optimizing market research inside your company

Hello and welcome to MarketResearchOptimized.com.

If you are a market research manager serving clients in your company, or if you have market research as part of your job responsibilities, this site is designed especially for you. We are working to filter the vast amount of information on the Web relating to the practical application and use of market research into a concise, actionable form that you can use to solidify and enhance the role market research plays in furthering the goals and objectives of your firm.

Our objective is to provide you with information you can use to effectively represent the voice of the customer inside your organization.

The world of market research is changing rapidly with the explosion of market research online and the use of social media for listening to customers. We work to stay abreast with all the novelties and news and to bring them to you. Usually we update our blog two to three times each week, so make sure to stop by frequently (subscribing to our RSS feed or joining our mailing list will keep you notified of our new content and analysis).

Following is your guide to the content-rich pages here about market research – there is much more to find here, but these are your best starting points.

• Our posts dedicated to Criteria for Selecting a Quantitative Market Research Firm give you an in-depth overview of our experience with the pitfalls of choosing a market research supplier. We explain the criteria we have found invaluable in our years of choosing and managing suppliers as buyers of market research services for companies we served as market research managers.
• If you have ever encountered the misunderstanding or misuse of market research statistics within your organization, our article on the Use and Misuse of Market Research Statistics might provide some guidance.
• In these days of increased access to customers, especially through Web channels and email, the testing of the clarity and (customer) understanding of promotional offers is more vital than ever. We wrote about the consequences of failing to test comprehension of offers, especially the consequences that may be hidden to organizations that simply use test and control for email or direct mail offers.

We would be remiss not to address the explosion of “market research” online. Seems, these days, that anyone and everyone can proclaim themselves a market researcher, slap up a survey online, or in a social network, or Twitter, and appear as a hero for getting “quick and dirty” information for “no cost.”

Even in the days before online market research became viable, market researchers in client businesses and organizations struggled with internal clients simply bypassing the market research organization and commissioning their own studies—with little or no understanding of the potential pitfalls. In today’s environment, what appears to be market research can be done by almost anyone (or department or organization).

Market researchers are having to defend the expenditure of company resources of “traditional” market research studies, to explain why slapping a survey up on social media is not necessarily a valid means of gathering certain types of market research data, and to help their client organizations to understand the value of tried-and-true statistical sampling and research practices.

We certainly understand the temptation to perceive the Web as the answer to all things market research.

We also understand both the obvious and hidden dangers of running willy-nilly down this path and we understand when and how to use the Web to conduct sound and solid market research studies.

The challenge is explaining these issues in terms that are salient and compelling to your clients.

As this site evolves, we plan to address these developing issues in considerable depth.

We have already developed some content on the issues of conducting market research in a Web 2.0 world. You can find one such post here.

We invite you to join our email list. We do not loan or sell our list for any purpose. If you join, you can expect to hear from us on occasion with exclusive new content and when we post significant new content here on this site.

Last, we invite your questions and discussion of issues by posting your comments on the blog page or by emailing us. We promise to get back with you. And if we can be of help to you, please contact us.

Regards, the Customer Insights Research team