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Market Research

Key Resources

ARMTEC’s founder has conducted or directed over ten thousand research projects across a wide range of industries and organization sizes. While key links are provided below that will provide a huge shopping list of firms who do various types of research, before you jump to use them lets talk about some critical things learned over that extensive experience.

Do You Real Need It?

This is not a let’s be cheap question. When you really need research to make an important decision, you should spend money proportionate to the size of the risk/reward you are seeking to answer. However, too many organizations, especially large firms with many employees and deep divisional structures use the call for research as a mechanism to avoid decisions or deflect blame. It is strongly recommended that before any research is considered, and especially before dropping yourselves into the tenacles of commercial research companies seeking cashflow, that you frame the exact decision and options you face.

Bayesian What?

Bayesian probablity is sort of a fancy way to systematically framing a decision and doing some “what if” logic on that decision. You can look up different approaches or go get some MBA student fresh out of a Decision Science class to explain some options. One of the easiest to relate to is something called a decision tree. Assume you face a decision and depending on what happens between a couple different initial options you would make another set of different subsequent decisions. So take a napkin and put the first couple options down and a layer below put the next level options you face under each. Now write down a ballpark number for the outcome result for each of the end-point branchs. Look back at the first branches and write your best guess for the probability that option will result; e.g. a percent with the total of each adding to 100%. Do the same for guessing the next level branches; they too add to 100% at their individual level/prior branch cluster. Now work from the bottom up and multiply the ‘outcome values’ of each branch by the probabilites. You now know the most basic level value of the decisions faced and don’t even think about spending that much to research the decisions. Rather, now go review the percent probabilites of your initial guesses and put a best and worst percent around your guesses. Recalculate the math again for the ranges around your guesses. Compare the very worst to the very best probability weighted outcomes and consider that the maximum you would spend to research the answers. You still shouldn’t actually spend that much for two more reasons: a) Some of your decisions may be reservable and if you made a wrong level first decision you might be able to recover and redirect, and b) research is not perfect and you will need to consider the error rate (cost of sample, length, etc. to confidence intervals).

Questions

Not Just How

Ok, so you know all about this research stuff. And you can maybe figure out a decision tree. But research isn’t just about the “How”. You also need to know what the heck are the important things to ask about. Here is a generic starting point…

Business Understanding

Remember, larger companies, better run companies, maintain internal market research staff. This isn’t because research vendors don’t know methods, sample management, advanced analytic techniques, etc. It is because these vendors don’t know your business; even if they know the category. If you don’t have internal research staff with fairly senior level exposure to all the elements of your business, please don’t just pick up the phone an order some research study of type “X” be done. You want an organization who will come in for a pretty solid level of ‘let me learn’ connections with your company or brand leadership. And expect to pay them for their time to do this research consultation. Make it clear you will even applaud and endorse them recommending another organization do the fieldwork and even some of the data analytic work under their direction. Your and their goal should align to produce the best outcome.

Results Linkage

It has been noted throughout that when you conduct any research you should aim to have classification questions, demographic or firm-o-graphic type information, collected from respondents using a question wording and response opportunity aligned with secondary source data. Most commonly this can be the Census but also look to list vendors and even your own sources like a call center or business reply card responses. Market research should be considered a form of R&D. It actually is a great place to do the pilot work for your Information Systems development prioritization. Information may seem ‘free’ and the lower cost of computer horsepower projects that interpretation. However, the reality is that information collection is a potentially huge cost. If you use a call center that maintains a CRM database with an ROI algorithm driving variable response collection prioritation during a call, each moment of the conversation collecting information is taking staff time and outbound message time offset. What you want to do is to conduct research on the hundreds of potentially important tidbits from a sample and leverage research analytics to pinpoint ROI predictive factors to collect more universally. As noted in the prior point, this takes ‘Business Understanding’.

Types of Research

ATU

Awareness, Trial, & Usage

Present Product Concept(s) for consumer reaction:

– Consumer
– HCP

– Branding
– Current Equity Positioning
– Message Development
— Qualitative
— Quantitative
– Placement & Testing

Who Does Research

ARMTEC, Inc. can certainly do some research directly and can also act as your research coordinator as part of our consultation. There are tons of individual research organizations and the most common directories to find them are these:

Quirks
Greenbook




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