This is where I need your help! I’d like to beef up our case study library so that we have a variety of examples to show potential users when they ask.

What am I looking for?

I’m looking for SurveyGizmo uses that are unique, out of the ordinary, or just down-right awesome.

What will you get for volunteering?

You’ll receive a free Enterprise level account for a month (and all the fame and glory of having your survey used as a case study!)

How do you submit your survey as a case study?

I made it really easy. Just fill out the survey below and I’ll be in touch with you in a few days about whether we’ll be using your survey and when we’ll make it all happen.

If you think you think your survey is awesome or unique in any way, I’d love to check it out. Please fill out the survey below and I’ll be in touch soon. Thanks so much for helping us out!

Sears had a customer dispute that was unresolved and made it all the way up to the corporate offices. A stove had burned a hole in the carpet of a couple’s kitchen, and at this level, Sears hired out a third party to negotiate the dispute. Needless to say, at this level, I’m sure the individual who was brought in to negotiate was not a small expenditure.

The gentleman went to the trailer home of the two individuals, an older couple, and noticed the hole in front of the new stove, which was seemingly replaced during previous conversations with Sears. He sat down and talked with the couple for about 45 minutes, getting to know them better. He then asked them one simple, magical question, “What would you like to have me do for you?“

They replied, “We don’t expect you to put new carpet throughout, but if we could just get an area rug or something to nicely cover up the hole, that would be great.”

Numerous hours, frustration, and money because nobody bothered to find out what they wanted out of the negotiation. Rarely do both parties in a negotiation want the same thing, so being aware of the other person’s wants is critical to successfully negotiating. Have no doubt, you will likely be surprised how reasonable and amazing people are when you invest time in listening and understanding.

CASE STUDY: A leading price optimization and management solutions company, TriBlend Solutions, needed information to guide its marketing efforts. They were planning to do a survey of customers and prospects in order to better understand their market and their target audience.

Designing a Pricing Survey – Part II

Recall TriBlend Solutions (TS) was partnering with the Professional Pricing Society (PPS) to do some pricing research. The survey was shaping up but it was a long way from being finalized. The survey still needed detailed refinement, deployment online, more reviews of the online version and testing before it would be ready to launch.

Version 4 was sent to Lori and Eric for review. Lori and Eric took a few days and another conference call was held on August 23 to go over comments and produce the next draft.

This round of changes was fairly extensive. Of the approximately 40 questions in the survey only three questions remained untouched. I won’t go through every change but will give some of the highlights.

We refined the introduction wording to make it more focused. For example, “ . . . the state of the current technology, challenges and trends in our industry,” was changed to “ . . . the state of the current approaches to and tools for pricing across industries.” This minor change was more in tune with what was to follow thus providing better setup for the respondent.

The definitions were fine tuned to bring them more in line with the specific questions being asked.

The questions were organized into three sections, “Pricing at Your Company”, “Pricing Tools and Adoption of Price Management Software” and “Pricing Effectiveness Challenges”. A demographics and closing section were added as well.

The question, “How would you rate the overall effectiveness of the pricing tools at your company?” seemed out of place. Would it not be better to ask this question after we asked what pricing tools are used at the company? Moving this question would make the data we received much more meaningful.

The question, “What are your company’s TOP TWO objectives regarding pricing?” was changed to: “What business goals are the BIGGEST drivers of your company’s pricing strategy?” The change focuses respondent attention on the intent of the question. The original wording seemed to be all right but was just a little too broad to provide meaningful information.

“Where does the pricing responsibility reside in your company for each of the following pricing processes/activities [the list that followed had 10 items]?” This question was going to be extremely involved and would not provide meaningful information. It was eliminated and instead we replaced it with the following question; “How is pricing generally managed in your company?

• Centrally managed by corporate pricing group
• Decentralized activities within each region or business unit
• Other (please explain)”

Branching was refined to target different questions for different respondents based on where they were in their adoption of pricing tools. For example those that have already deployed price management software were asked different questions than those that had not done so.

