Market Research Overview

With the proliferation of narrowly specialized products and niche markets, along with highly knowledgeable and ever-more-sophisticated consumers with multi-channel acquisition capabilities, success in the marketplace hinges on effective market research. This article describes techniques and technology for examining and leveraging consumer attitudes and preferences and tells where to turn for assistance and information in designing and implementing your research project.

OVERVIEW

Consumers can – and regularly do – make or break a product. Today's competitive companies are preoccupied with customers’ behavior for that reason. Consumers of all ages are savvy; they know what they want and what they’re willing to pay for it. Combine that with the profusion of products, advertising and purchasing channels competing for the consumer's attention, and you have a recipe for volatility. A company whose leadership simply assumes a market exists for its product or service is doomed. Success will be yours, however, if you offer products that match consumers' desires.

You can accomplish this by employing market research. Executives at thriving companies acknowledge they rarely make critical decisions without integrated input from their market research team. Research helps a company understand who its customers are, how they relate to the product, where the product fits into their lives, what satisfies them, and what frustrates them.

Broadly, marketers employ what is known as consumer market insight, an in-depth understanding of customer behavior that is more qualitative than quantitative. This approach describes the role played by the product/brand in the day-to-day existence of its consumers, as well as their general relationship with it. That includes the way they acquire information about the category or brand, the importance attached to generic and specific values, attitudes and expectations, as well as the choice-making process. It refers to a holistic appreciation, which traditionally was split by market researchers and brand managers into qualitative and quantitative research.

Market research of all types assists not just the marketing department, but the entire integrated company and its outsourced functions, throughout the product lifecycle. Product organization provides for the planning, scheduling, coordination and control of the product process from idea to commercialization (or abandonment along the way), as well as getting participation from the internal departments and external agencies that must do the work. Internal participation is required of top management (corporate and/or divisional) and major functional departments such as marketing, research and development, production, engineering, finance, sales and physical distribution (logistics). External participation may involve, for example, advertising agencies, industrial design firms, independent laboratories, market research agencies, product consultants, and product development companies.

Dan Meir, a product manager for Survey and Market Research for the predictive analytics firm SPSS Inc., has provided a list of popular questions that survey research attempts to answer:

•       What is most important to customers, employees or patients?

•       What do people want or need in terms of programs, products or services?

•       Who is our customer?

•       Do consumers cluster into groups?

•       How can we compete in the market most effectively?

•       Are we providing value to our members or customers?

•       What areas need improvement?

•       What drives satisfaction or sales for customers?

•       How can we improve our programs, materials, products or services?

•       What are the brand’s perceived strengths or weaknesses?

DEFINITION AND SCOPE

The American Marketing Association defines market research as “the systematic gathering, recording and analyzing of data with respect to a particular market, where market refers to a specific customer group in a specific geographic area.” In general usage, the term market research refers to any organized effort to gather new knowledge to help make better product development and marketing decisions. Market research can be used to create breakthrough products, to assess marketing opportunities for a new product, or to pursue an improved version of an old product. Also known as business intelligence, it is a scientific way of discovering consumer likes and dislikes, calculating market performance, and improving understanding of marketing as a process. It is the means by which a company generates, refines, transmits, monitors, interprets and capitalizes on feedback from the market.

Research is much more than simply asking someone a few questions. It’s a multiple-step process with a clearly defined protocol at each step. In order to get reliable results from your survey research, you must be able to plan the survey research project, collect data, and access and manage the data easily, as well as report relevant results. And for your survey research project to be a success, you need to share your results with the decision-makers and implementers who can act upon them. Among the functional areas that can benefit are:

• Satisfaction measurements
• Customer/employee profile census
• Customer retention
• Complaint tracking
• Product features desired
• Medical errors
• Patient outcomes
• Viewer/readership interests
• Assess program effectiveness
• Customer acquisition

Dan Meir has developed a system calling for seven stages of survey research. Each of the seven steps is equally imperative to the process, and each must be implemented well if the research is to be successful. Problems at any step, he emphasizes, can lead to incorrect results. The seven steps:

1. Planning and survey design
2. Data collection
3. Data access
4. Data preparation and management
5. Data analysis
6. Reporting
7. Deployment
   

STATISTICS

Jack Honomichl, president of market research monitor Marketing Aid Center in Barrington, Illinois, annually publishes a comprehensive survey illuminating the state of the industry. The 2006 report indicates continued revenue growth for the marketing/advertising/public opinion industry in 2005, but that growth was far short of earlier spurts. Over the 17-year period from 1988 to 2004, the industry’s annual revenue growth rate was 5.2 percent. In 2004 it was 7.2 percent, but for 2005 it fell to 2.1 percent. Honomichl cites slower growth by two top global firms – VNU NV (which includes AC Nielsen and Nielsen Media Research) and TNS – even while many smaller market research units experienced strong growth.

