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