Otherwise, feel free to read on!

Last week I attended the 2011 The Market Research Event (TMRE) conference, which bills itself as the most comprehensive conference in the world for improving business insights through market research. With 1,200 market researchers attending 9 tracks of break-out sessions and multiple Keynote events each day, the event didn’t disappoint!

The event was filled with great market research information – here are a few of my top takeaways:

Lighten Up On the Options

Your customers say they want more choices…but your customer satisfaction research indicates otherwise? This scenario is not at all uncommon.

At The Market Research Event, Sheena Iyengar (author of The Art of Choosing) led a session discussing the difficulty of choices. According to Sheena’s research, while customers regularly say they want more choice, they more often are unhappy when they have to choose from the extra choices.

The solution? When deciding what to offer customers, Sheena recommends providing three distinct categories with three distinguishable choices in each category. By striving for a happy medium, you offer enough choices to allow the customer to feel control, but not enough to overwhelm them (this technique works well for survey design, too!).

Screen Your Survey Respondents

Ever have the experience where you find yourself getting far too many flat-liners on your survey? If you’re offering an incentive, these flat-liners might be responding simply to take advantage of your offer.

Try adding a few low-incidence screener questions to your survey to help you screen out the professional survey takers and clean your data.

Appeal to Younger Survey Audiences

Sometimes, the survey medium can be prohibitive. Particularly when dealing with younger audiences, who are often too young to respond to traditional survey methodologies. At the same time, their feedback is still incredibly valuable as a target market. So how to reach them?

Try turning your survey into a game to make it a more engaging experience. By making your survey more interactive and allowing younger audiences to offer feedback in a more fun way (drawing, for instance), younger respondents will be more likely to give genuine, honest answers about their feelings and ideas.

Which brings us to the next takeaway…

Provide Positive Reinforcement

Are monetary incentives not an option for a survey? Try providing positive reinforcement through instant survey results data. You’d be surprised at how many survey respondents will keep going through a survey if they receive some sort of confirmation that their responses are making a difference (or if they can compare their answers to the rest of the survey respondents).

By the same token, you can further engage your respondents of all ages by turning your survey into a game (that’s right – it works for adults, too). Gamification was a hot topic at TMRE, and with good reason – it’s been an extremely successful technique recently to boost survey engagement.

Either way, by giving your respondents some sort of positive reinforcement for their survey responses, you can better engage them and increase your survey response rates.

Lastly, from all the TMRE sessions I attended (too many to recount), my key takeaway is profoundly simple:

If what you’re doing with your market research efforts is not giving you the results that you want, try something different.

Seriously. There are endless different market research techniques and philosophies out there to choose from. If what you’re doing isn’t working, attack it from a different angle until you find what works.

TMRE 2011 was a great event – I hope to see some of you there next year!

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog.

I have to beg your pardon, I’m about to indulge my love of great customer service.

You might wonder how, at TMRE 2011, I got the inspiration to write about customer service. Well for one thing, at SurveyGizmo we’re insanely passionate about customer service and satisfaction. We fully believe that it goes well beyond the Customer Service team. We may be a DIY survey tool, but we know that nothing will truly wow our customers more than a great product combined with great service. Everyone at SurveyGizmo – from the customer service agents you chat with on the phone, to the developers who write the code, to the CEO – has the heart of a servant.

So when I saw a panel run by Sandra Kelly of 3M, I was really excited because she’s a market researcher who started in the Customer Service world. Her specific panel was about “Listening to the Voice of the Complaining Customer.” Obviously no product is perfect, so there will always be customer feedback to be gathered and complaints to be heard. She had several interesting case studies on products that were wonderful for a large number of customers, but unexpectedly caused complaints from others. How should a company handle that sort of situation? Sandra was very specific: “You cannot – and should not – tell the story of your customer without including the story of their complaints.”

In short, paying attention to your customers will let you know if you’re causing disruptive innovations…or just disruption.

