A little knowledge is indeed dangerous. However, it's even more dangerous if you ignore experts' advice.
Think of market research as your payment for relevant information to reduce risks in new product management.
When business is good, you don't value research and data. When business is poor, you suddenly realize that you've got no data to guide you in the right direction.
If you can't accept the findings, then you'd better not conduct any marketing research in the first place.
All specific research questions must be specified by all stakeholders before embarking on a marketing research project.
Like Christmas which gives hope, market research casts light on the right direction businesses have to take.
It's surprising that a test market is still being considered instead of a proper marketing research initiative in the 21st century.
Conducting a proper product testing project takes time since we need to give enough time to the consumers we've recruited as respondents to experience the product and form their opinion.
Marketing research can only provide a prediction via a simulation. The actual results must be confirmed via an experimentation.
Business objectives in a marketing research project must come from the brand team.
Research agencies, don't ignore the intangible high mental cost dealing with poor operations when calculating your gross margin.
When writing a survey questionnaire, avoid creating an imagery attribute in two sentences joined by the conjunction 'or'.
Business insight is only as good as the quality of data it's based on.
It's critical that the different panels in product testing projects are matched as closely as possible in all aspects.
Small businesses can conduct a simple market research just by interviewing their own employees who may already know customers' likes, dislikes, and preferences.
There're several variants of the implicit association research method. Beware of what you're buying from research agencies.
A quality research proposal can be written if clients can provide agencies with a quality research brief.
It's a cardinal sin to tweak your data to fit your story.
When commissioning a large scale quantitative project to a fieldwork supplier directly, make sure your supplier has a strong enough financial resource to be able to complete the project.
In marketing research, the devil is also in the detail as well.
You must really think way out of the box to design a brand health check study covering 4 different categories in 7 different cities with a budget of only IDR 100 million.
Data collection strategy depends strongly on the research objectives and project constraints like time and cost.
A tool should be selected not due to its sexiness but due to its ability to answer the research objective.
A good research would provide a guidance in your company intentional growth plan.
Brand Managers, research will be just a waste of valuable resources if you, yourselves, are not sure what you're trying to sell to consumers.
When you're creating a new product or service and want to test it on your prospects, make sure you set aside a big enough budget to finance the research.
There are only two informative open-end questions in product testing projects; i.e., spontaneous likes and dislikes.
Once the data and tables from the Data Processing Department are ready, always check & recheck for errors.
It's a bad practice to cover many different topics in one research project.
To obtain the most cost-efficient proposal from a research agency, you must provide a concise specification including your detailed expected deliverables.
In an unbranded product test, it's just too good to be true if respondents can guess the flavor or fragrance perfectly.
Procuring market research services is not the same as procuring tangible goods.
It's more important to reach the right target respondents than to be fast.
Is there any correlation between the involvement of Procurement and the decline in the quality in the marketing research world?
A New Year wish: leave managing research to the research professionals.
The huge amount & different types of data in your disposal are relevant only if they help you achieve your business objectives.
Marketing research can help business owners to identify potential consumers.
R&D should also understand well the basics of marketing & marketing research to be able to support the business effectively.
Preventing a disease is much better than treating it. Conducting a concept product test must precede launching a new product.
Software package is only a tool to help you solve business problems.
In the self-completion mode of data collection, each question must be very precise without any double interpretation.
Newness of a methodology doesn't guarantee its validity and usefulness. Older methods have their own merits to be able to survive the test of time.
In the restaurant business, ingredients determine the quality of the foods served. In MR, field quality is the key success factor.
In this environmentally friendly era, it's just a shame to demand research agencies to submit a hard copy of the proposal.
An "evidence-based decision making" process should be augmented by good technologies to run smoothly and efficiently.
When you've got a predetermined bias favoring a particular research method, you just can't see that another research method would be more suitable to achieve your objectives.
Sampling theory makes it possible for us not to collect data from every location / area.
