In the delightful Marx brothers’ film, A Night at the Opera, Chico and Groucho discuss a contract.

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Groucho: “That’s in every contract, that’s what you call a sanity clause.”

Chico: “You can’t a fool a me. There ain’t no sanity clause.”

In many organizations, market researchers are often the sanity clause or, more rightly, the sanity check on squishy information.

Take for example the recent headlines around the web that Facebook is responsible for one out of every five divorces. Goodness, what a great headline!

Step back and investigate even a little and one soon discovers that the headline plays fast and loose with the underlying data.

The headline was generated based on a press release from Divorce-Online.co.uk. Here is the salient portion of the release:

“Divorce-Online scanned their divorce petition database for the use of the word Facebook, and found 989 instances of the word in over 5,000 divorce petitions sampled.

This means that just under 20 per cent of all the petitions filed through the company had references to Facebook within the text of the divorce petitions.”

That alone is a far cry from one in five divorces were caused by Facebook. When did mention morph into causality?

Turns out as well that the sample of divorce petitions skewed to the young and was sourced in Great Britain which does not allow divorce without cause.

However, the juiciness of the headline overrode any sense of subtlety or just plain old fact-checking. Besides, it sounds so plausible.

It may not be accurate but it sure is salacious. So, let’s publish!

Part of our responsibility as market researchers is to do the fact-checking, to understand the limitations of our data and help our clients apply research conclusions to the highest advantage.

And in today’s voracious world where public relations and spin often govern, that is a tall order.

Are we up for the job?

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, stands tall in the long history of self-help and self-improvement literature. And it is more than that.

Purposely chock-full of tidbits and easily-accessible chunks of useful information, it is easy to turn to any page at random and pick up useful advice about relating to our fellow human beings.

Guy’s basic premise is that in order for a leader, an entrepreneur, or an executive or manager to marshal the human, financial and physical resources to execute a vision, one needs to enchant. And he should know, having been Chief Evangelist for Apple in its early days and rubbing shoulders with Steve Jobs, perhaps the finest business enchanter of our day.

For market researchers, Enchantment could be quite helpful in providing guidance on client relationships. Sometimes we tend to get caught up in numbers and statistics, graphs and charts, and assume that a well-constructed logical argument will usually win the day. And we often learn the hard way that that’s just not so.

To success in business is first and foremost a matter of mastering relationships, selling oneself and selling ideas and concepts.

Enchantment provides a modern roadmap to doing so.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Now, market research is rarely as dramatic as in the RJR example in the previous post. But this story conveys an essential point. The bottom line of market research is to guide organizations in making investments, large and small.

We do so through both confirming the validity of product development, marketing strategies and campaigns, and changes to customer-facing internal processes.

Of course, everyone likes a winner. Clients tend to be jubilant, or at least pleased, when market research confirms the viability of a concept, product or change they have developed and nurtured.

But market research also has a role as in the story above: to warn management about product/service concepts or changes that will either fail or negatively impact the bottom line.

Type I and Type II error tests are critical here. Rather than simply go with the gut, or management consensus, careful, thoughtful and valid market research can help guide winners and avert losses. Both roles are crucial.

Comments welcome. Dr. Bob

The market research industry, via forums, blogs, conferences and commentators, is busy declaring the death of market research.

Phone surveys are dead.

Online surveys are passe.

Traditional analytic techniques are moribund.

Why all the hand-wringing?

Social media and social networking are taking over the world, market research included.

True? Maybe. But maybe not.

I suggest that the declaration of the death of market research is premature.

Of course, it really depends on the purpose of market research. And the purpose is what is being lost in the discussion.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I am a great admirer of The Economist as a solid, balanced news source. In a recent article titled The Status Seekers, Economist columnist Schumpeter discusses consumer-watchers, which he describes as an industry “as crowded and competitive as any other.” In what could be an indictment of modern market research he observes that “they hype passing fads as seismic shifts. And their propensity to be spectacularly wrong seems not to damage their business at all.”

Could it be that much of the lamentation about the death of market research is really about the tendency of some in the industry to embrace the ephemeral lure of consumer-watching rather than rationally and logically adapt traditional market researchers to electronic media?

