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
Tagged as:
Analytic Market Research,
Market Research,
Market Research Consulting,
Marketing Research,
Primary Market Research,
Qualitative Market Research,
Quantitative Market Research
Configure part of the responsibility of market research to offer guidance and assistance to managers who need help with a self-developed survey effort. Consulting on questionnaire development. Helping set adequate controls to ensure that appropriate respondents, and only appropriate respondents, respond. Guiding the choice of surveying method to ensure adequate coverage of the desired population.
In other words, win them over by providing a true consulting role.
I understand that this may be a major shift for market researchers, especially when goals and objectives are still set primarily on the number of completed projects and the like.
Is it worth the potential time, energy and effort to turn in this direction? Becoming in essence a boutique market research house inside the corporation or organization?
If the quality of some of the surveys I have seen both online and by email invitation are any indication, the answer surely is yes. Some are barely adequate; others are abysmal and embarrassing. I have to assume that they are being generated completely underneath the management radar. Mostly the offense is shoddy writing, unclear and sophomoric. And ratings scales that are obviously tilted. These are basics that would never (well, almost never) make it past the brand or communications police, let alone market research groups, at most companies.
Market researchers might be gritting their teeth about this trend, but assuming a mandate to help the well-meaning but misguided DIYers might yield benefits. First and foremost, brand image will be better protected. Moreover, helping DIYers might lead to new internal clients. Certainly, too, it would provide an opportunity to provide a far superior market research study and thus higher quality information for managerial decision-making.
Fighting the DIY trend appears hopeless; rather, market researchers might consider how they can make their knowledge and skills more readily and easily available for the DIYers of corporate America.
Comments welcome.
Dr. Bob
Tagged as:
Customer Satisfaction,
Market Research,
Market Research Consulting,
Market Research Services,
Marketing Research,
Online Market Research,
Survey,
Survey Research,
Surveys,
Web Market Research
This is not just happening in the larger DIY world. More and more surveys are appearing with major brand sponsorship that have obviously been nowhere near a professional market researcher. Managers can simply conceive of the need for a survey, order it done by an underling with some PC or HTML skills, and voila, a survey appears.
All is not well, however, in DIY land. A surprising number of these grassroots surveys are obviously amateur efforts, full of poorly-worded, confusing questions, questions that are really two or three questions combined so the respondent does not understand what is really being asked, unbalanced ratings scales, nonsensical answer categories and overall general weirdness.
What to do?
In the old days, if anyone in the corporation did venture out on their own to do market research, the senior leader in our silo would confab with the senior leader of the offending silo and orders would be issued to cease and desist. Or not. But everything had to go silo to silo.
Now, surveys can be fielded in real-time, over and done in a matter of hours or days. Oops! Well, we already did it. As the saying goes, better to beg forgiveness
than to ask permission.
Fighting this trend feels a little like playing Sisyphus.
Perhaps a different approach might be more productive.
More to follow.
Comments welcome.
Dr. Bob
Tagged as:
Customer Satisfaction,
Customer Satisfaction Market Research,
Market Research,
Market Research Consulting,
Market Research Services,
Marketing Research,
Online Market Research,
Survey Research,
Surveys,
Web Market Research
