Unpopular Posts from "Voice of Vovici"

So in the recent redesign of this blog we added a Posts by Popularity sidebar. I’m glad for the addition, as that it always one of my favorite pages on news sites. That said, it reminds me of grade school.

I was the youngest in class, small for my age, and was always picked last in gym class by the Bombardment captains. I recall the one time I got to be captain, and I picked all the unathletic kids first. Yeah, we lost. The game was still fun.

In that spirit, here are the unpopular posts of this blog.

• Rethinking the Role of the MR Dept. – In these times of change, MR departments need to mentor and assist fellow employees who are doing their own surveys using survey software. This can be a jarring change from how such departments operate today.
• Market Research Blogs – Yes, I realize blogs are passé now and Twitter is where the action is: this article lists the blogs and Twitter accounts of a number of MR professionals that I read.
• MROC – Market-research online communities are popular, even if calling them MROCs isn’t. This is an abstract of Brad Bortner’s white paper on “Web 2.0 and MR” and includes my suggestion of one way to position MROCs.
• Unsubscribe Survey Questions – Letting subscribers unsubscribe from email is necessary but unpopular. Since you have to do it, modify one of these templates to make sure that you are soliciting feedback to understand why people are unsubscribing.
• Recommended Survey Length – I know, short surveys are all the rage today. But sometimes a long survey is appropriate for the research task at hand, especially for surveys of major accounts.
• Face-to-Face Interviews – Yes, they’re unpopular because they’re expensive, but face-to-face interviews provide great insight and great experiences. If all you’ve ever done is write questionnaires to administer online, you’re missing the understanding of survey research that comes from seeing the respondent react to the questions you wrote, the wording you used and the order you put the questions in.

Let the bombardment of comments begin.

Marketing in a Web 2.0 World

Marketing In A Web 2.0 World:

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Market Research Departments Struggle for Strategic Relevance

Heidi Lo and Brad Bortner of Forrester have written a new independent report, "Role Insights: Market Researchers Struggle For Strategic Relevance":

Forrester surveyed 40 market researchers from business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies with annual revenues of more than $1 billion and annual market research budgets ranging from $30,000 to $8 million.... Results from Forrester's Q2 2008 Global Market Research Organizing For Influence Online Survey show that many market researchers have not been able to position their market research groups as strategic partners within their organizations. Market research leaders report finding themselves sidelined because they are often viewed more as service bureaus focused on tactical, not strategic, questions and research. To pull out of this rut and get on the road to strategic relevance, it is imperative that market research groups create processes to prove value, enhance their own operational efficiency, and improve alignment with their internal clients. 

Table of Contents

• Most Market Research Groups Are Not Strategic Partners Yet 
• Challenges In Funding And Operations Are Key Obstacles 
• Many Market Research Groups Are Lean Extensions Of Marketing - Minus The Budget 
• Recommendations 
• Get Organized To Start Attaining Strategic Relevance 

Forrester has prepared a sobering assessment of the state of market research within corporations. Given the strategic importance of customer research, it is surprising how project oriented most departments are. Yet MR departments are only addressing major projects-the minor projects are being addressed by line staff across the organization. Missing from Forrester's analysis is a discussion of the disintermediation of market researchers due to the widespread use of survey software, and the power of enterprise feedback management to help. Check out my post Rethinking the Role of the Market Research Department for more on this possible path for internal MR.

What do you see as the way forward for structuring market research within organizations?

Market Research Blogs

A roundup of market-research blogs I enjoy reading:

• The Employee and Customer Survey Research Blog - NBRI staff (@NBRI) blog about customer and employee satisfaction.  They just wrapped up a good six-post series on How to Conduct a Survey.
• Walker Blogs - Steve Walker of our partner Walker Information writes a blog entitled "Customer Connections".  A recent post makes the case "the world of customer loyalty is no less complex than human health... As a customer advocate, don't take yourself too seriously, but do take your work very seriously. Treat it like your company's survival counts on it."  Pat Gibbons (@PatGibbons), senior vice president of marketing for Walker, has a new blog, Engaging the Enterprise, focused on the need to market customer-loyalty research within the organization.
• Customer Experience Matters - The personal blog of Forrester Analyst Bruce Temkin (@BTemkin) covers customer loyalty, customer sat and customer experience. I had planned on writing a summary of the Kano Model, but Bruce has a great introduction that I wouldn't be able to top: What Do Customers Want? Professor Kano Knows.  And check out his recent post Microsoft Takes a Giant Leap Into Retail.
• Mike MacLeod: Social Media, Research & More - Mike (@MikeMacLeod) points to news stories I would miss otherwise (ironically), such as Harris Poll Chairman Stands up to The Economist and a Seth Godin post on keeping online surveys simple.

