Market Research

Market researchers are called upon to provide fresh, current information about a target market and/or product. For example, a study might be conducted to find out if people are planning to upgrade their cell phone in the next year, and what kind of phones they are looking to buy.

Naturally, you will decide on a data collection method and send out surveys or conduct focus groups. In this instance, a combination of online survey and in-person focus groups might be chosen. It is a good idea to supplement these methods with some external research.

This will add weight to whatever is discovered through the online survey and focus groups. For example, if 70% of online web survey respondents and 84% of focus group participants say they plan on upgrading to a smartphone like the iPhone or Blackberry, that makes a strong statement in favor of smartphones. You can supplement this finding with market information on smartphone sales. If the research shows steady increases in sales of smartphones, that strengthens the market research finding. However, if it shows declining sales, it provides additional insight. It might even indicate a need to broaden the target group for the survey – perhaps they are early adopters and very technology conscious.

If you do use external research to supplement or add insight into your findings, be sure to use reputable sources and cite them correctly.

I’ve previously emphasized how important it is to consider survey reporting not only after you’ve collected data, but at the beginning and throughout a survey project.  Another central tenet of good survey reporting is tailoring your report or presentation to your audience.

The formatting of your market research reports and presentations can vary dramatically depending upon who is going to receive them.  Even the content will differ based on the audience(s) who will read the report or view the presentation.  Here are two big questions to ask yourself about your audience, so you can tailor your reporting tasks accordingly:

1) Is this a lay or technical group of people? 
The more professional your audience is, the more technical you want to be when describing the results.  For example, if you are sending survey results back to respondents, you probably don’t need to go into statistical and methodological detail.  If you are presenting to market research colleagues, on the other hand, you would go into fairly deep detail regarding topics such as statistical significance, margin of error/confidence level, as well as include prior research citations and an abstract of your project.

2) Am I presenting this to senior officials and/or executive decision-makers?
Usually, the higher-up the ladder your audience is, the less time you spend on detail.  So if your answer to the above question is "yes," I like to use a five-minute rule: if someone had to make major business decisions based on your survey results, what could you present in five minutes that would help them make good strategic decisions?  What would be the “take-home” message (i.e., two or three data-driven recommendations based on your results)?

Although surveys are usually single point-in-time snapshots, it’s good to draw basic conclusions unless it would be inappropriate to do so... after all, you’ve likely spent considerable time and effort for the survey project to generate useful insights!

Conducting an online web survey should really be no different than any other kind of survey form, save for the medium. But all too often, normally restrained market research companies lose all sense of decorum when conducting an online survey. Suddenly it’s OK to plague potential respondents with multiple email survey reminders to take their electronic surveys.

It’s not. You must be mindful of how often you are communicating to potential respondents. I’ve even seen companies send out reminders to an entire respondent pool, some of whom have already taken the survey. If your survey is not getting enough respondents, there are probably issues that will not be fixed by several reminders. Perhaps you have fallen into some common traps not discussed previously – not explaining things clearly, no enticement, computer glitches or countless other things. The issue could also lie with the list you are sending it to and not the respondents themselves. If it is a list you have purchased, make sure the information is accurate. Always check out companies who sell lists thoroughly to ensure they are scrupulous.

It is important to check out all these potential avenues before sending out multiple reminders. Receiving unsolicited email reminders can irritate your potential respondent pool. All too often, I have seen this backfire when recipients unsubscribe from the email list. By sending out multiple email reminders for electronic surveys, you could be losing out on the ability to contact hundreds of potential respondents for future surveys. Once they have opted out, you can’t get them back.

With the emergence of widespread internet usage and powerful online survey software, the web has become the survey method of choice for many project managers and market research professionals.  Utilizing an online web survey design allows for levels of efficiency unheard of in traditional mail questionnaire projects, but it also poses new challenges for business survey researchers.  One of the questions that is asked often is, Is my customer feedback sample and/or survey data skewed because I used an online survey?

The answer could be either no, yes, or maybe, depending upon your specific research issues and target demographics.  The demographic that use the internet (and newer technologies in general) the most are younger people.  Those who are new to online technologies, or those who are not tech-savvy, might be intimidated or confused by a web survey form or an email survey invitation from an unknown sender, which can decrease your rates of nonresponse.  Also, you can run into the issue of coverage error for those who do not have internet access, which is more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals.