I strongly suspect so.

Trendy is cool. It is way more fun and a lot more catchy to make absurd predictions about the future (who’s going to hold you accountable?) than it is to put the proverbial nose to the grindstone and do the hard work of solid  questionnaire writing/guide development, selection and execution of appropriate methodologies, and proven data analytics.

But some of us have to live with ourselves. Personally, I like to sleep well…and I cannot do that by adopting the flashy and trendy in market research simply to be hip, cool, and modern.

But I digress.

The real debate here is about the purpose of market research. From the perspective of a hard-nosed business owner, executive, or manager, why do market research?

Why indeed?

More to follow.

Comments welcome!

Dr. Bob

So how can companies get real value out of customer satisfaction surveys? Value that demonstrably leads to increased revenue?

The key is to operationalize the results.

Transactional surveys, as we discussed in the prior two posts, can be valuable—IF they are keyed to measure attributes of which performance improvement can be demonstrated to have a positive impact on revenue (or other bottom line financial metrics).

However, transactional surveys are one of the last elements to implement in a customer satisfaction process.

The first is a solid qualitative understanding of the attributes of your products and/or services that drive customer behavior. This can only be accomplished by talking with customers and observing customer behavior.

Once the attributes are developed, a periodic quantitative survey then measures customer perceptions of performance on those attributes by your organization and competitors that customers identify as using or considering.

At this juncture, the results need to be operationalized. Otherwise, all an organization has is a fancy and expensive survey process.

How, exactly, do you drive change that results in bottom line impact?

You need a process that translates the voice of the customer into the voice of business process.

First is a hard examination of internal metrics on customer-critical processes. Is your organization measuring what is important to your customers? Of course, you are measuring what’s important to the business. Equally important is to measure what customers tell you is important to them and what is driving revenue.

Second, voice of the customer attributes must be mapped to business processes.

How do these two points work in practice?

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

J. Scott Armstrong on Advertising PrinciplesContinuing our discussion of market research reporting:

In the last post, I suggested the idea of evolving toward reporting with a point-of-view rather than a summary and explication of all research findings.

In his recently published Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-based Principles, J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School offers a 45 point checklist to effective management report writing where the objective is to support a recommended course of action. Market research results are usually one input to decision-making and therefore might limit itself to possible recommendations or courses of action that are supported by the research findings.

The point I am reaching for is that market research reporting could be much more compelling (and interesting) if structured with a point-of-view.

Armstrong recommends building a report around the recommendations. Moreover, the more specific and operational the recommendations are, the better. He also suggests offering options and guidance of how to select more appropriately from the options based on the findings.

I highly recommend Dr. Armstrong’s book, Persuasive Advertising, to market researchers. It is the result of years of study of both original research on advertising and reviews of thousands of sources including hundreds of published studies. Essentially Dr. Armstrong has shown what works in persuasion and what does not. Of the hundreds of business books I have read over my career, this is clearly one of the best.

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Sometimes our personal experiences lead to profound insights into developing market research surveys that work.

Such is the case explored in a recent blog post by Theresa Bradley-Banta on her bigfishTopDogs.com site. In an post titled “Don’t Ask Your Customers These Questions!” , Theresa describes a customer service encounter with GoDaddy and their subsequent customer satisfaction questionnaire GoDaddy asked her to complete.

It provides a strong lesson on conducting customer satisfaction research on customers’ terms rather than on management’s needs.

Briefly, Theresa experienced a less than satisfactory encounter with customer service at GoDaddy. Receiving a survey request on her experience almost immediately, Theresa notes the self-serving nature of the questions (both of them!).  And, most saliently, the missed opportunity for GoDaddy to receive some solid feedback on how to improve and the potential damage to their brand by their perhaps unwitting failure to consider the survey process from a customer/respondent perspective.

Many have pointed out, including Theresa, that customer satisfaction surveys serve a dual purpose: to acquire feedback for process improvement and as an additional opportunity to let a customer know they are valued as a customer and their needs are being considered by the surveying company.