And some other MR blogs that I've written about in the past:

• PluggedIn by @mattpluggedin
• MR Heretic by @MRHeretic
• Esteban Kolsky's Blog by @EKolsky

I had some others that I wanted to include, but they hadn't been updated yet this year.  

 

What other MR bloggers should I be reading and pointing people to?

Coke, New Coke & the Angry Focus Group

On Friday, Coca Cola announced that it would drop the word "Classic" from "Coca-Cola Classic", thereby-as Bloomberg reported it-"writing the final chapter in one of the greatest marketing blunders in U.S. business history." That might be too harsh:  New Coke was a tactical blunder but a strategic victory, and it offers us a few lessons about market research along the way.  

In the early 1980s, Coke (the drink) was steadily losing market share to Pepsi-Cola. One reason was that Diet Coke had cannibalized Coke sales, quickly rocketing past 7-Up to become the #3 soft drink in America.  Another reason was that Pepsi had been positioning Pepsi-Cola for the youth market in the 1960s and was winning a greater share of new cola drinkers than Coke was.  Finally, Pepsi-Cola was reported to taste better.  

Faced with all of this, Coca-Cola executives thought the only way to compete was to reformulate the cola to be sweeter and better tasting than Pepsi-Cola.  They launched "Project Kansas" to come up with a new formula.  Project Kansas took its name from this famous photo of Kansas journalist William Allen White drinking a Coke:

Enter the first marketing-research issue.  Taste tests conducted by both Pepsi and Coca-Cola showed Pepsi-Cola having a better taste than Coke.  Only later would it be determined that those tests had at least two flaws.  

1. First, they were "sip tests", involving small samples to try out.  Many consumers liked the sweeter taste of Pepsi-Cola in these small samples, but disliked drinking Pepsi in a normal-sized portion (soda can) because it was then perceived as too sweet.
2. Second, perceptions of taste are affected not just by the food or drink itself but by its packaging and presentation; this "sensation transference" can change the perceived taste.  Ultimately, it may not be possible to separate product taste from product packaging and brand.  (For more on this, see Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.)

Enter the second marketing-research issue.  After taste tests confirmed that "Project Kansas" did in fact taste better than Coke or Pepsi, Coca-Cola's marketing department began conducting focus groups and surveys.  When participants were asked if they would buy and drink "Kansas" if it were called Coke, a low percentage of respondents in surveys said they would stop drinking Coke altogether.  In the focus groups, though, around 11% would stop drinking Coke altogether, and this vocal minority was angry enough to indirectly influence the attitudes of others in the group, skewing results to the negative.  Coca-Cola executives chose to dismiss the negative findings from focus groups, since they were not backed up quantitatively by the surveys done after the taste tests.  

With the results of Project Kansas in, Coca-Cola executives felt that they had to replace Coke with New Coke.  If they introduced New Coke alongside the existing Coke, thereby cannibalizing its sales, Coke would no longer be the #1 selling soft drink in the United States:  Pepsi-Cola would be.  That would be a marketing disaster.  So New Coke had to replace the original.

Of course, what enfolded was a marketing disaster of a different type.  Millions of consumers were outraged to learn that the original formula was being discontinued;  some even began to stockpile "classic" Coke.  These consumers hated New Coke - without ever having tasted it!  Those detractors in the focus groups weren't outliers: they were a significant force in the larger population of consumers. Less than three months after announcing that the original formula was being discontinued, Coca-Cola caved in and announced its return as "Coca-Cola Classic."  Had executives paid closer attention to the focus-group results, they might have handled the roll-out differently.

From the philosophy of "even bad press is good press,"  the launch of New Coke and re-launch of Coca-Cola Classic generated such publicity and discussion that Coke sales increased at twice the rate of Pepsi-Cola's that year.  "Yes, it infuriated the public, cost a ton of money and lasted only 77 days before we reintroduced Coca-Cola Classic," said Sergio Zyman, then vice president of marketing for Coca-Cola.  "Still, New Coke was a success because it revitalized the brand and reattached the public to Coke."

Rethinking the Role of the Market Research Department

Many of our prospects for enterprise feedback management come to us after discovering, in horror, how terrible they are as an organization at surveying their customers. They survey all of their customers instead of taking a random sample. They send out surveys that are far too long. They send out surveys on topics that the organization has already researched. But, most of all, they just write bad questionnaires.

Meanwhile, most of these organizations have on staff experts at writing questionnaires, specialists who can tease out key insights from respondents, professional researchers with decades of mastering the survey process: experts who aren't available to their coworkers. In fact, that's how many of the organizations got into this jam in the first place: the market research department, which typically manages only the highest profile, most strategic research, was - by definition of its role - unavailable to assist coworkers with tactical surveys. As a result, those coworkers bought survey software and did the project themselves.

It's time for market research departments to rethink their mission. They should not simply be project managers, overseeing large outside research efforts; they should be mentors to their coworkers, assisting fellow employees with the deployment of surveys. To do this, MR departments need to expand, hiring additional staff with the appropriate research skills and knack for teaching.

