Wow! It has now been 5 months since my last entry on the blog. Something that was supposed to be a weekly exercise has now really lapsed.

While a brand new baby in the family has had a lot to do with my tardiness, summer weather has also got in the way.

Unless I throw the gauntlet down I suspect a new entry will be some time away. So be prepared for next week for some new hard hitting rocking commentary on the wonderful world of market research.

There it is – the gauntlet is down.

See you then!

The Internet has helped to create a language of its own, a language which is hard to keep up with. The great thing about ‘crowdsourcing’ is that you can kinda figure out what it means just the word its self (unlike names like twitter, google, bing). Obviously it has something to do with sourcing something with crowds. Turns out when I looked a bit closer ‘Crowdsourcing’ isn’t that new and it means a little more than sourcing from crowds.

Seems that ‘Crowdsourcing’ was coined back in June 2006 by Jeff Howe in Wired magazine. Broadly speaking ‘Crowdsourcing’ refers to the outsourcing of work to a large undefined group of people. Typically this occurs in the digital world as opposed to the real world (shame, as I’d love to crowd-source by gardening out).

It strikes me that there are some real similarities between ‘Crowdsourcing’ and Market Research, in fact it seems that there are so many similarities that it is useful to compare the two and find out what the difference between market research and crowd-sourcing actually is.

Similarities

Crowd-sourcing and Market Research aide Good Product Design. Crowd-sourcing in many examples sees consumers taking the driver seat in regards to product design/survey design. There are examples of consumers being directly involved in the end product i.e. sneaker design. Market research does this to0.

Crowd sourcing involves collaboration between company and consumer.

Seems that market research and crowdsourcing have collaboration in common as well.

Crowdsourcing uses incentives like prizes, sometimes no incentives are used.

After looking at some of the examples of crowd sourcing it seems to me that market research can best considered a type of crowdsourcing. So if you were worried that you’d missed the next best thing your not. Ff you are doing some market research, then you are doing some crowdsourcing. Although one of the underlying platforms that crowdsourcing relies on is web 2.0 (i.e. the two way communication the Internet provides). It would seem then that market research 2.0 would be more closely aligned  to crowdsourcing than market research 1.0. Next crowdsourcing project – my garden.

Below is a list of the 10 best songs (IMHO) to do market research to.

10. Listen To What The Man Said – Paul Mccartney & Wings

9.  Can’t Buy Me Love – The Beatles

8. Good Vibrations – The Beach Boys

7. Cant You Hear Me Calling – Ricky Skaggs (This one goes out to all telephone interviewers)

6. I Can’t Be Satisfied – Muddy Waters

5. Give Me One Reason – Tracy Chapman

4. Some Might Say – Oasis

3. Five Short Minutes – Jim Croce (the best survey length)

2. Keep the customer satisfied – Simon & Garfunkel

1.  (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones

A special mention goes to Speech De Belle who just won the 2009 Mercury prize. Before becoming a prize winning musician she was also a market researcher.

If you think I have left any songs out or challenge my ordering let me know. And for those about to survey ‘We salute you’!

I was kicking myself after subscribing up to New Zealand Marketing for two years to find out a week later that 3media (the magazine publishers) had gone into liquidation. To be frank I wasn’t actually that keen on subscribing to the magazine but it was a pretty good deal (now I know why) and is really the only industry magazine that we have so felt duty bound to support it.

The beef I had with NZ Marketing (and a lot of other business magazines) is that a great deal of the contributors are industry participants who clearly have a vested interest in the topic they are writing about.  The problem I have with a lot of the articles is that often they read more like advertorials or at best tip sheets (i.e. six steps to a better brand etc.)

What the articles often are not are well balanced, objective or particularly that interesting. If you look closely you will often find an advert by a contributing writer in the same edition. Off course this is not always the case but often it is.

My other criticism of many business magazines is that many of the feature articles are banal at best consisting of incessant cheer-leading for fear of rubbing someone up the wring way and losing an advertising opportunity (the old who do you serve your readers or your advertisers chestnut). While this may help the bottom line it makes for fairly dull reading.

I was pretty excited then when I heard that HB Media had picked up the NZ Marketing masthead and were re-vamping the publication. I like what they have done with Idealog and expected good things.  It seems the team have been pretty busy over the last few months and I waspleasantly surprised when I found my brand spanking new copy of the magazine in my mailbox today.

The (new) NZ Marketing mag at first glance seems to have avoided some of my ealier criticisms judging by this editions feature article titled ‘Epic Fail’ (BTW – don’t get me started on the current trend to label screw ups as ‘fail’).

‘Epic Fail’ by Simon Young takes a hard look at the recent mismanagement of screw ups by Cadbury, Jetstar and Dominos. Quite a good read!