At SurveyGizmo we love hearing customer feedback, good or bad. If you call up our Customer Service department or Sales Department to tell them what you think about our survey software, you can be sure that your feedback will be passed to the right people. But what about formalized data collection? What if your company has many locations, how do you aggregate that information? How do you get the best, and most complete picture of your customers’ complaints and other feedback?

Complaint codes are probably not accurately reflecting what your customer really wants to tell you. Talking to the customer is one great way to get the real picture…but isn’t necessarily scalable. Of course, our recommended solution to that problem is simple: create a customer satisfaction survey you or your cs agents can fill out as they’re talking to your customers, and have them engage in a real dialogue. You’ll find some surprising insights.

The other suggestion was to talk to your front line constantly. Rather than focusing exclusively on customers, you should be talking to your people. It was really neat to hear this because it was something Anne Mulcahy of Xerox had mentioned on Monday. It makes a lot of intuitive sense. If you’re researching customer experience – as you should be – rather than just building your product, you should recognize that you have a phenomenal and captive audience in your employees. These are the people who interact with your customers each and every day. Anne went as far as to say that your employees hold your most important qualitative data about your customers and what’s going on with them.

Your people are your army, and you should be constantly asking them what they think about the current product trajectory, their day-to-day interactions with customers, how they’re feeling about those interactions, and (most importantly) what your customers are feeling. As an added bonus, by engaging your employees and asking them what they feel, you are making them feel valued and important!

I apologize for being long-winded, but I absolutely adore this idea. If you’re not constantly surveying your employees about your customers’ satisfaction with your products and services, you’re wasting a treasure chest of data. Obviously, talking to your employees directly is wonderful, but for the sake of documentation, consider sending them customer satisfaction surveys asking them the questions above. You’ll be keeping important records you can use to help create a whole picture of your customers. Your front lines should be advocates for your customers, and you should empower them to be that.

Finally I want to leave you with a quotation from Sandra Kelly’s presentation that really stuck with me. It speaks about the need for customer service in more than just your customer service team. It’s just a little something for your brain to chew on while you think about service and how to best understand your customers and their complaints:

“Researchers need to view themselves as chief customer advocates, moving their businesses forward by providing relevant and actionable customer insights that will reduce businesses’ risk and help drive customer-based innovation. They can – and should – serve as the chief quality control experts for customer information flowing in from many different sources for their organizations.”

Want to get the full story? Here’s a link to our first Market Research Event 2011 post. And here’s a link to Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

The first day of TMRE 2011 was a smashing success. A day full of meeting market researchers, listening in on breakout sessions, and traveling around the world. It’s true: we made it all the way around the world!

…or at least around the Epcot Center’s culinary tour of food and wine during a networking event. (Perhaps I was exaggerating slightly.)

One of my favorite panels was hosted by Annie Pettit of LoveStats. She spoke about social media research and how to accurately capture a whole picture of target audiences. Her main point was that, just like more traditional market research, it’s extremely easy to manipulate stats gathered from social media if you’re not vigilant. She proved her point by manipulating data to prove that people like bank fees more than they like cookies. The moral is, be extremely careful of your biases and expectations. The other moral is that if you never thought stats could be fun you should go check out her blog!

One common theme that I noticed during several panels was the idea that Market Research is in a period of change and needs creativity and fresh approaches. During the keynote Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, said “We are drowning in data and starving for insights.” This was said during her call for innovation in the market research field and for “Actionable, understandable insights.” This struck me me particularly because during a prior panel on Smartphone research hosted by Greg Heist of Gongos Research, it was said that “expertise works best when the history and the future are similar.”

In an age of DIY survey software one of the most important talents a Market Research professional has is perspective. Certainly I don’t think any of the speakers meant to devalue the value of researchers’ ability to collect data or the importance of proper market research techniques, but it’s undeniable that we’re living in an age of easy access to data. It’s easy for a company to embed a poll on their website and collect data in a matter of hours. This will only become more true as smartphone research evolves.

