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How to... conduct effective researchMarket research is only valuable if you ask the right people the right questions.

So how do you get the most from surveys, focus groups and mystery shoppers?

Marketers are on an eternal quest to understand what motivates their

customers. And that desire to get inside customers heads is what drives market

research.

So although it might seem blindingly obvious, the very first thing to ask about

market research is whether this is what you need. Rather than rushing to put

numbers and ticks in boxes, marketers need to stop and think about exactly

what it is they want to find out, and assess whether market research can do

that.

Anthony Tagal, head of insight at POV Marketing and Research says: Theres a

knee-jerk response. Clients feel they should do research when theres nothing

better to do. Business and marketing are about creating new ideas and insights

for the product, brand idea or creative route. So its about finding meaning.

Research is one way of finding meaning but we can get lazy with what we ask

and assume that research will give us everything we need.

Lets start at the very beginning

How you start a research project is crucial if you want to avoid wasting time and

money. Robin Birn, client services director at Research International, suggests

beginning by writing down what you do know and what you dont. This will form

the basis of a brief.

Juliet Strachan, senior partner at HPI Research, adds: All things stem from the

brief. The most important things to include are what the business problem is,

how the research is to be used and how the outcome will answer that business

issue.

Its easy to fall into the trap of using research to validate something youve

already decided to do, cautions Andy Moore, director of customer insight,

Vodafone Global Marketing. Dont decide to do it and then think, Ill check it out

with the customer. A much better route to gaining genuine insight is first arming

yourself with an understanding of the core consumer drivers and then making

sure thats shaping your thinking.

Great marketers will listen to what the consumer is actually saying.

When to outsource

Once a good brief has been drawn up, other decisions flow from that. One of

the first will be whether the research can be done in-house or whether it shouldbe outsourced. The majority of marketers simply do not have the manpower or

resources to run research projects themselves. Even companies with large

departments dedicated to insight and research will usually outsource the legwork

and use internal intelligence for analysis.

Besides the cost, there are risks to doing research in-house. Among these is the

possibility that responses will be influenced by respondents awareness of who is

asking the questions an organisation conducting its own research must make

that fact clear. Equally, if your research base is flawed, those flaws could be

perpetuated throughout the results.

Carrying out research in-house, you run the risk that the hypothesis in the

organisation drives the design and outcome of the research, so you dont get a

fresh perspective, says Strachan.

Another problem with in-house projects is that they slip down managers priority

lists and are in danger of being dropped as more pressing matters arise. But

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"Nationwidedeveloped its TVadverts afterresearchshowed thatpeople felt

financial servicecompaniestreated themunfairly"

w to conduct effective research - The Marketer magazine http://www.themarketer.co.uk/articles/how-to/how-to-conduct-effective...

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before you rush headlong into a research project and get into detailed

methodology, ask yourself whether you can solve your problems using existing

information does new information really need to be collected?

Sometimes the question or problem requires some digging closer to home. If, for

example, you dont know who your core customers are then theres no point in

looking for new ones. So doing your homework in-house may be the first stage

to address. Of course, existing information, be that articles, directories or

reports, wont give you everything you need and, if what youre after is specific

to a product or company, you will probably need primary information.

Quant or qual?

As with most things in business, you get what you pay for. So the methodology

will vary according to the scope of the research as well as what youre trying to

find out. The two main options to consider are of course qualitative and

quantitative research, depending on whether youre looking for more detail and

depth on a topic, or hard figures on recall or use, for example.

With quantitative research people need to be questioned for their response;

methods range from telephone to internet, face-to-face to printed

questionnaires. Jean Sutton, a course director for The Institute and founder andmanaging director of market research agency Actionline Research and Training

Sales, says the most efficient and cost-effective route is likely to be via

telephone.

This has the advantages of face to face be it for qualitative or quantitative

work in that you get more depth and detail.

But the internet is becoming an increasingly popular route, especially as

broadband and PC penetration increase. When the internet first came along it

was a very cheap way to conduct research. But internet research is no longer

the compromise it was. Now its an extraordinarily powerful research tool

because youre talking one-to-one, says Strachan.

Whether your questionnaire reaches its audience on- or offline, there are a

number of points to consider. Should your questions be structured or closed

yes or no or should you go for a semi-structured questionnaire with open

questions as well? The latter provides more qualitative responses while the

former lends itself to quantitative findings.

It comes back to what information you need and what you want to do with it.

You wouldnt use a closed questionnaire for an audience of CEOs.

Semi-structured allows for a two-way conversation, says Sutton.

Crucial to remember is that average response rates to self-completed

questionnaires range between 3 per cent and 5 per cent. So to get 50responses, you need to send out 1,000 questionnaires. And you have little

control over who chooses to complete often only those who are very happy, or

very unhappy, with a product or service, or those who have time on their hands,

will fill them in. The only way of limiting this effect is to ensure high response

rates to reduce the bias.

Offering an incentive is a common solution. But keeping the questions short and

simple and making the sponsors identity clear will also improve the response

rate.

Time to focus

The classic market research tool for gaining depth of understanding is the focus

group. Many are quick to sneer at the image of a cosy room of housewives,

chatting over tea and biscuits about their favourite fragrance for toilet cleaners,

all keenly observed by researchers behind a two-way mirror. But this method of

Dos and donts

Do be clear on what

decision is to be made

as a result of your

research.