“The research industry, historically, is not known for being nimble,” says Allison Enright in the 2006 "Honomichl 50" report. “But changes in the industries and clients they serve are propelling researchers to move more lightly on their feet, and become more flexible in how they design, sell and execute research.” She says the large consumers of market research – including consumer packaged goods companies, retailers and service firms – have been heavily involved in mergers and acquisitions in the past several years, creating a ripple effect in the industries that serve them. When Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co., for example, acquired Gillette Co. in 2005, the market research industry lost a major global account.

At the same time, ever-growing clients have more clout and make more demands of research providers, who find they need to change to remain competitive. In fact, client demands for full-service international capabilities and competitive pricing models have driven the industry to M&A activities of its own, with 80 such transactions occurring globally in 2005, 36 of them in the U.S. The global value of the research business is more than $21 billion annually.

Larry Brownell, executive director of Connecticut-based Marketing Research Association, observes that the research being commissioned today in the U.S. reflects businesses’ desire for international or multicultural perspectives, making the increasingly international capabilities of research companies important. “The globalization of companies that we never would have thought would go global has changed the nature of their need for research,” said Brownell. “They are trying to get at larger world trends . . . Companies that are buying research are a different breed now.”

CRITICAL ISSUES

The “voice of the customer” (VOC) is a market research term describing the stated and unstated customer needs or requirements, with quality delivery defined as meeting customer needs and providing superior value. Meeting customer needs requires that those needs be understood. Increasingly a concern of market research and new product development (NPD) teams, VOC can be captured in a variety of ways: direct discussion or interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer specifications, observation, warranty data and field reports, among others. Once a product plan is established that defines the target market and customers, the next step is to plan how to capture those customers’ needs for each development project. This includes determining how to identify target customers, which customers to contact in order to capture their needs, what mechanisms to use to collect the information, and a schedule and estimate of resources to capture the voice of the customer (project plan for product definition phase).

As opportunities are identified, appropriate techniques are used to capture the voice of the customer. The techniques used will depend on the nature of the customer relationship. There is, of course, no one monolithic voice of the customer. In consumer markets, there is a wide  diversity of needs. Even within one buying unit, there are multiple customer voices (e.g., children versus parents). This applies to industrial and government markets as well. There are even multiple customer voices within a single organization: the voice of the procuring organization, the voice of the user, and the voice of the supporting or maintenance organization. These diverse voices must be considered, reconciled and balanced to develop a truly successful product.

The challenge is getting NPD staffs out of their silos and directly involved in understanding customer needs. This provides a better understanding of customer behavior and the customer environment and product use, and it develops greater empathy, minimizes hidden knowledge, overcomes technical arrogance, and provides a better perspective for development decisions. These practices have resulted in fundamental insights such as engineers of highly technical products recognizing the importance to customers of ease of use and durability rather than the latest technology.

At Intel Corporation, where market research has been incorporated at various levels and to varying degrees for years, the arrival in late 2004 of Chief Marketing Officer Eric Kim brought a new focus on company-wide support for VOC, with a Voice of the Customer Team created within the corporate market research group and methods/benchmarking developed for integration of VOC results into all marketing activities.

However, the reluctance of consumers to take part in measurement surveys and other research efforts is a major source of concern to market researchers, increasingly so in this day of tremendous privacy worries. The non-profit organization CMOR (formerly known as The Council for Marketing & Opinion Research) was established in 1992 by four major marketing and market research associations in the name of promoting and advocating survey research. CMOR works to improve respondent cooperation in research, promote positive legislation and prevent restrictive legislation that could impact the survey research industry. Today, more than 150 corporations and organizations that conduct and/or use marketing and opinion research work together under the CMOR umbrella. CMOR also designs and implements programs that help ensure improved access to consumers, so that respondent awareness of the value of research increases and respondent cooperation rates improve.

CMOR, citing a recent study of respondent cooperation in market research efforts, reports several factors – most of them negative – in attempting to reach consumers for surveys, and to garner non-skewed data:

• Trend data points to a continuous growth in ownership of answering machines, with higher percentages among those who are better educated and in higher income brackets. The proportion of owners who use answering machines to screen calls also has increased.
• Call-screening services, especially Caller ID, have gained in acceptance and penetration, especially among those with unlisted telephone numbers.
• Selling under the guise of research, known as SUGGING, continues to decline. The decline in SUGGING activity will assist in improving trust between the survey research industry and consumers.
• High awareness of privacy issues among the general public and a high level of concern for personal privacy. Industry efforts and "rules" in this area are not being clearly communicated to and/or understood by the public.
• Negative perceptions among potential respondents, such as threats to confidentiality and invasion of personal time and space, are on the increase and contributing to record high refusal rates.
• Thos taking part in mail surveys report the most pleasant experience.
• Researchers are taking heed by shortening telephone and in-person questionnaires. However, Internet and mail surveys showed an increase in length. Overall, respondents still complain that surveys were too long.
• Respondents have found the subject matter in all types of surveys are more interesting.
• Attitudes on courtesy and professionalism of the interviewer continue to trend downward, and there are indications of a decline in the professional appearance of self-administered and Internet surveys.
• There is an increase in complaints among mail survey participants about not being given enough time to respond, and among telephone and in-person participants about being contacted at inconvenient times.
• Many people who have placed themselves on the national do-not-call list don't understand that survey research is exempt.
• Internet surveys have shown substantial growth in the past few years. One in five individuals who have participated in a survey in the previous year indicated their last survey was conducted via the Internet.
• Internet focus groups have yet to achieve noticeable penetration. Most likely, the currently available technology limits the usefulness of this technique. However, as advances occur, this methodology may be used more widely and could be a significant threat to the current central-location focus group methodology.
• The market research industry is slowly making changes to questionnaires by shortening the length of interviews and making the subject matter more interesting. They must continue these practices in an effort to ensure future participation.

Donna M. Romeo Ph.D., manager of customer trends in Strategic Planning and Research at JCPenney, is a proponent of ethnography as a consumer-friendly alternative to survey research and refers to corporate market research staff as in-house anthropologists. As the cycle time for new product development goes down and its cost goes up, and as competition becomes fiercer, many firms are trying to get closer to the consumer to try to figure out the context of use for new products. Ethnography is a way to make personal contact with consumers.

Whereas focus groups often work in artificial settings for short periods, ethnography situates consumers within the larger social and cultural context, says Romeo. Ethnography looks not for opinions, but for a 360-degree understanding of how a product might resonate with the consumer's daily life. Examples of methodology include in-home interviews, consumer journaling, and filming participants actually using the targeted product. The “learnings – the emotional, cultural, symbolic meanings – are quite powerful,” Romeo said, and are significant in the front end of future product development. Toothpaste marketing, for example, used to be about fighting cavities and simple whitening of teeth. But ethnographic research found that consumers' concept and concerns had expanded to a broader definition of dental care. People are really concerned with gums, their tongue, the impact of a bright smile – the whole mouth.

“Let's say you start with the focus group,” says Romeo. “The learnings from that help inform the ethnography. Then you create a quantitative survey to help you understand the ethnography on a broader, more generalizable level. When the same messages are coming from different research venues, you have something powerful.”

Romeo recently has expanded ethnographic studies to hybrid research techniques focusing on cross-channel shopping behaviors among catalog, online and in-store purchasers. She has developed an innovative technique that seamlessly combines quantitative and qualitative research to deliver in-depth insights and retail market strategies in a matter of days.

Another significant question in current market research is whether to build and maintain a large internal team or to follow the recent corporate trend toward outsourcing, which has proved a valuable resource in many industries for delivering on short-term, specialized projects. Holly Edmunds of global market research firm Synovate provides these key motivators for engaging an outside market research supplier, whether to augment existing staff or to eliminate its need:

• Expansive scope of the project (large sample or multi-region research).
• Overload of internal staff – no need to stretch them to the breaking point. 
• Avoiding bias.
• Requiring expertise beyond what you or your staff can do internally (extensive modeling or specialized methodologies).

While the outsourcing option may make theoretical sense, the true key to a successful project completion remains a question of staffing. Hiring the wrong outsourced research firm can be as disastrous – and often more expensive – as hiring the wrong employee. With planning and advance work, however, hiring an outside vendor for certain projects makes for better research and better business.

Even before you send the details of your study out to potential vendors, identify your goals and expectations and set some initial guidelines. The suppliers you allow to bid should be:

1. Familiar, either from previous professional contacts or through referrals.
2. Able to provide one main point of contact.
3. Willing to stick to the budget.
4. Willing to disagree and therefore provide value-add.

Unless your project is one that is ongoing, such as customer satisfaction or advertising tracking, you should ask several vendors to submit bids. This will not only enable you to consider pricing options, but it often can provide you with insights about different methodologies you could use. The cheapest proposal is not always the best option. Likewise, an expensive one does not always mean that the supplier is a research guru. You should also bear in mind that some suppliers have strengths in certain areas and not in others. Try to get a picture of their specialty so you can select the vendors that best fit YOUR project.

HOW MARKET RESEARCH IS CONDUCTED

Every company has its own way of using market research. Some apply it continuously to track sales or to monitor market share. Others use it only when a problem arises or when a decision has to be made about an important project, such as launching a new product. Among the popular methods of market research implemented today:

§         Focus groups. In a marketing research plan, focus group studies are an excellent starting point, often are used by firms as a qualitative prelude to quantitative market studies, online surveys, phone surveys and other quantitative market research. Focus group research is applicable to both B2B and B2C markets.