As Mr. Heist pointed out in his panel, smartphones are starting to allow us to start gathering responses that are more in the moment, and less rational. Data collection is becoming immediate: you can have a respondent submit feedback using a smartphone only minutes after an interaction with your store or product. What’s needed, Anne Mulcahy said, are market researchers who are willing to take risks and provide interpretations of data that can generate, shape, and enable ideas. This often requires great bravery on the part of the researcher as innovation is always risky and often goes against what experience counsels. I guess the point is, these are exciting times to be in the business of collecting and interpreting data!

Tuesday is another big day of research fun! Look for more updates coming soon.

After checking in this morning (and a word of advice to any TMRE attendees showing up tomorrow, check in early; the line was long), I got a chance to attend a couple Breakout Sessions. One was on segmentation for strategic product planning and innovation and the other was about using Panels to turn customers into advocates. Both got me thinking about the value data really has to a product. You have the survey software, you have the survey, you may even already have the data, but how will that data really help you?

In the first session we were presented with a case study of how Yum! Brands utilized their data to identify a segment they previously assumed they were reaching…but in reality were not. When it comes down to it, what you think you’re saying about your product or service isn’t important. The only thing that’s important is what your customers are hearing. Accurate and relevant market research data can tell you if there’s any disconnect in your perception of your message versus the reality. Are the words you’re using really reaching the markets you think they are?

By identifying gaps in your segmentation you can move away from product development-based planning to consumer-based planning. Why is this important? Because you’ll move from developing the product and then finding the market, to developing the product for the market. While this sort of approach is more expensive, it also provides better long term value and a bigger picture.

The second session really drove home another important, and often overlooked, value of product research. Often you think of survey tools just providing you data. You survey your respondents to learn about them. But surveys actually go both ways. The simple act of taking a survey about your product is actually educating your customers. Obviously you want customers who are better educated about your product for their own benefit, but also for yours. The more knowledgeable a customer is the more likely they are to be an advocate. In fact GE CareCredit, who ran the session, found almost a 1-to-1 ratio between knowledge and advocacy. Can’t get any better than that!

So that was my morning so far. Pretty exciting stuff! We’d love to hear from you. If you’re at TMRE, what does it have you thinking about? If you’re not, what aspects of Market Research or the conference would you like to hear about? Another update soon!

I thought it was a very cool community and a quick and easy way to get outside input on a question that was nagging you. So that’s cool thing number one – the site in general.

The second thing I wanted to bring up was a question one of the users of Focus posed on the site. They asked, “Who brings more innovation to the Market Research world, small firms or large firms?”

This got me thinking about the advantage of using the different types of firms and how many of you who use SurveyGizmo are part of either a big company or a small company (not necessarily just part of a market research firm, but a company in general).

What I wanted to see are the different ways big companies use SurveyGizmo and online survey software in general versus small companies.

So, how do you use SurveyGizmo every day? Are you in a large company or a small company? Do you think you have advantage because of the size of the company you work for?

Leave the answers to your questions in the comments and we’ll get this conversation started!

(Yes, we do send out a survey once a year asking you these questions, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to ask again and now we can share with the community!)

We currently have a plethora of questions we want to ask you, but as usual want to know if you have questions you want to ask your peers as well.

The “Poll of the Week” will be shown for just one week, and after the week is up, we’ll send out the results and you’ll then be able to use them for your own research purposes.

That brings us to what questions you want to ask. A wide range of professionals will be taking these polls, so you’ll have a large enough sample size to make appropriate assumptions from the data given.

Just email us at marketing@sgizmo.com with your poll question with answer options, and we’ll try and include it in our weekly poll. If you don’t have an exact question in mind, but have a topic you’d like to see covered, feel free to forward that on as well.

Keep your eyes peeled for the surveys to start coming out, and more importantly be sure to sign-up for the weekly email to see the results once we launch everything!

But when these test are not well designed, this type of research tends to yield general information that is not very actionable or worst yet, could be misleading. Creating a concept test correctly is key to making informed decisions.

The first step in concept testing is to create product concepts that clearly define the “reasons-to-believe” in the product and the experience the customer may expect from it.

The best source for good product concept descriptions is the potential customer.