Several questions were deleted at this point because they no longer made sense. A perfect example of a question that lost its meaning is the question, “When you have implemented new pricing tools or processes, was it typically part of other changes made in your company?” Clearly this question is too broad to provide useful information.

The only other substantial change for this round, other than moving questions to their most appropriate section, was the revision of the options provided for several questions. The more thought given to the questions the better equipped you are to decipher appropriate question options.

The next draft was scheduled to be ready for review by August 27 with hopes of having a final copy by September 5. Each of us reviewed version 5 by August 28 and it felt like we had a near final draft, however a few important changes surfaced. For example, Lori realized we needed to add a question asking for the respondent’s work location so that the analysis could include breakouts by location (like US versus other parts of the world). Next Eric was to review the survey once more and pass it on to the PPS for their buy-in.

[Side Note: This is the point in the design where Lori realized she wanted SDA to handle the online deployment of the survey, which led to her agreeing that SurveyGizmo was the best tool for us to use. Although outside the scope of this article, there is plenty of value to add when going from a finished questionnaire to the final online deployment.]

Although it seemed like we were close to a final version, discussion ensued on a couple of items including what detail was needed when we asked for location – would it make sense to have US, Canada, UK and other? Where would Russia go? Should we add “Middle East? September 5 came and went, as PPS was taking longer than expected to look at the survey. The planned launch was pushed back to September 18, but we still needed to put the survey online and test it with a pilot group as well as have PPS add their comments. There would be further delays.

When PPS finally reviewed the survey they were very impressed, but they had a few issues around the privacy of those on their member list to whom we would send the survey. Next Lori had an opportunity to give the survey (in paper form) to a small group of customers and prospects that were attending an event hosted by TS. This presented an opportunity to see some “live” data, which led to more adjustments and changes.

The survey was put online and reviewed on September 12. After changes in fonts and adjustments to the look and feel of the online version, another conference call was scheduled for September 18 to go through the survey in more detail. It was another good working session. We refined many of the options for the multiple-choice questions and added some new questions. As is often the case, when you see the survey as the respondent will see it, it can spawn new ideas.

At this point we went back and forth between editing a text version of the survey (exported from SurveyGizmo) and making changes directly to the online version. Over the next month there were at least three more rounds of revisions, most of which involved the rewording of questions and question options.

We were now on version 12 and the survey was ready for a pilot run. We sent the survey to a small group of team members at TS. (At the same time, PPS set a launch date of October 31, so there was plenty of time for the pilot.) The pilot and further reviews of the online survey led to a host (about 22) of improvements. Most were minor, but they all helped make the survey easier to understand and more targeted toward the desired information. I won’t list all the changes made at this stage, but a few examples will illustrate the type of changes made. I’ve left out the changes to formatting. As you look through these changes remember that the motivation is always to strengthen the survey objectives. Changes are made to improve the quality of data and facilitate the use of the data in your decision-making.

• Numbering was removed to avoid confusion when questions are skipped due to branching.
• A couple of ratings questions were changed for drop-downs to radio buttons. We felt like radio buttons would be better so respondents could see all the choices at once.
• Based on pilot responses we changed year ranges for the question, “How long have you been involved in pricing?”
• For five questions “you” was replaced by “your company”.
• “Manager” was changed to “Manager/Analyst”
• “Where do you spend MOST of your ‘pricing activity’ time?” was changed to “What pricing activities take up MOST of your time?”

Now we were very close to having the survey ready to launch. There were just a few more cosmetic changes, like fixing some graphics, changing question formatting, adding a few missing words and adjusting what questions get shown to whom based on responses. It was October 26 and Lori, Eric and I reviewed it once more.