But overall, the reliability and validity of online survey results can be on par with or better than other modes, especially if you know your target audience well, including their rates of internet usage.  According to a September 2009 survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 77% of all adults - and 93% of those ages 18-29 - use the internet “at least occasionally.”  Less than half of those aged 65 and older use the internet or send and receive email, however.

So while there are drawbacks to online questionnaire designs of which you should be mindful (as there are with any survey modes, such as interviewer bias, etc.), the efficiency and reduced costs are more than enough rationale for most to employ online data collection techniques, either exclusively or as part of a multi-mode survey design.  Knowing and understanding your target audience is the best way to be sure that your chosen mode will produce quality data.

Quota sampling is frequently used in survey designs, and especially in market research projects.  This technique is a form of "convenience sampling," where respondents are chosen not at random, but because they are available or easier to reach.  A probability-based sampling design is not employed, due to decisions made by the researcher based upon various reasons: the population frame cannot be known, contact information for respondents is unavailable, or even because the time, effort and costs are simply too high for the budget.

Quota sampling is a way that you can gather completed questionnaires, producing adequate amounts of data, from people with different demographic attributes.  Often, market researchers want to ensure they get roughly equal amounts of data from males and females, may be interested only in a specific age range (i.e., their target market/demographic), or would like to know if preferences differ by other characteristics such as ethnicity and income level.

So where does the “quota” come into play?  Well, just as in stratified sampling, the population is divided into mutually exclusive subgroubs, often based on demographic characteristics.  The researcher sets a quota for each subgroup (100 females and 100 males, for example), collects data until the quotas are met, then stops data collection and begins data analysis.  The reason that quota sampling is not a probability-based sampling technique, thereby limiting your ability to generalize, is because respondents are not selected at random.  Quota sampling does go a step further than simply selecting whomever is available without regard to any criteria, and that's why it is used so often.

While this entry is tailored to online survey best practices, these tips can also be applied to other market research methods.


For any survey type whether you're surveying customers, collecting employee feedback or conducting a product market research study, exercise caution and good sense in order to get results that are applicable and trustworthy.

When conducting market research, either through survey forms or another mode, the method of sending a survey pre-notification letter can be a tempting one.

For some time now survey methodologists have been conducting studies of pre-notification letters to determine if they have any affect, either positively or negatively, on survey response rates. An overall analysis of these various independent studies revealed an increase in response rate of approximately 8% when compared against studies where no pre-notification letter was sent.

No one can say for sure exactly why pre-notice survey letters seem to assist in increasing the number of survey responses, but perhaps they help to establish the legitimacy of a survey, contributing to a respondent's feeling of trust and the credibility of the organization conducting the research. Another possibility is that a pre-notice letter builds expectation of arriving mail (be it electronic, paper, or in-person). A third possibility is that a potential respondent is less likely to disregard the survey when it arrives if they are aware it is arriving shortly.

Although survey pre-notification letters are an excellent (but sometimes expensive) way to increase response rates, they are seldom used in marketing research surveys. Each researcher needs to weigh the additional cost of sending out a pre-notice to potential respondents against the probability of a lower response rate.

It's worthwhile to take your population's survey sample size into consideration when coming to this decision. When your sample sizes are small, each individual response affects your survey results even more. Increasing those responses through utilizing a pre-notice letter may counterbalance the increased cost of sending them out to your participants.

When you plan your online market research study, you still need to remember the standard steps for any market research project, plus some online specific tasks:


The time frame for an online study is, as discussed previously, often shorter because of the immediacy of the results. Keep this in mind but be sure to give yourself enough time to analyze survey responses.

Surveys are an invaluable tool for researching the community attitudes, employee concerns, product needs, customer loyalty and priorities held by different groups or target audiences.  Designing a questionnaire and collecting survey responses from a sample allows us to draw a profile of the group as a whole, and perhaps perform some correlation analysis to understand the source of those feelings.  The online survey findings can then support fact-based organizational decisions or improvement projects to help continually improve the organization over time.

