These days, it’s not uncommon for organizations that once relied heavily on outsourced market research to re‑think that practice. buy albuterol online https://petalk.com/scripts/new/albuterol.html no prescription There are four primary reasons… Continue reading From Outsourcing to In-house Market Research: Weighing the Benefits (Part 1 of 3)
With the summer season upon us, along comes a most welcomed relief for many market research project managers. The workload slows and creates a great opportunity to take care of… Continue reading Market Research Strategies: Summertime Activity for Survey Writers
If you are tracking customer satisfaction at regular intervals, say quarterly or monthly, you may have found that your colleagues want explanations for every increase or decrease in scores—even minor… Continue reading Customer Satisfaction Survey Results: Jumping To Conclusions
Let’s get a few facts on the table, shall we? We all have non-researcher friends, colleagues and acquaintances who are writing their own online surveys using one of the many… Continue reading Survey Design 2011: NEW REALITY, NEW RULES
The final presentation, when we deliver market research project results, feels like a huge accomplishment. The project is finally done! Or is it? Alas, our goal is not to deliver the results–it is to make sure our audience actually uses them.
Be careful not to oversell market research. Those of us who do market research professionally tend to get enthusiastic. We are typically people who enjoy designing and implementing research methodologies, who like to dive into mounds of data and extract meaningful results. In our enthusiasm for research, we have to be careful not to over-promise. Realistic expectations are the key to satisfied clients, especially for riskier types of projects.
Even if a market research project produces a pile of perfect data, we still face the fundamental challenge of analysis — making sure that we’re analyzing the results comprehensively and objectively. In other words, without bias.
Let’s say you’ve done an online survey. You identified your objectives, thought carefully about sampling, and designed a great questionnaire. You monitored data collection and carefully cleaned your dataset. Even after all this painstaking work, risk still exists. You still have to analyze the data, and it’s here that unexpected errors often creep in.
Typically when we think about market research surveys, we think of questionnaires that have 20, 30, or even more questions. Getting qualified people to complete these questionnaires has become a serious challenge. One alternative is the single-question poll. After all, you’re much more likely to get high response and low dropout rates if you can simply say, “Hi, we have a single question we’d like your opinion on”, rather than requesting a novel’s worth of responses.
Facebook is making polling insanely easy these days…
Did you learn everything you possibly could from your last project—not just from the final results, but by examining the process itself? Conducting a detailed review, a post mortem so to speak, can help pinpoint exactly what worked—and what needs work.
Here are a few practical tips about what you should see in a market segmentation proposal. If you see these things, it tells you that this proposal is from an experienced market research firm that understands how to mitigate the risks specific to segmentation projects.