I found a few things to clean up but I thought we were done before Lori mentioned that Eric had about 20 more “minor” edits! Eric called it his “fine tooth comb” list. Although I was taken back by the thought of even more changes, I never complained about time spent up front on the design. I may get testy when someone wants to “overdo” the analysis side but never the design. The difference is that every change to the survey design has the potential to improve the data quality, the usability of the data and/or the response rate.

So, I happily made the changes from Eric’s fine-tooth-comb list (most of them were really good changes) and the survey was finally ready to launch on October 30.

Not all surveys go through 14 or more revisions, as we will see in my next case study, but it can be necessary to ensure the survey produces the information you need. And for this survey we even got some (unsolicited) comments that helped justify all our work. Here are some of those comments:

• “Thanks for the survey”
• “Excellent survey!“
• “Great Study… this will help a lot to assess how we are situated compared to other companies“
• “Nice survey. Worded pretty well in general.“

We received over 400 responses to the survey. If you would like to see an example of the final product (names changed for privacy purposes), you can see it here.

The design called for two main requirements:

• A Berkeley inspired look and feel
• A two-column layout with the left column used for instructions on that particular page of the survey

Our Professional Services design team quickly went to work on the Berkeley inspired look and feel, using the About Berkeley page as their guide:

To incorporate the second requirement, the design team used the Page Description section of any page within a SurveyGizmo survey as the easy to edit section that will serve for the instructions. Secondarily, the area supports full HTML code, allowing the Berkeley staff to add in any markup or additional images in the left column. In the end, the results were spectacular:

You can see the sample Berkeley inspired survey template directly if the images above are not enough interactivity. The final step for our team was to put in some additional hours outside of the Professional Services request and create a general layout that would be available to customers in the most recent version of the survey tool, SurveyGizmo 3.0, as one of the new themes available called Page Description. Here’s a peek:

If you would like a website inspired custom template, get in touch with our Professional Services team through the only request form. Thank you to the staff at Berkeley who allowed us this quick case study and showcase.

Quick Tip

On a particular page, if you want the side column to disappear, put the following code into the Page Description:

<style type='text/css'>
#sg-side-col { width: 0%; }
#sg-main-col { width: 100%; }
</style>

CASE STUDY 1

A leading price optimization and management solutions company, TriBlend Solutions, needs information to guide its marketing efforts. They plan to do a survey of customers and prospects in order to better understand their market and their target audience.

INTRODUCTION

TriBlend Solutions (TS) partnered with the Professional Pricing Society (PPS) to do their survey. TS was considering doing the survey themselves. They had a list of questions and PPS had an account for doing surveys. (This would change!)

The main players for this project were Lori, Lori’s co-worker, Eric and their manager Andy, all with TS. TS was looking to get some help with the design and structure of their survey. Lori found Survey Design and Analysis from a web search and that’s how she came into contact with me. Lori and her team had most of their questions written and suspected it wouldn’t take much time to have someone help them create the final survey.

Lori’s original request was on June 24. They planned to deploy in the fall.

On June 27 I responded to Lori with a request for more information on the following:

• Your survey objectives and reasons for starting this undertaking
• The number of names (email addresses) on your survey list
• Whether you’ve done previous studies that were similar
• The proposed size of the survey (number of questions)

[The design process actually starts in the proposal phase!]

The information she provided was used to create a proposal. After several delays through July we had a conference call on August 2 to discuss the details of our proposal. On August 8th our proposal to design their questionnaire and make recommendations for executing the survey was accepted. A few days later the work was expanded to include the complete execution of the survey. The survey design always includes considerations for execution and Lori realized the complete execution would be a natural extension of the design process.

SURVEY DESIGN PROCESS

A kickoff meeting (conference call) was scheduled for August 14. Prior to the meeting the following survey objectives were enumerated:

• Learn what they can do better
• Look at challenges, prepare for future
• Assess the momentum in industry
• Understand current pricing capabilities

Kickoff Meeting (conference call), August 14 – Ed with Lori, Andy and Eric

This first meeting lasted over two hours on the phone. It went long because it was productive. Everyone felt that we made good progress. There was that “ah-ha” moment when Lori and Eric realized that designing a good survey meant thinking through EVERY question completely. Comment from Lori:

“I know it was a long meeting but we’re so happy to be working with you. We’re really confident that in the end we’re going to have a fabulous survey.”