Key Changes

From my observation these appear to be the key changes in the new look NZ Marketing Magazine.

• Price Increase – old marketing magazine had a cover price of $7.50, new mag is $8.50
• Frequency – old marketing mag was monthly, new marketing mag is bi-monthly (looks like my subscription has just been chopped in half)
• New Editor – Vincent Heeringa replaces old mag editor Graham Medcalf Graham still seems to be contributing though with two articles in the new mag written by him.
• Two magazines in one – new mag also features the DLB which is the official magazine of the New Zealand Marketing Association. DLB use to be a large format magazine sent out to marketing association members.
• Wave goodbye to – ‘One Consumers Opinion’, ‘Branding’,  ‘Microman’, ‘Weasel’
• Say hello to – ‘Media’, ‘Law’, ‘Advertising’, ‘Metrics’, ‘Research’, ‘NFP’, ‘Sustainability’ and ‘Back Then’

All in all the new NZ Marketing is looking good and there is heaps of potential. It will be interesting to see what they do with the website, currently there is nothing much there . I can only hope that it is halfway as good as the Idealog site. The NZ Marketing site under 3M was under utilised and if HB Media was smart they will look at using the site to bring the New Zealand marketing community something which the Marketing Association website has to date failed to do.

Ray Poynter is in the process of running a survey to look at What makes a great market research conference?

The interim results can be viewed here.

The Market Research Society of New Zealand is having their conference on the 14th of August in Auckland.  I’ll let you know how it stacks up against Ray’s checklist.

One of the great things about online surveys is that you can create a world where free will no longer exists. Or in other words you can choose to make your survey questions mandatory or optional. This power should be used wisely though as although you can make your survey questions mandatory it is a far harder exercise to make your survey mandatory and making survey questions mandatory can be a great way of increasing your survey dropout rates. I thought it was worthwhile investigating then when questions should be mandatory and when caution should be applied.

To begin with it is probably useful in determining what a mandatory question actually is. A mandatory question is when the survey respondent is forced to respond to the question.  If no response is received then the respondent is not able to proceed with the survey. Generally this is achieved by a simple piece of javascript which in practive is as simple as ticking a box marked “Mandatory”. So far it sounds pretty good. Mandatory questions mean that all your survey questions will be answered – what could be wrong with that? In practice a lot -the major downside is that making questions mandatory can bug the hell out of your respondents and cause them to simply dropout of your survey.

A good rule of thumb is the more mandatory questions your survey has the higher your survey drop-out rate will be. All that is achieved by a high drop-out rate is a high non-response error, which is something which should be avoided at all costs. It pays then to seriously consider when you should make questions mandatory.

• Screening Questions

Often when conducting your survey you have a target segment in mind. You may wish to research all females aged  between 18 – 40. It makes sense then that any screening questions are made mandatory. In this example gender and age are required to be mandatory to ensure you get to speak to the right people. i.e. females aged between 18-40

• Branching Questions

Branching questions are when the respondents answer to a question sends them off in a particular direction whilst a different response will send then in a different direction of the survey and asked another question. It is essential to make branching questions mandatory otherwise the survey will not know where to send them and your survey respondents will be stuck in survey limbo for ever (not a nice place). 

• Essential Questions

Essential questions are those questions that you really need an answer to. You really need to take a step back on this one. If you wrote the survey you are likely to believe that all questions are essential. Before you make all questions mandatory take a long hard look at the survey questions and ask yourself what if any damage will be done if the respondent chose not to answer the question. If you can live without the data then give the respondent the choice (another note, if you can live without the data ask yourself if the question is required at all).

The three tips above are pretty good guidelines to keep in mind when considering if you should make your questions mandatory. But like most thing there are a couple of mitigating factors that should also be considered when making this decision.

• Length of Survey

If your survey is short you are more likely to be able to get away with mandatory questions than if your survey is long.

• Relationship with respondent

If you have a close relationship with your respondent’s i.e. if they are staff members then you are more likely to be able to get away with mandatory questions.

• Incentives

If you have some generous incentives for respondents the above rules for mandatory questions. The rule of thumb with incentives and respondents is the greater the level of incentive the more your respondents will be willing to put up with.

So while mandatory questions are pretty useful to ensuring you get the data you need they also have the potential to really bug your respondents. In a way mandatory questions are a lot like drinking – moderation is the key!

Providing an incentive to survey respondents is a great way to increase response rates and one of my favourites is the prize draw.

Running a prize draw as an incentives raises the question on how you are going to select your prize winner. I laugh when I think about my first research job where I would spend hours making little numbered tickets, placing them in a box and trying to find someone potentially impartial in the office to make the prize draw.

A far quicker and more efficient method is to use a random number selector. The key thing is to attribute a sequential numerical indeifiter to each response. One of the easiest ways to do this is to place your survey data into excel and use the row number as a guide.

