Key issue with marketing research. Overcoming a common, but frequently overlooked, weakness in many marketing research studies — many marketing research professionals go to great lengths to discover what are the right issues andthe right topics for their research studies. Such exploratory research may utilize tools such as focus groups, diads, or simply chatting with the right people or examining the right blog.
Unfortunately many other researchers do not make this level of investment beforehand. Instead, they draft their questionnaires or moderators’ guidelines, plunge ahead, and then proceed to analyze the resultant data and make a myriad of recommendations. Results which may turn out to be entirely off the mark or just plain wrong in key respects. This reminds me of a play on an old adage: “Garbage in and gospel out.” Partly, this is why many marketing and business professionals who need and value this kind of insight have such a low regard for expending resources on marketing research – a low ROI.
A good beginning. Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, marketing research began to take on the guise of science, employing sophisticated sampling techniques, strict screening of study participants, well-designed questionnaires, and complex statistical techniques that produced accurate results. But the latter part of the same century saw the growth of dual working households, the spread of telephone answering machines and of mobile phones. All of these new-found obstacles to interviews were coupled with a proliferation of telephone surveys and direct marketing callers which dramatically and adversely impacted people’s willingness to participate in a survey.
The end of the beginning. In part, to keep up with the need for marketing research information, comparatively easy to arrange online focus groups and online surveys arose followed by the growing construction of large panels of people who would participate in research studies for a fee or reward. . At the same time, marketers grew leery of “professional participants”, people that marketers were unsure of who they were or their appropriateness in participating in their studies. And concerns grew for the reliability, accuracy and projectability of information derived in this manner.
A new opportunity to derive consumer insight is emerging. Never before has the voice of the consumer been so accessible and transparent as that contained in online social media and product reviews. Now actual buyers of products and services are talking with the online world in general, other prospective purchasers in particular, and you, their marketer – if you will listen.
These “hand-raisers” will freely provide you the strengths and weaknesses of products, your competitors’ products, the means to better position these products with them via their own language used in their conversations, and a host of other valuable competitive differentiators. Recently, in October 2008, I was involved in an Opinion Insights research study for two prominent builders of the latest craze in notebooks, the light-weight, inexpensive, “netbook”. We were hearing early on that many of the first wave of purchasers were displeased with the significantly under-powered systems (RAM and CPU) in spite of the low prices and extraordinary portability of their new netbooks. The manufacturers of these new systems were essentially unaware that a brewing adverse backlash within the marketplace could be building. Product marketers are beginning to introduce newer, more robust netbooks albeit with trade-offs at least in terms of higher price points.
Marketers and researchers are only just beginning to tap into this new source of consumer information. By consolidating the thousands of online opinions, researchers can lay much of the groundwork and enable traditional research and product planning to be as pointed and efficient as possible. We are at the early stages of effectively promoting a dialogue between consumers and marketers and maintaining the trust and convenience that existed for all before the end of the beginning of marketing research described above.