Quantitative research tries hard to shorten the length of interview to under 30 minutes while a focus group discussion can easily last for 3 hours.
Creating a rate card is a futile exercise if the project specifications are vague.
Fieldwork cost can be reduced by hiring inexperienced interviewers and letting go the proper field training and the various standard quality control checks at the expense of quality.
A CEO should understand well and fully what marketing research is all about before condemning it useless.
Before discussing sample size requirement, check first the size of the universe population.
Watch out for the order bias in the long list of responses when designing an offline pen-paper diary.
It's almost impossible to try to understand the market, the category, your brands, and users of your brands from just one marketing research project only.
A questionnaire administered face-to-face by an interviewer must be designed differently from a self-completion one.
Qualitative research is useful in an exploratory study since the moderator has the flexibility to change the flow of questioning and the questions during a focus group discussion
In a self-completion mode of data collection, researchers should from time to time try out the questionnaires themselves to empathize with the respondents.
Plan the analysis early, even at the proposal stage. Envision the end results as early as possible.
Before conducting a post launch check, you need to wait and give enough time to the consumers to be aware of your brand and buy it.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to see a difference in awareness level when comparing two tracking waves with a one year gap.
When designing a face-to-face interviewer administered questionnaire, try to put yourself in interviewers' shoes.
Technology still can't replace basic marketing research skills like designing and writing a good questionnaire.
A better way to measure the length of interview in a survey is to count the number of questions.
Research objectives determine the data collection strategy, not the other way around.
It's expected that branded and unbranded product tests may yield different results.
Sometimes, the best way to understand why customers did what they did is to ask them directly instead of trying to model it.
Think of sample size as a magnifying glass. You need a bigger sample size to detect a smaller difference.
A good researcher must act as a trusted advisor for the client, not as a slave.
"If you don't have a point of difference, you'd better have a low price." (Jack Trout)
The acceptance of a product should be based on the evaluation by common consumers, not an expert panel.
Having more participants in one focus group discussion doesn't necessarily yield better insights.
Research proposals are supposed to be evaluated comprehensively, not only the investment section.
A boutique research agency doesn't mean a cheap research agency.
In a quantitative research, diagnostics would cause the questionnaire to be longer and the project cost to increase due to the additional analyses incurred.
Before adopting a cheaper ingredient in a product, test it among the loyal users to avoid alienation.
All people involved in the business of consumer insights must really master the fundamental of marketing research.
Research design determines the analytics that can be applied, and vice versa.
Very small businesses can also benefit from market research by asking for a simple feedback from their customers before launching a new promotion.
Qualitative researchers must also understand the principles of experimentation like randomization and rotation to minimize bias.
Manipulating fixed format ASCII data is a dying skill in marketing research.
Behavioral economics covers a lot of topics; e.g., judgments, heuristics, biases, and choices.
No matter how big or small your data are, the appropriate research design and methodology will always depend on your objectives.
You must have a clear definition for every possible answers in each question in your questionnaire.
When testing your new product in a marketing research project, make sure you benchmark it against an existing product in the same class.
Sample size determination is in the end a function of research budget or stimulus availability.
In every research project, it's of the utmost importance to define very clearly in advance the expected outputs.
In an online survey, use a grid question sparingly since it actually counts as multiple questions.
You must not mislead respondents by providing a wrong description about your competitor's product in an unbranded product test.
In a volumetric exercise, it's implicitly assumed that the concept & product are already optimized in the previous research stage.
A customer experience survey must be conducted not too long from the actual event for customers to recall the experience well.
Members of Consumer Insight Department should master Marketing Research principles to collaborate well with research agencies.
Marketing research can help business owners to identify potential consumers.
Changing the layout and planogram of a store without any proper research could run the risk of alienating the loyal shoppers.
Users of marketing research services must acknowledge that each analytical solution has its own limitation.
Marketers who don't fully understand their own business issues can't write accurate research briefs.
A mobile panel can provide a quick, simple, and cheap solution to screen out non-critical options.
