Once you have taken the time to craft a fantastic questionnaire, the challenge becomes: how do you get people to actually take it? Of course, having a great list (or… Continue reading Please Take My Survey: Getting People to Accept Your Invitation
Once you have taken the time to craft a fantastic questionnaire, the challenge becomes: how do you get people to actually take it? Of course, having a great list (or… Continue reading Please Take My Survey: Getting People to Accept Your Invitation
Technology is fundamentally changing how, when, where and with whom we do research. buy wellbutrin online buy wellbutrin no prescription generic These changes fundamentally challenge the market research industry’s tired… Continue reading Technology Ran Over Our Dogma
The final presentation, when we deliver market research project results, feels like a huge accomplishment. The project is finally done! Or is it? Alas, our goal is not to deliver the results–it is to make sure our audience actually uses them.
If you throw “social media” and “market research” into a blender, what do you get? It depends on the exact recipe you select. The good news is that whatever you decide to try first, you can start with some free samples.
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:
We get a lot of questions from people evaluating online survey platforms. And given that there are now more than 50 options available (see partial list at the end of this article), it is a bit confusing. Before you start evaluating options, consider these checklist items:
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.