§         Qualitative research. Qualitative market research means “quality.” Conversely, and importantly, it does not mean “quantity.” Qualitative research methods are designed to talk to a relatively few people in the target audience of interest. The purpose of qualitative research is to plumb the depths and range of buyer attitudes and beliefs, not to measure incidence or forecast quantity. Qualitative research is a method that plays an important role in conducting customer value analysis, customer satisfaction research, market segmentation research, branding and naming research, brand equity research and new product research.

§         Quantitative research. Quantitative studies are designed to assess, predict and estimate buyer attitudes and behaviors. They’re used for market sizing and market segmentation, and for uncovering "drivers" for brand and product preference. Quantitative research designs gauge, describe and forecast quantity. Using a range of sampling strategies, quantitative studies often project results of quantitative market surveys to the entire marketplace. Popular quantitative survey methods include online surveys, personal quantitative interviews, mail surveys, intercept studies and phone surveys.

§         Qualitative depth interviews. Depth interviews, conducted among a priori target segments, often is a preferred first step to explore, discover and assess the marketplace. Depth interviews provide an initial landscape view. Strong depth interview design and interviewing capabilities offer discovery of the depth and range of buyer behavior and beliefs as a prelude to quantitative market measurements.

§         Market research panels. Panel research is an excellent tool as you build your marketing plan, marketing strategy, or overall business strategy by first scanning for strategic opportunities. Market research panels are pre-recruited groups in an audience of interest willing to participate in marketing research events such as focus groups, surveys or usability tests. Panel members might be current customers, sales leads, prospective customers or members of an identified target segment.

§         Executive surveys. Reaching executives, consultants, engineers, analysts, attorneys and other hard-to-reach target populations requires top-level attention and interviewing by peers. Success in conducting an executive, management or special audience survey comes from carefully thinking through the survey objectives and focusing on the need-to-know information required.

§         Industrial market segmentation. This is the process of separating an industrial market (business market) into groups of customers or prospects such that the members of each resulting group are more like the other members of that group than they are like members of other segments.

§         Photoethnography. The art and science of representing other cultures visually, photoethnogaphy is a unique qualitative market research method that gives consumers a way to express themselves by using photography and providing deep insight into their lives, needs and motivations. There are variations in how data is collected: 1. sending a consumer observer-researcher into stores, workplaces and homes to observe real behavior; 2. giving subjects a video camera to record consumer interactions with the target product; or 3. having consumers record their behavior in a diary. As with any market research technique, photoethnography has its measurement validity problems. Properly used, however, it can yield exceptional insights to consumer behavior and attitudes useful for product redesign, new product concepts, discovering alternate product uses, and profiling true customer satisfaction.

§         Data mining. Data mining – finding gems of insight from basic or sophisticated analysis of your internal customer and sales and margin trend data – is a key part in brand development and naming assignments, as well as new product development. Combine data mining with online surveys, phone surveys and focus group research to create a winning marketing plan and competitive business strategy. Data mining searches for meaning and insight among the stacks of sales data and marketing data already within an organization. Such tools include advanced statistical tests and modeling, and the use of neural networks.

§         Market surveys. Market surveys include marketing research methods such as online surveys, phone surveys, focus groups, executive interviews, depth interviews and photoethnography. Market surveys are often designed for companies to assess buyer attitudes and behaviors for building or revising a marketing strategy, and creating a marketing plan. Market surveys can be either qualitative or quantitative.

§         Online surveys. Online marketing studies and surveys are now a well-established market research methodology. Web research is deployed after carefully considering research design factors. As Web-based market research has evolved, online studies are often the premier data collection methodology for new product research, brand name research, branding studies, concept testing, product development research, pricing research and customer satisfaction research.

§         Secondary market research. Also known as desk research, it is relatively cheap and can be conducted quite quickly, and of course the Internet has broadened its scope enormously. Thus it may be untargeted and difficult to use to make comparisons. Sources include: trade associations, national and local press, industry magazines, governments, Web sites, informal contacts, trade directories, annual reports, business libraries, public records and census data.

§         Motivational research. Motivational research seeks to understand thoroughly the often unspoken motives and beliefs held by customers and prospects regarding a brand or product category. Typically, motivational research exploration begins with qualitative research in a personal one-on-one interviewing setting, and when appropriate, it’s followed by use of photoethnography to "see" the behaviors and underlying motives. Motivational research may explore a new category or brand, one that is seen by a company as an opportunity under consideration. Motivational research is useful to discover tangential activities and behaviors surrounding the target product or service of interest.

§         Competitive intelligence. Competitive intelligence is a core component of the data leg of the intelligence platform and is any information about competitors that can be legally obtained for purposes of thoroughly understanding their strategies, resources, strengths and weaknesses.

TECHNOLOGY TOOLS

Reflecting the general culture, there is no lack of new software products designed to facilitate and enhance the market research process.