There were 35 questions in the original list and we talked about each question. What are we trying to get from this question? Will it be ambiguous to the respondent? Is it clear? Here are a couple of examples from our discussions:

1. Has your company’s pricing process been discussed or addressed by your company’s board, investors or financial analysts?
   Yes – answer 5 then go to 6
   No – go to 6
   What does “discussed or addressed,” mean? Are they the same thing or different? And what does “pricing process,” mean? Is the meaning the same for every company who will respond?
2. What is their primary focus or directive?
   “Primary focus or directive”? Are we trying to get at “business goals”? The wording is too vague and will probably mean something different for each respondent.
3. What functional group is driving the pricing improvement initiative?
   Driving or leading? Which are we looking for?
4. Do you plan on implementing price management software?
   Is implementing the right word or is deploying more appropriate for software?

This is a small subset. Every question (all 35) were discussed and evaluated from the viewpoint of the person who would be answering the question. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, it isn’t so critical that everyone understand every question. What is critical is that everyone has the same understanding of every question. Questions need to be so clear that there can be only one way to view them.

Discussion about the wording for each question led to work on the structure of the questions. How can we order the questions so that they flow evenly and the information builds in a way that makes it easier for the respondent? Are there background or qualifying questions needed to help the respondent see what is coming?

At the end of this first conference call, we realized that we needed an introduction and a few qualifying questions in order to not only help the respondent but also for us to know who (what type of person) was answering the survey.

Our next steps were for TriBlend to put together definitions or explanations for the following terms (this list started out differently and changed several times over the course of the design process):

• Pricing team
• Pricing technology
• Pricing process
• Pricing tool
• Pricing function
• Pricing effectiveness
• Price management software

We also determined that we needed to understand the “pricing activities” that typical companies go through. This would help us have a basic understanding of whom we were dealing with and the perspective they have for answering the questions. TriBlend took on this task.

I created the next draft of the survey, which I’ll call version 4 (TriBlend had gone through a couple of revisions at the onset).

Version 4 included:

The following introduction:

“Thank you for participating in our pricing study. The information you provide will be used to better understand the state of the current technology, challenges and trends in our industry. These questions should take 10-15 minutes of your time. If you are interested in receiving a summary of the results of this study be sure to indicate so on the last page of this questionnaire.”

A list of definitions to which the respondent could refer throughout the survey:

Definitions
In what follows several terms will be used. Please refer to these definitions as needed.

I. Pricing – Any and all activities involved with understanding and or setting prices for a company’s products

II. Pricing Process – Any sequence of pricing-related activities

III. Pricing Tool – Any software, commercial or otherwise, used to support a pricing activity

IV. Price Management Software – A commercial pricing tool specifically designed to improve pricing effectiveness

V. Pricing Effectiveness – The degree to which your pricing processes and or tools produce the desired results in terms of revenue, win rates, margins and predictability

And a set of introductory or qualifying questions:

1. How familiar are you with the “pricing” at your company?
2. What is your role with regard to pricing at your company? (Select all that apply)
3. Overall, how would rate the effectiveness of the pricing processes at your company?
4. How would rate the effectiveness of the pricing tools at your company?
5. What method do you use to set and negotiate prices?
6. Comments On Introductory Questions

[Note the first five of these questions were multiple choice but the choices have been left off for brevity sake.]

Version 4 was sent to Lori, Andy and Eric on August 18 for their review. I asked them to focus on the following points:

• Addition and deletion of questions
• Placement of questions in sections
• Placement of Sections
• Section titles
• Length of the survey and flow of the questions
• Question applicability by type of respondent (managers versus workers)
• Executive only questions (i.e. do some questions apply only to executives)
• Understandability and definitions

As part of the next review we were able to focus on which questions could be answered by which type of customer or prospect. This led to adding branching and question skipping (and a chance for SurveyGizmo features to shine). We also expanded the review to include more people identified by Lori and Eric.