Survey research can be applied to many venues.  Here are just a few practical applications listed below:

An Internal Employee Survey could identify reasons for low employee retention and provide ideas for reducing those costs, such as a better designed benefit program, improved training opportunities, or problems in the way the organization functions.

A Training Survey can identify how a training program has improved the capabilities of some group and how the training program itself can be improved.  

A Product Satisfaction Survey can identify initial customer experiences with a product, providing data to address unforeseen problems and help the next product release.  

A Market Research Survey can identify customers needs when creating these new service and product offerings.  Surveys can be part of Design for Six Sigma activities.  

An Association Survey, which is similar to market research and customer surveys, can show the member benefits most of interest.

However, a survey program is only valuable if it is properly designed and executed.  While performing a survey project seems deceptively simple – it's just a bunch of questions, and survey software tools make electronic surveys quick and cheap – a small mistake in the survey questionnaire design or survey administration can skew or bias the data, leading to erroneous conclusions.  No organization should ever make critical business decisions based on unreliable or invalid data.

Bad data is worse than no data!

I’ve talked extensively in the past about using Facebook for market research. But there are other Web 2.0 sites that you can use effectively as well.

For example, Twitter is growing more and more. You can search on Twitter for keywords or competing products to see how often they are mentioned, and what people are saying. This is a quick and simple method of gathering background info.

There are many sites where people mark things they like or dislike, like digg and del.icio.us. Everything on digg is submitted by users and then ranked by users. After a story has enough “diggs” it is listed on the front page. You can search for your client and see what types of stories are making their way to the site and get an idea of what kind of buzz is surrounding them. Del.icio.us allows users to tag and bookmark their favorite pages, and then allows all users to access rankings. You can find out how many people have bookmarked your client and competitors.

Of course, both these groups are by their nature narrower than most studies require. Results for each page are primarily involving only regular users of the site. You should broaden your search to find other respondents so your data is more accurate.

Web 2.0 sites are great places to find information and do background research. They also tend to be good places to find electronic survey respondents, as users are web savvy and opinionated. But as I mentioned, be sure not to make your respondent range too narrow.

The benefits of online and email surveys are numerous. This is not to discount other survey methods but merely to point out the advantages.

1. Cost savings. It is fairly inexpensive to email survey questionnaires, once you have the email addresses of your target audience.

2. Ability to attach pictures or sound files. You can attach or embed necessary files in the online web survey – you cannot show someone a picture over the phone, or send an audio file easily through direct mail.

3. More honest responses. It’s been shown that respondents are more likely to reveal truthful information online than to an in-person interviewer. Think about how much people reveal through personal blogs and web sites, and this makes sense.

4. Limitless possibilities. With certain kinds of survey software, you can control what types of questions survey respondent can access, show additional questions if they answer a certain question in a particular way, and more. This can be done with paper surveys but it’s a bit more cumbersome and requires written directions: If you answered 'No' to the above question, please explain.

5. Fast results. As I discussed yesterday, the results of online surveys are very rapid, which saves researchers time and money.

Technology has come a long way – ten years ago, the majority of surveys were not online, and that has certainly changed. Now market researchers are using this format more often than not for at least one aspect of gathering feedback. Whether you're looking to conduct a product enhancement survey or an internal business survey of employees, web survey forms have their place in your internet research process.

There are many options available to market researchers when designing a web survey form. I covered this topic a bit last week when I discussed creating online surveys, and included some dos and don’ts.

Conducting a study for the Web offers several opportunities for market researchers that paper questionnaires do not. For example, you can create an instant survey and check on responses frequently for updates. You may even allow the respondents to view the current results when they complete the survey. This works best for one or two-question quick polls rather than longer studies. But knowing they will see the results immediately is frequently a tipping point for respondents who are on the fence about completing your feedback survey form.

This can be helpful in analyzing survey data as well. For example, suppose results for your online survey form vary wildly throughout one week. One day, 10% of respondents use your client’s brand of glass cleaner. The next day, it’s 65%, but then the following day it drops back down to 20%. This could mean something (possibly that you need to check your recipient list) and is good information to track for your client.

The instant results also allow you to add more questions and gain clarification on points you may not have considered prior to launching the survey form. There are dozens of survey web software tools available that can create instant survey results – it’s a method that is worth trying out, but as always, consider your client’s needs before committing to a particular survey method.