Do think about what

budget is available

research requires time

and money and you


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research is still used to great effect and can provide a forum for a target group

to interact and open up in a relaxed environment.

Amrita Sood, associate director at GfK NOP Social Research, runs many focus

groups for clients. She says clients are often surprised at how specific the

agency can be in recruiting the right sort of people to a group. Weve done

projects with people whove committed benefit fraud or crimes or with a specific

range of ethnic groups. The target sample is a really important aspect of

research.

Focus groups are unusual environments for most people so its important to

compensate participants for their time, says Sood, and to be as transparent as

possible about the research. While focus groups are useful for highlighting

attitudes and behaviours, they should not be used for quantifying behaviour.

If you end up with 100 people in your focus groups and 80 say they love the

new product, it doesnt mean you can say 80 per cent love the product, cautions

Sutton. Focus groups are hand-picked and so you cant extrapolate from that.

In the pursuit of ever more effective ways to understand the customer, market

research is spreading its wings and techniques span ethnography, semiotics,

longitudinal studies and even mystery shopping.

Ethnographic techniques are good for immersing and gaining insight, says

Sood. We may go to their home and spend time with them, observe their daily

routines, look around their house, see how they use technology and media.

With more time and depth these research tools can be useful for context and

bringing to light things that the consumer doesnt realise are important.

Birn says FMCG clients in particular are adopting these techniques where they

might go into shoppers homes to see how they stack tins in their cupboards or

what selection of cereals they choose.

Continual and ad hoc

For many big companies, research will involve a wide range of continuous

measures from brand tracking to customer satisfaction surveys, as well as ad

hoc research. At Vodafone, for instance, Moore says about 40 per cent of

research is continual tracking, while the rest is ad hoc.

Royal Mail Group uses ongoing programmes to act as a health check and to

identify business challenges. It then instigates ad hoc research to delve into

those challenges as necessary, says Crispin Beale, director of insight,

intelligence and analysis at the organisation.

The company also uses mystery shopping. One shopper survey, called Effect, is

about improvement in Post Office branches. Its carried out in partnership withemployees, consulting them about what they think is important for the customer.

Theres a danger that research can go wrong when companies get obsessed

with measuring the wrong thing or measuring too frequently. Ive seen customer

satisfaction measured on a weekly basis, which is too often as things move with

a margin of error. Ive been in companies where the measures were changing

faster than the programme could keep up with it, says Beale. The most valuable

research results are those where a performance improvement in a product can

be proven to add directly to the bottom line, he adds.

Research can and should produce real insight that can have a fundamental effect

on the business. At Nationwide, TV advertising was developed followingresearch revealing that people dont think financial companies treat them as fairly

as they should. Paul Hibbs, advertising controller at Nationwide, says the theme

for its advertising came from posing the question what can we do to treat our

customers fairly?

On mortgages we dont do new customer only deals and we also dont charge

cant buy in a project for

much less than 10,000.

Do understand how

much emotional and

unconscious factors

affect the market and to

what extent research will

uncover those.

Do respect the time and

contribution of therespondents dont

overstretch their

patience.

Dont decide on the

research methodology

before being clear about

what information youre

hoping to gather.

Dont just do the same

thing as has always been

done and avoid doing

the same research asthe competition.


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Case study: Artful researchAppealing to a wider audience is crucial for the arts industry, so the British

Market Research Bureau helped the Arts Council find out whats putting off

potential punters

Taking Part is a large-scale population survey that has been running

continuously since 2005, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media

and Sport in partnership with the Arts Council England.

The survey looks at who attends and participates in the arts. Conducting the

fieldwork is the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) Social Research,

which interviews around 29,000 English adults per year, face-to-face in their

homes.

But the Arts Council wanted a more detailed segmentation of the population to

better understand arts consumers, with specific profiles on each segment. The

objective was to improve engagement with consumers and understand the

barriers to participation.

One of the key constraints for BMRB was the limited budget but ambitious

scope of the segmentation project, as well as the Arts Councils desire for a

very robust statistical approach. As a result, BMRB decided to delve into the

existing Taking Part data rather than conduct new ad hoc research.

Anni Oskala, research officer at the Arts Council England, says: First we

segmented people into different types of arts consumers through cluster

analysis of the Taking Part data. Then that data was fused with BMRB Target

Group Index data, which allowed the creation of rich profiles of each segment,

not only in terms of their arts engagement but also their broader lifestyles and

attitudes.

The segmentation and fusing stages took about six months and also involved

the work of Henley Centre HeadlightVision to help deliver clear

recommendations. It allowed the council to understand what made people tick

and their hidden motivation or barriers to attending arts-related activities.

The research has provided a strong tool for strategic planning by giving us a

much better picture of how and why people engage with the arts today. TGIs

information on media use and attitudes could be used to feed directly into

communications and potential campaigns, says Oskala.

to use cards abroad. Most of that was driven by research into what frustrates

customers, says Hibbs.

Market research can be a detailed and complicated science but Beale boils it

down to some pertinent advice for marketers: Research should be seen as the

radar of your organisation it give you the early warning sign and then you

respond to it. Research only makes a difference if you actually use it, he says.

Its is all about making money or saving money for the organisation, it shouldnt

happen otherwise. It should drive the business forward how do we get ROI onthis and increase income?"

Jane Bainbridge is a freelance journalist who writes on marketing and PR for

titles including Media Week


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