The survey was shaping up but it was a long way from being finalized and ready to launch, as we will see in my next blog entry. The survey still needed detailed refinement, deployment online, more reviews of the online version and testing before it would be ready to launch. As I continue this case study we will watch the survey go to version 12, see the final product and see how all the design work paid off.

To be continued . . .

You may have heard about last year’s marketing snafus for two of Pepsico’s big brands, Tropicana and Gatorade. In both cases, the brands got makeovers that stripped their brand identity, for the sake of simplicity, and gave them a quite generic look. This resulted in confused consumers, which, in turn, hurt sales. In the case of Tropicana, after consumers protested, PepsiCo reinstated the old packaging with the familiar orange with the straw. But for Gatorade, now called “G,” PepsiCo continued ahead with the new packaging and label.

In July 2009, Beverage Digest estimated that Gatorade had lost a 4.5% share of the sports-drink market and its volume slipped 17.5% in the first six months of 2009 after the launch of the new packaging in January.

Did they conduct brand research?

PepsiCo’s internal brand research indicated that ‘G’ had scored high in the “coolness” factor, which fit the young market they were targeting. According to Jimmy Smith, the creator of the G ads, the main target was kids 13 to 17. However, it seems that the “coolness” factor may have worked against Gatorade’s brand equity for the rest of the market.

Brands take special meaning to consumers based on their past experiences with the product and the marketing programs that have accompanied the brand over the years. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity we are able to learn about a brand, get used to its packaging, logo, slogan and develop brand associations. As Keller said in Strategic Brand Management (1998), “…ultimately a brand is something that resides in the minds of the consumers. A brand is a perceptual entity, rooted in reality, but also reflecting the perceptions and perhaps even the idiosyncrasies of consumers.”

By the same token, brain plasticity is also responsible for the difficulties we face when trying to unlearn things. Neuronal connections have been formed and strengthen during our experience with the brand and they are hard to break. This has clear implications for any rebranding efforts, as marketers need to consider what makes a brand strong, unique and preferred before picking it apart to improve its image. This is why it is so important that before a brand makeover, brand research be conducted to avoid damaging brand equity.

The best approach to brand research combines both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Neither one alone gives a solid answer, so I would suggest to consider following this approach to brand research:

1. Define the problem. First, make sure it is an image problem and not a problem with the product or service.
2. Explore current brand perceptions, usage patterns, customer experience, and problem areas. This will give you a feel for the brand legacy and how much you can depart from it.
3. Create several new brand concepts and test them. Use the results from the initial qualitative research to develop different branding concepts. Explore initial reactions to the concepts, fine-tune them, and test them again using qualitative techniques.
4. Follow-up with quantitative research. Use a large enough sample to select a winner and project the results to your target population. Define the screening criteria of your sample carefully. To certain market segments, some brand attributes may be more relevant than to others, so make sure all segments are represented to avoid biased results.

Don’t be tempted to only run a couple of focus groups or an online survey and feel you know everything. Conducting brand research with the right approach will pay off and prevent you from making mistakes that will hurt your bottom line. If you need help revitalizing your brand with some sensible testing I’d be happy you to talk to you about it.