Conducting qualitative market research as the first step in the concept testing process can bring a lot of value by uncovering what is important to customers and how customers talk about the product.

I recently was invited to take an online survey which was used to conduct a concept test to measure the appeal of online marketing research courses.  I think back now and wonder if the sponsor of the survey did his homework in trying to identify what features really matter to potential end-users of online marketing research courses.

The image below is a snapshot of how the concept was presented in the online survey. Of the four features described in the concept, the only one I found relevant is the 24/7 accessibility. The other three are quite vague and somewhat immaterial.

 What does it matter if the courses will have 3 to 8 hours of total instruction if I don’t know the length of each class? Is it 30 minutes or 60 minutes?

My work schedule and home life may only allow me to sit for 20 minutes at a time to attend an online class.

Furthermore, I don’t know what they mean by “comprehensive instructions.”

Are the classes task-oriented, will I need to do a lot in preparation to take the class? I associate the word “instructions” with manuals, so when I read this I feel exhausted already. Who reads manuals these days?

“Dynamic interfaces” and the image they use don’t tell me much either.

A more concrete example would have helped to set my expectations. Without any direction, my expectations could be too high, which can lead to deep disappointment if the courses don’t align with my notions of what a dynamic interface is in this context.

A short video showing different screens would have provided a better illustration of what the user can expect from the interface.

Finally, the most relevant feature to me is the course topic and this is absent from the product concept.

One may contend that there are many topics of interest and there is interest in testing only the format. On the hand, I would argue that the format is irrelevant if the topic is not of interest. The approach followed here doesn’t really reflect how the end-user thinks about this product.

If topic is the most important feature when selecting an online class, then excluding it creates an artificial product concept to which it is difficult to give an accurate answer. When they asked if I would be interested in these courses, my only plausible answer was “might or might not.”

I have a feeling that that study produced misleading results for them, if I had so much trouble with filling out the answers. That was an example of what not to do.

So what are the key steps in conducting product concept tests that yield accurate results?

1. Conduct qualitative research with members of the target audience.  Avoid “inbred” concepts based only on input from internal staff – A few interviews with marketing research professionals would have provided a richer and more realistic foundation on which to base the concept.
2. Create concepts that are concrete and put them in relevant context – An online course on a particular topic would have allowed me to give a more realistic response. A video could have shown me what to expect from the “dynamic interface.”
3. Write concepts in the target audience’s language – No “instructions” please!
4. Focus on Reasons-to-Believe arguments that highlight what is important to your audience – I need more than 24/7 accessibility to assess the value of this service. Topics are a good start.

If you’d like more help with concept testing, please head over to Relevant Insights’ and see our Concept Testing and Product Optimization services.

The focus of the presentation was a new program at Best Buy which was created to solve a problem common to many large B2C companies: We have 180,000 employees talking to customers every day becoming experts to our customer needs — how do we gain access to that expertise?

Bill reports that they have 1.5 billion interactions with customers yearly. He saw it as a huge wealth of information going untapped while they spent tens of thousands of dollars on focus groups to give them information already available from employees.

So to solve the problem they designed a program to give employees the ability to send customer comments, feedback, behavior, questions and experiences into a database system (which they call VOCE). The data is obviously qualitative and Bill glossed over exactly how they analyze it. However, the results of the data are then used to discover trends and address problems they may never have known existed.

Even better, they are discovering insights that their competitors may not know, or at least not as soon.

Bill showed a few video clips during the presentation. One showed a number of employees using the system which is simply a widget available at any computer terminal in the stores using it. The employees simply walk over to the computer between customers and record any (and all) feedback they have about the experience.

This is obviously a great idea for retail and consumer oriented businesses, but with a little imagination and someone to manage it, I think it could be implemented in business-to-business companies too.

If you are going to try something like this, Bill’s suggestion is keep it simple to use. Apparently they met with various degrees of failure 26 times before they came up with something easy and simple to use! So keep innovating and don’t give up!

Off to the next session!

Usually, those who give such advice are not professionally trained market researchers or have made a short incursion into the market research field and got disappointed by its complexity, often equated with the inability of any single research method to capture data that explains customer behavior in its totality.