Asking too detailed purchase habit in a survey is really problematic since memory fades very quickly.
When your Discussion Guide covers everything from A to Z, it indicates that you have no clue what you want to get out of the research and you are just on a big fishing expedition.
The proposal writer(s) must get involved in executing the project to ensure common sense is upheld in designing the study.
Performance of a recently launched product should always be evaluated via a post launch check survey.
Data collection method depends on the research objectives, analytics, cost & time constraints, and country specific limitation.
Principles of behavioral economics can help designing a survey questionnaire which minimizes the inherent biases of respondents. They can also be used to nudge consumers to prefer your brands.
"Faster, cheaper, better" must be compensated by a very focused, short, and to-the-point questionnaire.
Statistics can help in providing guidance to assess if the observed difference between two scores really matters.
Consumers are not brand managers. It doesn't make sense to expect them to think like a brand manager in a survey or focus group.
When doing data collection via an online or mobile panel, you need to let go imposing various quotas on your sample to be able to complete fieldwork within a reasonable time frame unless your panel database is extremely huge.
The proliferation of small research agencies, originated from fieldwork suppliers, with only barely minimum technical competencies but offering a full marketing research service might deteriorate the quality of research in general.
It must be made a standard operating procedure that the R&D team must attend every product testing marketing research presentation.
Churn is a good example where data mining and marketing research can complement each other.
An "evidence-based decision making" process would rely on the solid data sensemaking skills of the analysts to be able to be completed successfully.
Beware of the few outspoken respondents representing only the minority in the actual population when conducting Qual Research.
If a research project is unplanned and there is only a limited budget, don't expect a comprehensive research design.
Without access to retail audit and consumer panel data, it's just extremely difficult to monitor the market movement and develop the appropriate growth strategy for the brand.
Marketing research can't perform witchcraft. You can't just ask respondents directly & then come up with a new positioning concept.
It's a wishful thinking to expect fieldwork to be 100% efficient. Even machinery can't be 100% efficient.
Cost Per Interview is a function of many factors; e.g., project type, sample size, respondent's criteria, no. of visits, interview length, and data collection method.
Unless the questionnaire is very simple and short, interviewing by street intercept is to be avoided.
Marketing research should be indispensable in an "evidence-based decision making" process.
You need to put yourself in your respondent's shoes when asking him/her to fill in a diary you've created.
A well executed segmentation exercise will depend heavily on pre-determined crystal clear business objectives.
In the end, comparing the quality of field service providers is like comparing SQ to Air Asia.
Qualitative research results in general are not supposed to be generalized to the wider population.
Calculating a rate card makes sense only if the specs are clearly defined & the variation from project to project is very small.
Garbage in, garbage out. Fancy analysis and graphics can't cover up poorly executed field operations
Qualitative research asks "why" while quantitative research asks "what".
Big data project can be considered as providing the "inside view" while marketing research provides the "outside view".
The conclusions are only as good as the data they're based on.
Product performance must be evaluated in a proper context. A concept & product test methodology provides it.
Questionnaire design & writing should really be left to professional marketing researchers.
To be able to extract some consumer insights for decision making purposes, you need to conduct some research. Doing a consumer research does require some investment.
It's just a waste of resource when clients rush you for a proposal but at the end the initiative gets postponed indefinitely since the brand team can't produce the stimulus.
A new method takes time to create, develop, evaluate, test in a real situation, and implement commercially.
Market research agencies can launch standard projects in a short time. Usually, it's the brand team who's having problem finalizing the stimulus in time.
It's just unfortunate when research is used only to support an argument in an internal political debate within a company.
Avoid asking two questions with highly correlated answers.
Brand managers should have a mastery of marketing research principles to be able to write a proper research brief.
A new product launch shouldn't be left to an inexperienced brand team with only a limited knowledge about marketing research.
Each tool / technique has its own strengths and weaknesses. There's no perfect tool / technique.