[Editor's note: If you're just getting started with brand research you might find the SurveyGizmo Image Chooser question type useful. If you would like to dig deeper into some qualitative data by adding live survey moderating to elicit deeper responses, take a look at our partner iModerate. Read more about iModerate on our partners page]

The motivation for this is that every time Scott (our CEO) does an webinar or demo, he inevitably fields questions about target customers. It sounds like an easy task (surveys are pretty universal), but it’s actually more complicated than it seems. Some of our clients are large corporations that use SurveyGizmo to measure customer satisfaction, conduct market research, gather new leads by integrating SurveyGizmo with SaleForce.com (check out tutorials here and here), and just about every other “traditional” survey you can imagine. We also have customers who are conducting their first survey ever and are looking to SurveyGizmo for technological and methodological guidance help make it easy. In a completely different segment, we have a strong group of academic researchers who use SurveyGizmo for conducting survey and experimental research studies, setting up student tests and quizzes, and even for teaching marketing research. And sometimes, people just need a quick way to ask a group to vote on options for an upcoming company outing.

SurveyGizmo can do all of these things (and a lot more), and that’s exactly why it’s so hard to pin down a target audience. Because SurveyGizmo is so versatile, Scott usually explains that SurveyGizmo is for “anyone who wants to design a great survey!” While that’s a true statement, it’s not exactly satisfying. So as part of our customer survey project, one of the big goals is to figure out who uses SurveyGizmo and how their needs differ as a function of their unique circumstances.

Our end goal in doing this is to better understand each segment’s unique (and common) needs, so that we can tailor our marketing/advertising efforts to reflect the needs of each segment. This will allow us to position SurveyGizmo appropriately for different marketing and advertising efforts based upon the needs of the target segments (more on this in future posts).

Our first step in segmentation is to think about how survey users might differ. We came up with four variables, each with two levels.

Variable (levels)
Sophistication Needs/Features (basic, advanced)
Number of Surveys (few, many)
Number of Responses per survey (low, high)
Survey Length (short, long)

This gives us a conceptual space in which to start placing our users. Take a look at how we filled out the chart below.

Even though we identified four variables which could have given sixteen specific groups (2^4), once we started plugging customer types into the spaces, it turned out that the variables were flexible guides rather than hard and fast barriers allowing us to combine cells. This gives us plenty to work with without being overwhelmed by detail (being overly focused can be as bad as being too general).

As a reflection of our analysis and noodling over this problem, the schematic reveals that users choosing SurveyGizmo for advanced features probably aren’t doing a few short surveys. Additionally, it is evident that the number of responses likely correlates with the length of survey and that customers with advanced needs might be choosing SurveyGizmo for different reasons. At the same time, it is also clear that basic users occupy all areas of the space (note that you could imagine/arrange the advanced and basic users tables as three dimensional spaces with axes corresponding to number of surveys, number of responses, and length of surveys).

In the end, we came up with three relatively broad segments: Advanced-Short, Advanced-Long, Basic. We can now start thinking about the different things we want to know from each segment that we should build into our survey.

The ultimate goal of a survey is to understand how groups differ based upon defined characteristics. By going through a segmentation exercise, you can anticipate the types of questions you should ask in your survey to help you better understand the different needs of each separate group. This makes for better data and a better use of respondents’ time since you’re asking the right questions to the right customers.

Extra Credit
For those who want to go more in depth on segmentation, Chapter 1 in Kellogg on Marketing is a great resource. Links below for the Google Book (some pages missing) and Amazon where you can order a full version to read on your next plane trip.

Google Book — Kellogg on Marketing (some pages missing)
Amazon — Kellogg on Marketing

So, in response to that, we asked some of our customers the top reasons why they’ve switched, and put that together into a handy-dandy (and darn good looking) pdf titled 10 reasons to switch to SurveyGizmo. Some of those reasons include the true ability to do branded surveys, multi-language survey creation and better reporting.

In the meantime, you can still do some pretty wicked stuff. The Orange Country Register found us a few months ago with exactly that in mind. Check out their OC Political Pulse page. They use SurveyGizmo to build surveys and collect responses, then render the results in a custom Adobe Flex application built by their crack team of programmers. They are able to allow visitors to drill down into polls and see political data in demographic slices.

BTW, we don’t restrict access to the API. Even Free users can build apps against it. So if you have a particular survey itch that needs to be scratched for your web site, sign up for a free account and give it a whirl.