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How to... conduct effective researchMarket research is only valuable if you ask the right people the right questions.
So how do you get the most from surveys, focus groups and mystery shoppers?
Marketers are on an eternal quest to understand what motivates their
customers. And that desire to get inside customers heads is what drives market
research.
So although it might seem blindingly obvious, the very first thing to ask about
market research is whether this is what you need. Rather than rushing to put
numbers and ticks in boxes, marketers need to stop and think about exactly
what it is they want to find out, and assess whether market research can do
that.
Anthony Tagal, head of insight at POV Marketing and Research says: Theres a
knee-jerk response. Clients feel they should do research when theres nothing
better to do. Business and marketing are about creating new ideas and insights
for the product, brand idea or creative route. So its about finding meaning.
Research is one way of finding meaning but we can get lazy with what we ask
and assume that research will give us everything we need.
Lets start at the very beginning
How you start a research project is crucial if you want to avoid wasting time and
money. Robin Birn, client services director at Research International, suggests
beginning by writing down what you do know and what you dont. This will form
the basis of a brief.
Juliet Strachan, senior partner at HPI Research, adds: All things stem from the
brief. The most important things to include are what the business problem is,
how the research is to be used and how the outcome will answer that business
issue.
Its easy to fall into the trap of using research to validate something youve
already decided to do, cautions Andy Moore, director of customer insight,
Vodafone Global Marketing. Dont decide to do it and then think, Ill check it out
with the customer. A much better route to gaining genuine insight is first arming
yourself with an understanding of the core consumer drivers and then making
sure thats shaping your thinking.
Great marketers will listen to what the consumer is actually saying.
When to outsource
Once a good brief has been drawn up, other decisions flow from that. One of
the first will be whether the research can be done in-house or whether it shouldbe outsourced. The majority of marketers simply do not have the manpower or
resources to run research projects themselves. Even companies with large
departments dedicated to insight and research will usually outsource the legwork
and use internal intelligence for analysis.
Besides the cost, there are risks to doing research in-house. Among these is the
possibility that responses will be influenced by respondents awareness of who is
asking the questions an organisation conducting its own research must make
that fact clear. Equally, if your research base is flawed, those flaws could be
perpetuated throughout the results.
Carrying out research in-house, you run the risk that the hypothesis in the
organisation drives the design and outcome of the research, so you dont get a
fresh perspective, says Strachan.
Another problem with in-house projects is that they slip down managers priority
lists and are in danger of being dropped as more pressing matters arise. But
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"Nationwidedeveloped its TVadverts afterresearchshowed thatpeople felt
financial servicecompaniestreated themunfairly"
w to conduct effective research - The Marketer magazine http://www.themarketer.co.uk/articles/how-to/how-to-conduct-effective...
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before you rush headlong into a research project and get into detailed
methodology, ask yourself whether you can solve your problems using existing
information does new information really need to be collected?
Sometimes the question or problem requires some digging closer to home. If, for
example, you dont know who your core customers are then theres no point in
looking for new ones. So doing your homework in-house may be the first stage
to address. Of course, existing information, be that articles, directories or
reports, wont give you everything you need and, if what youre after is specific
to a product or company, you will probably need primary information.
Quant or qual?
As with most things in business, you get what you pay for. So the methodology
will vary according to the scope of the research as well as what youre trying to
find out. The two main options to consider are of course qualitative and
quantitative research, depending on whether youre looking for more detail and
depth on a topic, or hard figures on recall or use, for example.
With quantitative research people need to be questioned for their response;
methods range from telephone to internet, face-to-face to printed
questionnaires. Jean Sutton, a course director for The Institute and founder andmanaging director of market research agency Actionline Research and Training
Sales, says the most efficient and cost-effective route is likely to be via
telephone.
This has the advantages of face to face be it for qualitative or quantitative
work in that you get more depth and detail.
But the internet is becoming an increasingly popular route, especially as
broadband and PC penetration increase. When the internet first came along it
was a very cheap way to conduct research. But internet research is no longer
the compromise it was. Now its an extraordinarily powerful research tool
because youre talking one-to-one, says Strachan.
Whether your questionnaire reaches its audience on- or offline, there are a
number of points to consider. Should your questions be structured or closed
yes or no or should you go for a semi-structured questionnaire with open
questions as well? The latter provides more qualitative responses while the
former lends itself to quantitative findings.
It comes back to what information you need and what you want to do with it.
You wouldnt use a closed questionnaire for an audience of CEOs.
Semi-structured allows for a two-way conversation, says Sutton.
Crucial to remember is that average response rates to self-completed
questionnaires range between 3 per cent and 5 per cent. So to get 50responses, you need to send out 1,000 questionnaires. And you have little
control over who chooses to complete often only those who are very happy, or
very unhappy, with a product or service, or those who have time on their hands,
will fill them in. The only way of limiting this effect is to ensure high response
rates to reduce the bias.
Offering an incentive is a common solution. But keeping the questions short and
simple and making the sponsors identity clear will also improve the response
rate.
Time to focus
The classic market research tool for gaining depth of understanding is the focus
group. Many are quick to sneer at the image of a cosy room of housewives,
chatting over tea and biscuits about their favourite fragrance for toilet cleaners,
all keenly observed by researchers behind a two-way mirror. But this method of
Dos and donts
Do be clear on what
decision is to be made
as a result of your
research.