The most frequent reasons I hear from businesses for not doing formal primary market research include:

1. Customers don’t know what they want, so why ask
2. We believe only in what customers do (transactional and behavioral data), not what they say
3. Research methods like surveys and focus groups are flawed
4. Many big brands are born without any research
5. I go with my intuition and “gut feeling”
6. It is too expensive ( it is a cost, not an investment)
7. We know all there is to know about our industry and customers
8. Our products are for everybody (research won’t add any new insights)

Instead of asking customers, there are some who recommend eavesdropping on Walmart customers while they shop or walking your dog to let the subconscious mind gives you the answers.

I hope that no serious business owner pays attention to this type of advice. No bank or VC will give money to a business based on such data. Customers CAN tell you what they want; you just have to know how to ask and what to ask.

To those who complain about surveys, focus groups and other data collection methods, I say: No research method is perfect, just make sure to choose one that is a good fit for the research objectives at hand. If budget allows it, use more than one.

Ford and Walmart are often cited as examples for the argument that several big brands were born because their creators had an idea and went for it, without doing any research. Unfortunately, there are countless ideas, even patented ones, which have failed miserably.  Besides, big brands may have come to existence thanks to their creators’ light bulb moment, but they all have market research departments that keep them attuned with customers’ needs and market conditions.

Given the current fierce competition we see in most product categories, if you don’t do proper market research (which is more than popularity polls and focus groups) you are doomed to fail. Many small business fail because their owners had an idea and never bothered to check whether there was a real need in the market (beyond asking their closest friends, relatives and gathering some anecdotal data) that would sustain their idea. Even behavioral testing and sales data will give you only half of the story. If you really want to grow your business, you need to know not only what customers do, but also why they do it.

I have also heard the advice that you should walk in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself what he would want and do. That’s called empathy. Good to have, but not enough if you are in business to make a profit. Unfortunately, human perception is very selective and we tend to “see and hear” what already confirms our beliefs, so “thinking as the customer,” doing anecdotal research as suggested by eavesdropping or making calls to your subconscious, will only give you biased information aligned with what you want to hear. You are too close to your idea to be objective.

In many instances, you can learn about your customers with the help of DIY research as long as you have the expertise, time and resources to do the right type of research for your business objectives. However, consider using a third-party research vendor when you know you will be introducing your own biases into the research. An external research vendor can help you craft the questions to ask, select the best data collection method (qualitative or quantitative) and extract insights from the data without filtering it through your colander of expectations and desires.

If you need any help with deciding which research design to adopt, how to design a survey or how to extract insights from data you have already collected, don’t hesitate to ask. To learn more about Relevant Insights’ consumer data service visit Consumer Shopping Behavior Insights.

Regardless of whether your customers are consumers or business decision makers, at Relevant Insights, we always recommend assuming a customer-centric market research approach in alignment with business objectives. This is based on two basic principles:

• Learn how to connect with your target customer by getting a 360 degree view of his behaviors, experiences, knowledge and emotions.

• Have a clear idea of what you want the customer to think and do regarding the company’s brand and products, having in mind the ultimate business goals: acquire and retain customers.

A customer research plan based on these two principles should include four key areas of research:

• Awareness: As a Cuban saying goes “the baby who doesn’t cry, doesn’t eat,” which means we have to let the market know about our products and services to get buyers.

• Targeting: Businesses usually are more successful if they are able to define early on who their target customers are and which customer segments have the highest profit potential.

• Acquisition: Without customers any business is bound to fail, so we need to know how we can attract new customers through appealing product benefits, the right pricing model, and effective marketing programs.

• Retention: Generating repeat purchases from current customers is the most cost-efficient path to business growth, so a retention strategy is a must for any business that wants to thrive.

There are many research questions that can be asked within each of these areas depending on the stage a product, brand or company is at. Below are some of the customer research questions that should be in the short list of any business that wants to succeed.

Find the answers to your customer research questions and you will learn how to connect with your target customers and will be way ahead of your competition.