One such is ThumbsUP Marketing Research. Sponsored by the American Marketing Association, ThumbsUP was developed for conducting marketing research live on the Web and provides user organizations immediate feedback from their Web site visitors on just about any marketing question. A ThumbsUP questionnaire pops up online as a visitor leaves a selected Web page. The visitor sees five interesting questions and a donation to charity by ThumbsUP. No visitor sees more than one survey. Pop-ups are triggered by a simple Java script, and ratios are determined to reach a random cross-section of visitors. All processing is conducted confidentially at ThumbsUP Research servers, where the client’s proprietary data resides.

Rotating up to 30 questions through the five-question format, ThumbsUP links and aggregates the data and provides full computer crosstab quantitative results for the client. It also captures critical verbatim qualitative results and provides a unique ThoughtScan and ThoughtTalk analysis.

The developers of ThumbsUp, Harry Washburn and Kim Wallace, are principals in a Boston-based sales and market research firm, faculty at Harvard, and the authors of a newly released book titled Why People Don’t Buy Things. ThumbsUp user clients include M.I.T, Gillette, Intel, Lycos, the American Management Association, Boston University and Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Another software product is a Microsoft Office System-based collaborative product development tool to help manufacturers meet the challenge of finding ways to improve productivity and process efficiency in competing effectively and bringing products to market faster. A Booz-Allen Hamilton study on new product management found that for every seven new product ideas, about four enter the development phase, 1½  are launched . . . and only one succeeds. The rapid rate of technology enhancements often makes existing products quickly obsolete. Issues in the new product development process include:

§         Customers expect faster results.

§         Aggressive competition exists.

§         Customers don't always give second chances.

§         Increased outsourcing for product development, design and manufacturing.

§         Increased reliance on different geographic regions to contribute to new products.

§         New products compose 30 percent of overall manufacturing revenue.

Companies have to find ways to streamline their product development processes, increase collaboration and support decision-making by aligning teams of people through collaboration technologies. From a technical standpoint, that means finding ways to integrate islands of information and foster collaboration throughout the team and across the supply chain.

Collaborative product development (CPD) provides a communication platform that breaks down barriers to collaboration throughout the product development process. Because as much as 80 percent of a product's overall costs are determined early in the design phase, better-informed early design decisions are crucial to lowering overall product development costs. Informed decision-making requires an information strategy that takes advantage of the relevant knowledge of everyone involved in the development process, from production to sales.

The Microsoft Office-based CPD framework integrates collaborative product design and product portfolio management, enabling companies to use their existing Microsoft infrastructure to bridge information and functional silos through the introduction of collaboration technologies that integrate with back-end manufacturing systems. With this type of solution, a company can expect to:

§         Connect team members, customers, suppliers and outsourced design houses.

§         Support sharing of project and design data, including project plans, computer-aided design documents, and bills of material.

§         Enable reviews, changes and approvals to take place virtually and in real-time.

Benefits include:

§         Providing automated processes that lead to quick turnaround on customer requests.

§         Reducing handoff time and administrative work to integrate information into documents.

§         Speeding product development from the drawing board to the sales floor.

§         Turning product development into a core competency.

§         Improving the ability for product review at all stages of development through better data tracking.

§         Extending the collaboration platform beyond borders.

Sawtooth Technologies, in Northbrook, Illinois, provides software for research data collection and analysis, as well as training seminars on advanced research techniques. Customers include marketing research firms, marketing and management consulting firms, research departments of Fortune 500 companies, academic and not-for-profit institutions, political pollsters, government agencies, and a wide variety of research organizations. One of Sawtooth’s products is WinCATI 4.2 for computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). WinCATI 4.2 functions like a best practices researcher, providing client companies with sample management, call scheduling, quota control, disposition monitoring and call management capabilities. Its interviewer productivity and sample reporting features are flexible and straightforward, and it gives users a choice of questionnaire development modules.

WinCATI 4.2 can adhere to the rigorous research standards set by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other leading research organizations. It also offers optional add-ons – such as mixed-mode (CATI + Web) interviewing, predictive dialing, voice capture and sound playback – that extend the reach and flexibility of CATI interviewing.

Sensus Web, also from Sawtooth, is a fully featured Web interviewing system. With straightforward efficiency, users can create questionnaires ranging from standard scroll-down forms to those with complex skipping, list handling and multimedia requirements. Clients can deploy Sensus Web surveys on their own server or on Sawtooth’s. Either way, companies can view data online or download it for more in-depth analysis.

Sensus Web’s Quota module provides precise quota management and unlimited quota cells. The E-mail module lets users recruit-sample by e-mailing appropriate links and passwords to respondents and increase response rates by sending mid-study reminders. The Server component supports hosting of surveys on the company’s own server.

Web hosting and questionnaire conversion services are available. With the questionnaire service, Sawtooth can convert clients’ questionnaires from paper-and-pencil format into Sensus Web format, deploy them on its server and provide both online and downloadable statistics.

CASE HISTORY

Formed in 2001 by industry veterans from big enterprises like Dell, Compaq, Apple and Fujitsu, Motion Computing is a mobile technologies company driven to innovate. With a fervent focus on addressing its savvy customers’ needs and bringing ultra-mobile computing and wireless communications technologies to market early, Motion strives to be the best at integrating world-class technologies into all its products. Motion designs and adapts tablet PCs for the way people work, producing revolutionary advances in productivity, without compromising their customers’ work styles to accommodate a machine.

That’s pressure.

Motion's product development efforts generally include exploring market reactions, perceptions and preferences for several key aspects associated with a next-generation platform. Though the company has internal product and marketing expertise, members of the product and marketing teams use third-party vendors to provide some important benefits in terms of objectivity, process and analysis.

The purpose of the research is to provide truly relevant information that lets the organization make key decisions regarding the product platform and capabilities. As with any technology product, mistakes are costly, not only in terms of actual product costs, but also in terms of market acceptance and time-to-revenue.

Using a collaborative process, VisionEdge Marketing of Austin, Texas, guided Motion’s research effort employing the following five steps to ensure Motion Computing's product validation efforts paid off:

1. Clear objectives. Any good research must have a clear set of objectives. For Motion, the objective of the research was to secure key facts needed to make important business decisions about feature sets and functionality priorities.

2. Well-defined scope. Because it can be hard to secure management buy-in for research, it is not atypical for marketers to try to pack everything they ever wanted to learn into what may be the only research study they will be able to deploy during the year. Though it may seem more cost-effective to conduct one very large study that answers a host of questions, this approach actually can reduce the overall effectiveness of the research, raise the costs of completing the survey and potentially make the instrument too long, thus reducing the number of completes. 

3. Use research to avoid costly mistakes. Developing a new product or service and bringing it to market is generally one of the largest investments an organization makes. The window to bring a new product to market for most B2B companies is very narrow, and few can afford more than one product failure. Research is a good way to gather insight before making an extensive investment only to find out later the decisions weren't the right ones. Though the research may appear to cause delay, the exact opposite is true.

4. Make the research count. Many marketers find themselves relegated to sales support rather than leading the charge to improve the company's competitive advantage and market position. Research can provide valuable data points to demonstrate the effect of marketing efforts on business initiatives. The best way to assess your impact and spot changes is to conduct before-and-after studies, benchmarking studies and tracking studies.

5. Use the research results. It is somewhat baffling to hear companies invest their time and money to conduct research and then ignore the results. It’s important to reconcile what you believe and what you learn from the research. Setting aside the results merely because they don't sync up with the company's assumptions and instincts probably isn't the best course of action. Uncovering issues and identifying unmet needs is a core component of marketing.

Partnering with such giants as Intel, FedEx and Microsoft, relatively young Motion Computing is a player in the health and life sciences, manufacturing, government, hospitality and retail and distribution verticals.

THE FUTURE

The marketing team for a large packaged food company is at a crossroads. A critical decision needs to be made quickly about a new strategically important pre-packaged line of soups that will be the first of its kind sold through mini-marts. They need to be in the market before the fall season, and they don’t have time for traditional research methods that could take weeks or months. Manufacturing needs a decision now so they can gear up for the right packaging. Marketing needs to know what benefits they should focus on in the product’s sales efforts. And senior management needs internal consensus on the decision before moving ahead – not everyone is in the same camp.

Within two weeks, the company has its consensus and is moving ahead confidently with the new product. How did they do it? Instead of following the typical path of a focus group series to gather insight and surface hypotheses, followed by a quantitative study to validate the results, it all happened in a single evening, with 200 consumers, product sample in hand, sharing their opinions about the product in a real-time research session. All of the stakeholders heard directly from their customers what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly why. This critical decision that charts a new course for the company was made within minutes at the conclusion of the live session.

They call it the next generation of research. Invoke is an online research platform that empowers researchers to gather better data more quickly than ever before. While the first wave of online research focused primarily on replicating traditional research practices, forward-looking researchers are starting to see another opportunity presented through the Invoke platform. Invoke not only allows companies to do familiar things better, faster and cheaper, it also allows them to approach research in an entirely new way.

Massachusetts-based Invoke Solutions, a leading innovator of interactive research technologies, was launched in 1999 and already has propelled research from static surveys and online focus groups into live interactive research sessions where marketers connect with large groups of consumers for rich insight and fast decision-making. Invoke provides marketers with real-time consumer contact, flexibility and speed.

And in July, 2006, Invoke announced the next quantum leap for the industry: mobile research. Invoke is currently expanding its patented research technology platform to allow marketers to tap their customers for feedback via cellphones. A new product called Invoke Ping will allow companies to target a wide population of cellphone users on demand and collect feedback from them right at the point of experience.

“Mobile research capabilities,” said Invoke Solutions President and CEO Ben Cesare, “will allow marketers to connect with their customers at the most timely moment – such as while they are in their store, experiencing their product or watching their ad – providing an added dimension of insight” previously not possible.

