In Part 2 of this blog post, I related an incident about a former boss with whom there was no love lost between us. I had left the company and after a year, I was asked to conduct a market research study for them as an outside consultant. This time, that same boss was amazed at how well I handled the project.
Maybe it’s just a story I tell myself, but the explanation for the sudden leap in quality of the work I was producing could be attributed to two factors—one, a long breather between projects and two, I was now a consultant rather than an employee. While in a sense my work for the company was “free” in that the department did not have to compensate me over and above my salary for moderating and reporting, now I was being paid as a professional—and earned and received the respect for work we all agreed was high quality.
Now I’m not suggesting that market research gains respect within an organization simply based on the associated price tag. The level of respect accorded market research seems more correlated with the depth of analysis and insights the research provides and how much the research results corroborate or challenge the status quo perceptions of the market.
I’ve witnessed very expensive projects go down in flames within organizations because the results were too far outside the assumed market paradigms held within the company. So it is not simply how much is spent on a project that drives its embrace or rejection.
But the expense of the project does appear to impact internal perceptions of the study (and especially the study’s champions). Pricier studies are often scrutinized more carefully and this is more impetus to find useful conclusions. That being said, nowhere in my experience have I had an internal client ask what was spent on a study and then made an evaluation of its value based on the expenditure.
However, I have noticed that projects where internal clients have footed the bill, they tend to pay more attention to the results than on projects where the monies came from another department or from general budget—that is, in some senses, where the research could be perceived as free to the client organization.
Consequently, I am reluctant to share in Chris Anderson’s effulgent embrace of free as the paradigm of business in the 21st century.
Until next time, Bob