Web 2.0 is a term that is frequently tossed around, but there are still many who may not be entirely clear on the definition. The simplest way to boil it down is that Web 1.0 offered little or no opportunities for feedback, while Web 2.0 includes countless ways to “talk back” on the Web. It can include blogs, forums, social media sites, and interactive informational sites like Wikipedia. The users can control the content to an extent on these types of sites, a difference from the static web sites of Web 1.0.

What does this mean for a market researcher? I’ve already discussed methods to use social media for gathering data and survey respondents, but you can use other Web 2.0 sites in a similar manner. It’s a huge topic that I am sure will be revisited again and again.

Web 2.0 sites are good for research purposes. People who would likely make the ideal survey respondents are using these sites to talk back about products. For example, if you were doing a baking survey, the blog Bakerella.com has hundreds of posts and thousands of comments about various recipes and their merits. It is a good start for conducting internet research about the habits of the true baking enthusiast, and could help you in your online questionnaire design.

Despite the opportunities for feedback Web 2.0 offers, it is important to remember that it does not and should not replace more traditional marketing research methods, like electronic surveys, paper questionnaires and other methods. Although respondents are very forthcoming on blogs like Bakerella.com, for a quality study respondents must be properly vetted to ensure they are the correct group.

When designing surveys, researchers often want to find out how people act in addition to how they feel.  Questions about actions and behaviors are especially useful in market research, since you can gain a sense of what customers and consumers are actually doing (as opposed to what they say they’ll do).  However, this area of survey research can be difficult – to the point of being unreliable – so I urge you to follow the guidelines below when asking behavioral questions in your online questionnaire design:

Provide a specific time reference within your survey questions.  This allows for an “anchor” to be set, and can give you a clearer idea of what your respondents do during an average time frame (be it a day or a week).

Make the time frame fairly recent.  It is very difficult for respondents to remember what they did three years ago.  At the very most, stick with questions that reference 12 months ago or less (preferably much less, like the past week or even 24 hours).

Ask only about the respondent’s own behavior.  Unless you’re asking about the actions of small children, it’s best to keep survey questions directed at the individual level rather than for family members or friends.  Asking people about others’ behaviors can provide distorted, unreliable data, as most people overestimate or underestimate certain actions of other people.

Personal and sensitive information should be taken with a grain of salt.  Multiple market research studies have shown the more sensitive a question is, the less likely it is that respondents will answer... and the data provided can be inaccurate, so it is important to consider that people might dance around the absolute truth on these kinds of questions.

In the past several years, many market researchers have shifted to using online surveys more frequently. Traditionally, these online surveys were emailed rather than posted online to avoid data skewing.

When creating the online survey design, there are several things to consider. Make sure the electronic survey is simple and easy to use. Too often, online survey forms are cumbersome or technologically dated. Keep it simple, and you won’t run into any problems.

You must also plan carefully to make sure no questions are missed. You can design online surveys so they will not allow survey respondent to move on if mandatory questions are not completed. In addition to requiring survey questions, I would advise setting up the internet survey so respondents cannot complete the questionnaire more than once. Most online survey research software applications have features to create limits on how many times someone can fill out an online survey form. This prevents skewed data – some respondents will try to complete online survey forms multiple times if there is a giveaway or drawing offered as an incentive.

Make sure you read over your electronic survey a few times as well. Proofreading is especially important when designing online surveys. You must have members of your team proofread not only for grammar and clarity, but also functionality. Make sure all the links work, and the survey can be completed with all your caveats and mandatory questions. 

Online surveys have made it possible to gather information much quicker, and when used properly provide an excellent resource for market researchers.

Rarely are we asked the question, What is a survey? Typically questions follow the path of, Why do I need a survey program? What am I going to get out of conducting online web surveys to collect customer feedback? Or How do I get started measuring employee satisfaction with online questionnaire templates?

However, sometimes it's good to define market research and what it means, and answer the rarely asked question, What is a survey?

Market Research Definition (mahr-kit-ree-surch)
The gathering and studying of data relating to consumer preferences, purchasing power, etc., especially prior to introducing a product on the market.

Survey Definition (ser-vey)
Collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research.

Chances are though, you're still wondering about those other questions. These posts may help you answer those ever burning questions about why you should create and design surveys.