Meanwhile, harnessing the wireless Web for survey administration is growing in popularity, especially in Europe. Survey functionality mimics the experience of a traditional Web survey in many respects and is greeted enthusiastically by younger generations of survey-takers. Significant challenges to adoption, however, include: lack of available panels, unknown incentive structures, and uncertain user acceptance among older generations. One of the most promising applications that exists for survey administration on wireless devices involves the use of camera phones for ethnography studies and longitudinal diaries.

Other contemporary market research techniques include:

• Cross-tabulation
• ANOVA/ANCOVA
• Linear regression
• Discriminant analysis
• Non-linear regression
• MANOVA/MANCOVA
• Conjoint analysis
• Canonical correlation
• CHAID
• Neural nets
• SEM
• Factor analysis
• Cluster analysis
• Multidimensional scaling
• Association analysis
• Time series analysis
• Markov chains

Not in the loop on these tools? No problem, just outsource your market research functions. “In theory, it is becoming possible to buy, off the shelf, practically any function you need to run a company,” said BusinessWeek senior editor Pete Engardio in a January, 2006, article titled "The Future Of Outsourcing: How It's Transforming Whole Industries and Changing the Way We Work." “Have a cool new telecom or medical device but lack market researchers?,” Engardio wrote. “For about $5,000, analytics outfits such as New Delhi-based Evalueserve Inc. will, within a day, assemble a team of Indian patent attorneys, engineers and business analysts, start mining global databases, and call dozens of U.S. experts and wholesalers to provide an independent appraisal.”

Organizations that conduct relatively little research are generally better off to outsource the work, as they usually lack anyone in-house with the necessary expertise to do the job properly. In fact, many large corporations that used to have huge internal market research shops have now turned to outsourcing for most of their research needs. Why? One reason lies in the dominance of more complex and sophisticated research techniques. Another is that many companies have downsized their middle- and top-management staffs. Results of cost-effectiveness analysis may well show that the intelligent use of a well-chosen, expert research supplier is far more efficient than continuing the old in-house model.

Certainly blogging will be a key aspect of ongoing market research. Google market research, blog and see what pops up: www.tamingthebeast.net, www.marketingshift.com and http://www.researchaccess.net are just a few among the hundreds and hundreds of corporate marketing blogs, boutique firm blogs, and independent “expert’ blogs on the subject.

At www.nielsenbuzzmetrics.com/mouthpiece, Nielsen BuzzMetrics CEO Jonathan Carson holds forth on important online marketing trends. Carson is co-founder and director of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), a relatively new and highly successful industry group. In a recent post titled "Turning Blog Tracking into Market Research," Carson says: “Steve Rubel has a post about the role that PR agencies should play in tracking online discussion about their clients. I generally love Steve’s ideas, and I’m totally with him in that any PR account manager that is not knee-deep in tracking the blogosphere on behalf of their clients is just completely out to lunch . . . But I think he strongly overstates the ability for a single human to turn the massive ocean of online chatter into actionable market intelligence for a company.

“You can base a strategic decision on a single blog post, if you would also base that decision on a single conversation with a stranger in the grocery store. And some single conversations at the grocery store would be actionable – for instance, if someone told you that one of the checkout guys at the store had just returned from a terrorist training camp, then you would probably put in a call to have that person investigated . . . You can base a strategic decision on what you find from a free web tool like Blogpulse or Technorati, if you would also base that decision on a ‘show of hands’ vote at your local church or PTA meeting. And some ‘show of hands’ votes would be actionable – for instance, if every one of the parents raised their hands when the PTA leader asked ‘How many people here think there is going to be a mandatory military draft?’, then you would probably launch an effort to stop the rumors floating around about a draft.

“But if your strategic decision is complex enough that it requires a more clear, penetrating and reliable understanding of the marketplace then you can get from a conversation with a stranger or a show of hands vote, then you need traditional market intelligence/research.”

Elsewhere in the blog, Carson says of the Web/blog phenomenon: "There is a sense of community that surrounds brands and consumerism that has never existed before. You will find large numbers of people who will go to a company Web site and spend a considerable amount of time learning about its products. Or they'll forward that ad to friends.''

Word of mouth marketing is another growing realm in the industry. WOMMA is the official trade association for the industry, whose mission is to promote and improve the practice. The association claims to have “mastered the understanding of how to create genuine customer enthusiasm and how to share it with future fans” by:

§         Being fantastic brands and marketers who know that happy customers are our most powerful advocates.

§         Acting as innovative agencies who understand how to empower and amplify the voice of the consumer.

§         Being the good guys, committed to protecting consumers with strong ethical guidelines.

