can help pinpoint exactly what worked—and what needs work.
I’ve come up with a few scenarios that could result if online surveys with non-customer populations became impossible tomorrow. Imagine: you can still reach your customers for research, but what about the rest of the world? What if you could no longer reach qualified, non-customer groups in a quantitative way? If the lists and panels were no longer available or the response rates dropped to .0005 percent, what would the impact be on your market research needs and investments?
In a crowded marketplace, how can market research help your company stand out? By doing things your competitors aren’t daring enough to try. So let’s have some fun.