The next step is to select a random number selector. Google ‘random number selector’ and you will find a few. My personal choice is Random.org The easiest way to get your random number is to use the ‘True Random Number Generator’ on the home page. Enter in the range of numbers, push the button and hey presto! you have a random number and your prize draw.

While it may sound a little weird I typically don’t like to go with the first number it gives me. I start of by letter the generator select a number between 1 and 10. The response from this query then gives me how many attempts I will make before I go with the final generated number. I.e. the ‘N’ th query will be the prize winner.

Market research has been identified as being key in a recession by a group of ‘experts’ in Singapore. In this article  published in The Strait Times it highlights the fact that when cuts are made in business it is often the marketing department that is targeted first.

Caution should be taken with such a strategy as it is understanding the customer which is most important in times where customers maybe becoming a scare commodity. One of the points raised was the move to engaging with customers in a digital environment i.e online surveys and the like.

It seems then that the use of online surveys will only increase during this recession as businesses look to engage and retain their customers.

If you are considering undertaking a new business venture one of the questions you will hear most often is – Have you done your market research?  It stands to reason then that you should quickly run off and commission a market research company to conduct a full and comprehensive feasibility study to ensure the success of your new business – off course not!

Often people starting off in business interpret market research as being something that requires a market research company to conduct. While this is sometimes the case, very often the research required can be conducted by the entrepreneur themselves.  The biggest deciding factor I believe in determining your market research budget is how much capital is at risk for the new venture.

Say for example that the total start-up costs for your new venture are $10,000. It hardly makes any sense to spend $7,000 on a research project to determine whether or not there is a market for your product or service. My advice would be to try your luck and dedicate your $10,000 to the development of the venture.  This advice does not hold true for when the venture requires larger amounts of start up capital.

Now say for example that the total start-up costs for your new venture are $100,000 (or insert any larger figure that is appropriate). Spending $7,000 on a research project to protect your investment of $100,000 now starts to make sense. Why risk your all your start-up capital when it is likely that a small cost effective research project will be able to determine whether or not your new venture is viable or not. Hence the notion of market research acting as an insurance policy for your venture. Why put all your start-up capital at risk when market research can provide you with the insurance you need.

While there is plenty of advice on the net on how to design survey, I want to focus on seven things to avoid when designing your market research survey.

Why make the mistakes that most professional market researchers have already made.

My seven things to avoid are:

1. Avoid long surveys
2. Avoid convoluted & technical language
3. Avoid multiple questions within one question
4. Avoid asking respondents date of birth
5. Avoid going live without testing your survey
6. Avoid dull surveys
7. Avoid roads to no-where

Avoid long surveys

I cannot emphasise this one enough. No matter how interesting you think your survey is to your respondent a long survey will kill any-one’s enthusiasm.

 A long survey will see a high dropout rate and poor data quality. Just because someone sticks around to the end of the survey does not mean they have answered your survey with quality responses. In all likelihood they have probably just ticked any old box in an effort to get out of your survey as quickly as possible. Remember, people are smart and they will find the quickest way out of any situation.

Avoid convoluted & technical language

Use language in your survey that is easy to understand. Your respondent is not going to run to find their dictionary if they have trouble with the language in your survey. When designing your survey keep in mind all ages, genders and education levels. This doesn’t mean you have to dumb down your survey, just make it understandable to your sample group.

Avoid multiple questions within one question

I call these double barrelled shotguns. i.e. Do you like green eggs and ham?, where would you eat them, in a box of with a fox?

Multiple questions within one question can lead to questions being on partially answered or not answered at all.

Avoid asking respondents date of birth

Avoid at all costs asking for the respondents specific date of birth i.e. DD/MM/YYYY.

If you really need specific birth data leave it at the year i.e. What year were you born? even better provide a year range. i.e What is your age? 16-20, 21-24 etc.

Avoid going live without testing your survey

Testing your survey is crucial for ensuring it works as it should.

When testing you are trying to find out if the questions work, i.e do people understand the question? and does the survey work – very important for online surveys and the like. This is your chance to ensure that your research project will be successful and you can now make any final changes. Internal testing with your peers and internal stakeholders enables everyone to get on board with the survey. A small pre-test of your sample group will ensure that the survey works in the ‘real world’

Avoid dull surveys

Make your survey fun. Keep the language light and breezy. With online surveys consider using video, images and other multimedia. This can help keep your respondents engaged.

Avoid roads to no-where

This is most important with electronically deployed surveys i.e. online surveys. Skip-logic and piping mean it is easy to direct your respondent in different directions. Just don;t lead them down a dead end street. Testing helps with this.

Keep these seven points in mind when designing your next survey and you should be on the right track.

Happy Surveying!!