The vast majority of survey research projects are studies at a single point in time of a specified population, such as employees, customers or the general public.  Fewer web survey designs track opinions over time.  This post outlines the different types of surveys carried out by researchers.

Point-in-time surveys are called cross-sectional studies.  They study a single population or sample size during a single specified time-frame, and give us a “snapshot” of opinion data.  Cross-sectional surveys comprise the largest number of projects that are undertaken. 

Longitudinal surveys, on the other hand, are those which study trends over time, and usually consist of cohorts or panel respondents.  These can be further classified into three distinct types of longitudinal designs (trend, cohort and panel).

Completing a study is just the first step in the market research process. A good researcher knows there is plenty of work left to be done analyzing survey data and taking action on survey results.

Stay in touch with the client and schedule presentations of the research. If you have a client contact assigned to the project, go over the preliminary survey data to see what key findings they feel are the most important to share. Create presentations around these key findings. You can also create separate market survey reports for different groups within the same company.

For example, if you have just completed a large product survey that includes feedback on customer satisfaction, the client may want a presentation simply on customer feedback for their customer service team.

A good researcher also has an eye for finding problems. If you notice an area for improvement in the course of your market research analysis, propose a solution to that problem for the client. Take this market research survey example, customers complain about being on hold too long when calling customer service. You could propose several ideas from hiring more staff to setting time goals for staff to talk to customers.

Even though the client may not agree with your solution ideas, ignoring problems you identify through the research is a bad idea. The client is paying you to compile and analyze research data, and they will likely appreciate all your efforts even if the information does not fit in with their current business plan.

Just because you find correlation in your data when analyzing survey results does not mean there is causation. I find this is a common mistake in lots of survey reports when someone is new to survey research or conducting data analysis. Take this example:


Some people see this connection as a causation. Customers are satisfied because you contact them frequently to make sure everything is going well. The problem is, it's not a causation. Causation are extremely hard to prove because you cannot control every factor. For example, you may split your territory by industry and your solution suits some industries better than others. Or clients who are really satisfied simply use the product more often so the customer success managers reach out to them more frequently, because they are more likely to have questions. While those who use the product less have less to be satisfied about and may feel they are wasting those budget dollars.

To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. As you can imagine, that's almost impossible to do since we do not control outside factors influencing the survey respondent or even the greater survey sample. Instead, when situations like these occur, we're seeing a correlation between two things. In my customer survey question examples, there's a correlation between how satisfied customers and how often they are contacted.

This principle does not only apply to customer survey research, it also applies to analyzing employee feedback forms, product surveys, market research and any other type of data collection and analysis.

Did you know there are 6 steps in the market research process?  While this process speaks directly to marketing research professionals, the process applies to HR, customer or education surveys as well:

1. Identify and define the problem.  Before you start any web survey project, you should identify the key issues you hope to be able to solve.  This step should also include clearly defined objectives.
    
2. Develop the approach. In this step, you need to establish a budget, understand influencing factors such as the environment or economy, decide on sampling and survey methods, and formulating hypotheses.
    
3. Research design. Designing a survey or questionnaire is considered the most important step in any survey process.  Question design takes a lot of thought and time.  We like to say, "If you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out."  This means that if the questions are bad, the data will be bad as well.  During the survey research design, keep in mind sampling methods and data analysis factors you intend to use.
    
4. Collect the data. Don't forget to test your survey before to ensure you're fielding the correct data.  Thankfully, with the help of an online survey tool, this step is relatively painless.
    
5. Analyze the Data. The types of analysis you planned to perform on the collected survey data should have been decided in earlier steps, but after collecting the data you have to actually perform the survey analysis.  Analysis can be performed using survey analysis tools like office programs, such as Excel, or more advanced programs such as SPSS - the complexity of the questions will determine this.
    
6. Report, Present, Take Action.  The final step in the market research process is to present your survey research findings and draw conclusions.  While Step 3 is the most important because it defines the outcome of your survey, if you fail to complete this last step and act on the findings in some way, the previous steps don't matter. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, this same process can be applied to any type of project: product evaluations, customer satisfaction questionnaires, public relation surveys, etc.  If you give each step the attention it deserves, each of your online surveys should be a success.