Do think about what
budget is available
research requires time
and money and you
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research is still used to great effect and can provide a forum for a target group
to interact and open up in a relaxed environment.
Amrita Sood, associate director at GfK NOP Social Research, runs many focus
groups for clients. She says clients are often surprised at how specific the
agency can be in recruiting the right sort of people to a group. Weve done
projects with people whove committed benefit fraud or crimes or with a specific
range of ethnic groups. The target sample is a really important aspect of
research.
Focus groups are unusual environments for most people so its important to
compensate participants for their time, says Sood, and to be as transparent as
possible about the research. While focus groups are useful for highlighting
attitudes and behaviours, they should not be used for quantifying behaviour.
If you end up with 100 people in your focus groups and 80 say they love the
new product, it doesnt mean you can say 80 per cent love the product, cautions
Sutton. Focus groups are hand-picked and so you cant extrapolate from that.
In the pursuit of ever more effective ways to understand the customer, market
research is spreading its wings and techniques span ethnography, semiotics,
longitudinal studies and even mystery shopping.
Ethnographic techniques are good for immersing and gaining insight, says
Sood. We may go to their home and spend time with them, observe their daily
routines, look around their house, see how they use technology and media.
With more time and depth these research tools can be useful for context and
bringing to light things that the consumer doesnt realise are important.
Birn says FMCG clients in particular are adopting these techniques where they
might go into shoppers homes to see how they stack tins in their cupboards or
what selection of cereals they choose.
Continual and ad hoc
For many big companies, research will involve a wide range of continuous
measures from brand tracking to customer satisfaction surveys, as well as ad
hoc research. At Vodafone, for instance, Moore says about 40 per cent of
research is continual tracking, while the rest is ad hoc.
Royal Mail Group uses ongoing programmes to act as a health check and to
identify business challenges. It then instigates ad hoc research to delve into
those challenges as necessary, says Crispin Beale, director of insight,
intelligence and analysis at the organisation.
The company also uses mystery shopping. One shopper survey, called Effect, is
about improvement in Post Office branches. Its carried out in partnership withemployees, consulting them about what they think is important for the customer.
Theres a danger that research can go wrong when companies get obsessed
with measuring the wrong thing or measuring too frequently. Ive seen customer
satisfaction measured on a weekly basis, which is too often as things move with
a margin of error. Ive been in companies where the measures were changing
faster than the programme could keep up with it, says Beale. The most valuable
research results are those where a performance improvement in a product can
be proven to add directly to the bottom line, he adds.
Research can and should produce real insight that can have a fundamental effect
on the business. At Nationwide, TV advertising was developed followingresearch revealing that people dont think financial companies treat them as fairly
as they should. Paul Hibbs, advertising controller at Nationwide, says the theme
for its advertising came from posing the question what can we do to treat our
customers fairly?
On mortgages we dont do new customer only deals and we also dont charge
cant buy in a project for
much less than 10,000.
Do understand how
much emotional and
unconscious factors
affect the market and to
what extent research will
uncover those.
Do respect the time and
contribution of therespondents dont
overstretch their
patience.
Dont decide on the
research methodology
before being clear about
what information youre
hoping to gather.
Dont just do the same
thing as has always been
done and avoid doing
the same research asthe competition.
w to conduct effective research - The Marketer magazine http://www.themarketer.co.uk/articles/how-to/how-to-conduct-effective...
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Case study: Artful researchAppealing to a wider audience is crucial for the arts industry, so the British
Market Research Bureau helped the Arts Council find out whats putting off
potential punters
Taking Part is a large-scale population survey that has been running
continuously since 2005, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport in partnership with the Arts Council England.
The survey looks at who attends and participates in the arts. Conducting the
fieldwork is the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) Social Research,
which interviews around 29,000 English adults per year, face-to-face in their
homes.
But the Arts Council wanted a more detailed segmentation of the population to
better understand arts consumers, with specific profiles on each segment. The
objective was to improve engagement with consumers and understand the
barriers to participation.
One of the key constraints for BMRB was the limited budget but ambitious
scope of the segmentation project, as well as the Arts Councils desire for a
very robust statistical approach. As a result, BMRB decided to delve into the
existing Taking Part data rather than conduct new ad hoc research.
Anni Oskala, research officer at the Arts Council England, says: First we
segmented people into different types of arts consumers through cluster
analysis of the Taking Part data. Then that data was fused with BMRB Target
Group Index data, which allowed the creation of rich profiles of each segment,
not only in terms of their arts engagement but also their broader lifestyles and
attitudes.
The segmentation and fusing stages took about six months and also involved
the work of Henley Centre HeadlightVision to help deliver clear
recommendations. It allowed the council to understand what made people tick
and their hidden motivation or barriers to attending arts-related activities.
The research has provided a strong tool for strategic planning by giving us a
much better picture of how and why people engage with the arts today. TGIs
information on media use and attitudes could be used to feed directly into
communications and potential campaigns, says Oskala.
to use cards abroad. Most of that was driven by research into what frustrates
customers, says Hibbs.
Market research can be a detailed and complicated science but Beale boils it
down to some pertinent advice for marketers: Research should be seen as the
radar of your organisation it give you the early warning sign and then you
respond to it. Research only makes a difference if you actually use it, he says.
Its is all about making money or saving money for the organisation, it shouldnt
happen otherwise. It should drive the business forward how do we get ROI onthis and increase income?"
Jane Bainbridge is a freelance journalist who writes on marketing and PR for
titles including Media Week
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