We should wait for all data to be collected and tabulated before studying the summary statistics to get a more reliable estimate. This is a practical application of the Law of Large Numbers.
Ignoring light and non-buyers of a brand is no recipe for growth (Byron Sharp).
In this digital age, it's unfortunate that some clients still consider doing a 3 to 4-hour usage & attitude study.
Marketing is not an exact science. A proper scientific experiment, if possible, would help supporting or refuting a marketing theory.
Every question in the questionnaire must have one and only one meaning.
A Usage & Attitude study is intended to capture a snapshot of the current market condition.
Software and tools can't replace the skills possessed by a well trained Statistician.
Always prepare a proper table specs before you start your data analysis.
It's futile to ask respondents what they want directly in a marketing research project.
Forcing customers to voice their opinion is not a good way to conduct a customer experience survey.
It's surprising that some researchers still don't understand that different data collection methods could yield different results.
Faster, better, cheaper is a myth! (Robert G. Cooper, in Winning at New Products: Creating Value Through Innovation, 5th Ed., 2017)
Research is valuable if it can be translated into tangible marketing actions (in Steven A. Silbiger. The Ten-Day MBA 4th Ed. 2012).
The validity of the result of a marketing research project depends on the unbiased research design, not on the size of the sample.
Even in data mining projects, the data in the customers database can still contain errors.
When developing close-ended questions in your questionnaire, make sure to include "Not Applicable" as one of the possible answers.
Don't confuse research methodology with operations excellence.
Marketing research can't guarantee any sales increase; probably only a price discount can.
A good branded evaluation should take into account the competition.
If a particular brand image is problematic within an organization, then it'd be better to exclude in from the survey questionnaire.
Marketing research can help business owners to understand their current consumers.
Variance of measurements from regular respondents can't be expected to be as low as that from trained panelists.
Always focus on the research and business objectives when analyzing your data.
Without explicitly written criteria in the research brief, no marketing research agency can prepare a complete questionnaire.
Excellent fieldwork execution is a must in every marketing research projects, and also in Sea Games 2017.
Randomness shouldn't be a determining factor when deciding to conduct mobile surveys.
Online or offline is only a data collection strategy. In the end, research objectives should dictate which one is better suited.
It's just discouraging that some business folks still don't understand that marketing research must go through a proper process to extract good insights from the respondents.
Completing a 60-question mobile survey is an experience you don't want to repeat.
In an online or mobile survey, the layout of a grid question must be designed well to avoid confusing & tiring respondents.
An "evidence-based decision making" process must start with a clearly defined business objective.
Marketeers must master the market research principles to be able to collaborate well with MR agencies to solve business issues.
A quick reminder. Changing the methodology slightly might change the end results significantly.
To date, 2017 was the peak of the marketing research business in Indonesia. Hopefully the positive trend would continue in 2018, the "election year" (Tahun Pilkada).
Volume forecast follows a branded test like a concept test or a concept-product test, and not an unbranded one.
Testing a new product branded but unpriced is dangerous since in the end price does matter.
The number of questions in a mobile survey via a smartphone must be really limited to get good quality data.
In this digital age, marketing research is still all about excellent operations.
A poorly designed research is worse than no research at all.
A census will collect information from all relevant participants in the population, not just from a subset of the population.
A "sexy" method should be selected because it can answer the business objectives well, not because of its "sexiness" only.
It's just an overkill to invite 6 research agencies to pitch for a standard concept-product test project.
"It is worth repeating the truism that research methods should be chosen based on the specific task at hand." (in Doing Qualitative Research by David Silverman, 5th Ed., 2018)
Respondents' fatigue must be taken into account seriously when designing a questionnaire.
Survey length should be determined by the number of questions asked, not the length of interview.
Volume forecast in the FMCG world requires that we talk to all potential buyers to obtain the most accurate number.
You must not use marketing research to try to elicit confidential information from respondents.
It's just insane if you choose a particular software tool to boast only.
If an initiative is important enough, then there should be a proper written research brief.
