Getting the best out of your Market Surveys

I was asked 'how can marketers get the best out of their market research to identify what their next steps should be? The question was posed not long after the Australian economy started to change, and and this was my response:

Common Purpose of Market Research

Companies conduct market research hoping to capture some sense of their market and their customers to develop a product, service, or response on the ideas or findings raised in the research. Discovering the facts in these findings – who, what, where, when, how, and, most importantly, why – is a challenge.

Traditional Market Research

Traditionally, market research will give you what is referred to as ‘customer facts’ which come in the form of structured data obtained through traditional structured surveys. These surveys provide details
around purchase history, coded responses to surveys, service streams, and so on.

Less Traditional…Yet More Important

A second and less common form of data is instructured data or ‘first person data’. Unstructured data includes call-centre notes, open note sections of surveys, emails, weblogs, chat rooms, online forums,
product reviews, and others. To truly get as complete a picture as possible around your customer/client base and market, both structured and unstructured data must be incorporated into the intelligence and analysis of market research.

The following focuses primarily on preparing your traditional market research survey.

Structuring your Research

In structuring your research, the following should be considered:
The differences between self-administered questionnaires and professional interviewer questionnaires

Knowing what questions should be asked where within the questionnaire

Understanding how to phrase questions

Being sensitive to questionnaire length.

Self-Administered vs Interviewer-Administered Questionnaires

Self-administered questionnaires are risky and impersonal. If you do not have the in-house expertise in preparing questionnaires, this can be a high-risk consideration. A recent study stated that fifty per cent
of respondents lose patience with self-administered questionnaires due to incorrect structure and methods of questioning.

Interviewer-administered questionnaires are prepared and facilitated by researchers who are trained in responding to differing types of
answers that could roadblock a self-administered questionnaire.

Researchers can walk respondents through the questionnaire and follow patterns generated by the answers given at the time.

Knowing What Questions Should be Asked

Questionnaires have a flow to them, usually from the general to the specific. There are no hard and fast rules around what questions should and should not be asked, as this is dependent on the purpose of the research.

It is suggested, however, that you keep these guides in mind:

• Keep the respondent in one mindset at a time
• Ask the easy questions first, place more involved questions toward the middle of the questionnaire and save sensitive questions
  for the end
• Understand how to phrase questions
• Being Sensitive to Questionnaire Length Questionnaire length is dictated by the study objectives. Some questionnaires take five minutes’worth of questions to address the objectives; others take an hour.
• Questioning the respondent in a professional and considerate manner is where your focus should be.

The most important component of market research is to be very clear on the objective of the research. Approaching market research without
a plan will merely provide you with nice-to-know numbers. You need to have a central core strategy against which to analyse those numbers to give you the desired direction.