Folks, put very simply, doing appropriate customer satisfaction surveying is first and foremost a brand issue.

We suggest that all customer satisfaction surveys be considered from both a perspective of what management needs for process measurement and improvement and of the impression such surveys leave with customers. Such consideration might help you avoid the GoDaddy error and, put more positively, use customer satisfaction surveying more rigorously.

GoDaddy, are you listening?

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Perhaps it is time to consider edging market research reports from passive, a simple neutral reporting of results, to the proactive, reporting with a point of view dictated by and demonstrated by the results.

Moreover, it might also be time to produce reports that are client specific or responsibility specific or both.

Let’s consider these ideas in brief here. Over time I will expand on these two propositions in greater depth.

Transitioning market research reports from passive to proactive

Let me state at the outset that I am not talking about presenting and arguing for the final business decision. That is not the place of market research, which is one information input to business decision-making.

What I am suggesting is to take a gentle point-of-view on the findings. Present a picture, a story, which is interwoven with facts that are linked in a coherent, persuasive manner.

Over the years I have written many market research reports and have read many more. More often than not, the reports are a compendium of all the findings of a particular project. While some emphasis is usually given to the “bigger,” more impacting findings, many reports are weighed down with the results of each and every question asked in the survey, whether or not they lead to an insight.

Thinking through the potential insights of survey results and presenting them in the order of their potential impact on the organization might help the report’s target audience(s) grasp the significance of the findings and encourage them to consider them in decision-making or even to implement the changes that flow out of the findings.

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Early in my market research career, our department operated by the dictum that it was not our job to determine what was and what was not significant (not in the statistical but in the broader business sense of the word), what would impact the business, what information would drive the business’ mission and objectives—such decisions were in the hands of senior managers and executives. Market research simply presented the findings and left their interpretation and use to others.

As my career progressed, I noticed that my internal clients expressed dissatisfaction with this—they complained that they wanted a larger context around the findings and to understand how the findings of a particular study fit with the more general trend of findings across studies. In the absence of anyone else charged with this level of synthesis, I found myself taking on the role of interpreter of market research findings rather than, or along with, being a reporter of market research findings.

At first, making this leap can be (and was) intimidating. It required that I learn more about how other silos in the business operated, what their information needs were, their views of the business goals and how best to meet them, and their general approaches to business issues.

Coincidently, corporate America has made a conscious effort to break down barriers and silos. Not to say that this effort has been entirely successful and needs continual vigilance. The impact on market researchers has been major: rather than simply serving a single direct internal client, market researchers have been called upon to produce information that serves across the organization. This necessitates being able to translate market research findings into terms that could be understood and assimilated by managers whose primary responsibilities were often far from marketing or customer servicing.

How to do so?

That is the question that looms, and continue to loom in making market research more and more relevant rather than merely a step in the product/service development or marketing process.

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

One trend I have observed in Market Research Departments over the past decade is to brand internal reports with a basic report template.

Rather than producing disparate reports of sometimes unknown origin (to corporate managers), market research departments are presenting themselves with consistency.

Internal clients gain familiarity with the reports; they can easily find what is important to them. Findings are summarized; the important take-aways or a-ha’s are clearly labeled.

Still, reports often appear laden with minor findings, as if there is an imperative for findings from every question in the questionnaire needs to be explicated. In a world of snapshot information, 300-word blogs (as this one) and written sound bites, market research reports can take on the characteristics of door stops or leather-bound volumes: to be displayed on shelves, sometimes if not often unopened, unread, unassimilated and worst, unused.

If questionnaires have been driven by objectives, presumably every question has a purpose and a manager or group in the business have a need for the information it yields. However, reports laden with a readout of all findings gleamed from the study are often forbidding—how many managers have time to read such missives?

One solution that researchers have used to obviate this problem is to include Executive Summaries, Overviews of Findings and the like.

Nevertheless, this information is sometimes devoid of a larger context, making the findings difficult to interpret in terms of their impact and meaning to the business.

Perhaps it is time to revisit and evolve the writing and presentation of market research reports.

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob