There are hundreds of market research agencies and hundreds of market research consultants. Changing agencies can be painful, but you deserve an agency that you can trust with your valuable market research investments.
There are hundreds of market research agencies and hundreds of market research consultants. Changing agencies can be painful, but you deserve an agency that you can trust with your valuable market research investments.
Quality is a concern no matter what country an outsourcing provider is based in—the US, India, France, Canada…anywhere. If you work with an agency and they outsource, you need to have some evidence that the outsourcing partner provides great work—and was not selected simply because they had the lowest price or a well-connected brother-in-law.
I mentioned that I would be writing up some more faves in a Part 2. The cool thing is that while I had my Part 2 blogs already in mind, several readers suggested others that were not on my planned list. Some are blogs I knew of but hadn’t visited recently, but others were entirely new to me! So I took some time to check them all out, and rounded out my favorite Market Research blogs, Part 2, below.
It’s great to hear a social media authority praise—even promote—the benefit of asking customers’ about their views. In this case, Peter was making the excellent point that companies need to ask customers how they want their information delivered. In today’s presentation in downtown Boston, Peter specifically advised the business folks in attendance to take the time to ask their audiences (clients, prospects, whatever) how they want to receive information. He points to the fact that the way information is delivered these days is extremely fragmented. Nobody can afford to simply guess how their audience wants to get information.
Have you ever delivered a big market research study, and had your internal clients completely ignore it?
It is an unfortunately common and painful experience.
Sometimes the challenge is that audience members find numbers too impersonal. They see charts and graphs and they just don’t seem to represent living, breathing customers. And nobody is going to take action based on market research data in which they don’t completely believe.
Yes, online research communities have their place. I ardently believe that there are many organizations that can benefit from structured online communities (MROCs or ORCs, as many now call them), or even just well-run, online customer advisory boards (link). In fact, there are some markets for which I think online communities can be one of the best ways of getting honest, objective customer insights. But let’s not oversell it; if we do, we’ll only cause a lot of heartache (and wasted research dollars).
So, please, some reality checks: …
Managing in-house market research is tough work. And your internal clients don’t make it easy, do they?
Your internal clients say they want powerful, fresh, objective customer insights. But too often, their behavior shows that they just want you to confirm their personal views.
You may have collected thousands of data points. You savor them for a time (I know I do!), and that’s fine. But then it’s time to step back, and take it all in…unless something blocks you. It may even be that you have colleagues who are so hung up on examining the little dots up close, that you get stuck too.
Be bold. Break away from the crowd. Step back.
Are you bringing more market research in-house? Relying less on outside market research agencies? That can be a perfectly reasonable choice—for many reasons. But before you …
Blogs tend to be a little less filtered, and a little more honest, than traditional magazines and newsletters. And that is exactly why I like to read them. In the market research space, there is no shortage of blogs. But I do find myself regularly checking these 5 (I’ll post a part 2 on other faves next week). MR Heretic’s “Market Research Death Watch blog.” First, I just love the word “heretic.”