A relatively new practice that is likely to develop over the next few years is virtual ethnography, a high-gear, yet real-touch approach to predicting and understanding shopping behavior. Wikipedia defines virtual ethnography as extending “the traditional notions of field and ethnographic study from the observation of co-located, face-to-face interactions, to physically distributed, technologically mediated interactions in virtual networks and virtual communities. In doing so it challenges the traditional notion of a field site as a localized space and moves it into the virtual world of physically distributed interactions.” Faster, cheaper and considered more reliable and revealing than an in-market test, the tool combines enthnography techniques with a simulated shopping model.

Some of the method’s strengths include:

·         Online conversation allows participants to “take back their words” prior to posting them so the evolving nature of the conversation can be accommodated.

·         Participants with a talent for the written word are able to “author” their life experiences in appealing prose.

·         Writing one's life experiences in text contributes to a sense of self and therefore buy-in for the process.

·         The absence of visual, bodily cues, and the fixed nature of printed words, allows participants to stay oriented to the other's intentions.

·         When synchronous, the nature of the conversation, entailing the waiting “other,” keeps the conversation spontaneous and unrehearsed.

·         When asynchronous, the participant has the time and access to information resources, to inform, reflect, revise and iterate responses.

·         Participants are less likely to put regrettable words in print as they are to let them dissolve into the air in an interview.

And best of all, there are no nods, frowns or yawns to lead, discourage or distract.

INDUSTRY ASSOCIATIONS

For related associations, go to the Industry Associations page.

INDUSTRY EVENTS

For related events, go to the Industry Events page.

INDUSTRY PUBLICATIONS

For a list of relevant publications, go to the Industry Publications page.

BOOKS

Do-It-Yourself Marketing Research, by George Breen, gives step-by-step guidance on planning a market study, collecting the data, and interpreting the results. Replica Books. $8.56 through Amazon.com. $44.95 from Barnes and Noble.

From Mind to Market: Reinventing the Retail Supply Chain, by Roger D. Blackwell, offers a good introduction to the new thinking about market research. It's a handbook of the latest trends, strategies, and techniques of marketing in today's global community. 272 pp. HarperBusiness. $17.79 through Amazon.com. $26.95 from Barnes and Noble.

Online Market Research: Cost-Effective Searching of the Internet and Online Databases, by John F. Lescher. This book shows how to perform efficient and cost-effective market research using the Internet and online databases. 269 pp. Addison-Wesley. $13.57 through Amazon.com. $19.95 through Barnes and Noble.

Market Segmentation: Using Demographics, Psychographics and Other Niche Marketing Techniques to Predict and Model Customer Behavior, by Art Weinstein. This book provides insights into the relationship between strategic planning and marketing and provides tools to segment and define markets. 313 pp. Probus Publishing. $17.67 through Amazon.com.

Marketing Research by Gilbert A. Churchill Jr. and Gilbert A. Churchill, breaks down the research process into basic stages that must be completed when posing a research question. 992 pp. Dryden Press. $24.95 through Amazon.com. $118.70 through Barnes and Noble.

Advanced Methods of Marketing Research, by Richard P. Bagozzi, contains summaries of advanced research techniques. Blackwell Publishing. $50.95 through Amazon.com. $54.95 through Barnes and Noble.

FINDING A SUPPLIER

To find a supplier, go to #9520, Supplier Finder.

Blue Book, published by the Marketing Research Association (MRA), is a comprehensive listing of the research services and data-collection facilities provided by its members. The 2006 edition is available for pre-order at http://www.bluebook.org/. Call 860-257-4008.

The Connector is the membership directory of the MRA. It lists members alphabetically and geographically and identifies each member by company type. Call 860-257-4008.

AMA International Member & Marketing Services Guide. This comprehensive guide, published by the American Marketing Association, lists marketing support services and products. Included by company name are corporate listings in market research, consulting, communication, software, direct marketing and other disciplines. Call 312-542-9000 or 800-AMA-1150; fax 312-542-9001; go to http://www.ama.org/pubs/msg.

ONLINE SERVICES

www.researchinfo.com, called the online community of the market research world, includes a round table where market research professionals discuss various issues.

mailto:tracklink@@http://www.brsgroup.com. B/R/S Group is a market research company, and its Web site is a valuable source of information. There are five online issues of the company newsletter that contain helpful information on such topics as coordinating focus groups around the world and determining the role of market research in high-tech industries.

http://www.greenbook.org lists thousands of market research companies and services worldwide.

www.greenfieldonline.com is one of the nation's leading full-service Internet marketing research companies that uses the Internet to conduct marketing research through online surveys. Their online panel is the world's largest and enables you to research your specific target, quicker and more efficiently. Research services include: custom research, online focus groups, online brainstorming, self-directed research, and syndicated studies. For more information, contact Steve Cook, SVP client development, at 203-834-8585.

RELATED SMN ARTICLES

For more information about market research and marketing in general, see #1010 and #1011, Direct Marketing; #1020, Customer Profiling and Modeling; and #9105, The New Marketing.