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
Recently I’ve had the experience of working with several clients who are in the not-uncommon position of being a one-person market research department. And across all of them, I have noticed a recurring challenge: they get stuck in reaction mode, much like a juggler. Let’s look at this challenge and some tactics to address it.
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.
RFPs range widely in terms of their level of sophistication and complexity. If your need is for a simple project, do yourself a favor: keep your RFP simple. It will save you a lot of time when the proposals come back and you actually have to read them.
At minimum, a market research RFP states parameters and requests responses to the basics:
Planning to hire a market research agency to help with a project? Before you do, be sure to create a list of questions you will use to assess potential agencies for fit and qualifications. Some questions are obvious: experience with similar projects, years in business, company size, and so on. But here are two important questions are often overlooked:
1. Do you belong to any professional associations? The answer should start with…
There are hundreds of market research agencies and hundreds of market research consultants. Changing agencies can be painful, but you deserve an agency that you can trust with your valuable market research investments.
Quality is a concern no matter what country an outsourcing provider is based in—the US, India, France, Canada…anywhere. If you work with an agency and they outsource, you need to have some evidence that the outsourcing partner provides great work—and was not selected simply because they had the lowest price or a well-connected brother-in-law.
Seth Godin’s blog post yesterday was about a topic I have been thinking about a lot lately. It’s inspired by the aphorism, “…to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Some of the pain that market research is going through right now is precisely because of this. In the field of market research, we have hammers we are very comfortable with…