How to cost justify this expansion? Quantify the cost of bad research. What decisions are being made on the basis of results from amateur surveys? These surveys can lead the organization astray, often incorporating biased questions or unrepresentative samples. Conduct a feedback assessment to get an accurate view of how pervasive the problem is (it's always a bigger problem than you think!). Your organization is making a significant investment in this research, but it is often a hidden investment: the survey software is being purchased on a credit card or expensed, and no one is tracking how much time employees are spending doing surveys (an expenditure that far exceeds the cost of the technology). Since these are surveys that are worth doing, they are worth doing right.

Too often, the market research department has been disintermediated by the rise of survey software. It is best for your organization if the MR department reintermediates itself-still letting line staff do most of the work for tactical surveys, but reviewing questionnaires and invitation lists before the survey goes live, to provide results that staff can feel comfortable making decisions with.

MR Heretic

I've become a regular reader of the blog, Market Research Deathwatch, at http://www.mrheretic.com/. With a title like that, how could I not?  Market Research has changed a lot since I started doing paper surveys, CATI surveys, personal interviews and focus groups in the 1980s.  And MR Heretic makes it clear that the profession needs to change even more: "I am the growing multitude of people in the Market Research industry who have realized that the status quo is obsolete, and we face a choice between evolution and extinction."
I've added MR Heretic to our blogroll.  To give you a taste, here are some of my favorite posts from the Dark Side of market research:

• Survey Fail - Links to four examples of survey mistakes.
• Do you know what your panelists are saying about you? - A look at online panels with the greatest number of unresolved complaints.
• Essentialism is an illusion - A rebuttal of market segmentation.
• Get Survey Points! What's the point? - A rant against points-based incentives for survey panelists.

Quantitative and Qualitative Research: The Yin and Yang of MR

My colleague, Brian Koma, has taken to describing qualitative and quantitative research as the yin and yang of market research.   In Taoism, yin and yang are opposing forces that are nonetheless bound together and interdependent, each giving rise to the other.   For market research, many research initiatives start out as open-ended, qualitative questions.  Once enough qualitative research is gathered, it discovers sentiments that can be tested across a wide range of respondents, giving rise to quantitative research.  A survey can then be conducted to determine how representative these sentiments are of the target audience.  When that survey is done, analyzing the results will produce some surprises, with some data for which the context is missing; this will give rise to further qualitative research, prompting further questions that need to be probed in detail, qualitatively.  And so the two types of research play off of one another.

What is unique about Vovici's approach to research is the integration of online communities with enterprise feedback management.  The community portal provides the qualitative results, while the feedback management system provides the quantitative results.  The EFM system is typically integrated with an internal database of customers, employees or partners, so that random, representative samples can be drawn.  Such an approach bridges the divide that often separates quantitative and qualitative research, and provides a balanced view of key constituencies.

Unifying research with online communities and enterprise feedback management:

• Enables the best, most complementary use of quantitative and qualitative data
• Gives voice to customers and other key stakeholders
• Moves feedback from a traditional serial process to an innovative continuous process
• Supports best practices for market research
• Provides significant competitive advantage

If quantitative and qualitative research are the yin and yang of market research, then enterprise feedback management and online communities are the Tao of Vovici.

Ideas Generated Through Traditional Research

The innovation life-cycle through traditional market research involves qualitative and quantitative research in a rich process:

Someone in a line of business has questions that they need help with.  Why are widget sales down in the West?  Engineering has an interesting new technology, what might customers do with it?  Sales in a niche channel are growing rapidly; might there be a larger opportunity here?  Initially, the questions are broad and vague.  You need to flesh out these questions.

The market-research department convenes a focus group or series of focus groups to gather together customers, prospects, distributors – whoever the key constituency is – to get their reaction to the broad questions and to brainstorm possible ideas.  “Why did you buy a competitor’s gadget instead of our widget?  What types of customers are coming through your doors, Mr. Reseller? How might you use our products if we leveraged this new technology?”

The researcher writes up the findings from the qualitative research and shares the key themes with the internal business owner.  The results provide detailed case studies and profiles of different types of respondents:  the prospect who bought the gadget instead of the widget solely based on price, the prospect who realized the gadget could do more for him than the widget, the prospect who bought because of the celebrity endorsement of Gidget, and so on!

The qualitative research results have helped the line-of-business owner focus their inquiry. They now have some clear questions that they would like to have answered.  Key for them is to understand the extent of the behaviors uncovered in the qualitative-research process.  How common are these views of price, features and endorsements?  Which features are most important?  How can the different challenges be prioritized?  The researcher develops and fields a survey instrument to answer these questions.

The survey results are in, and they help highlight the priorities for the organization:  what features are needed for widgets to better sell against gadgets, how the nontraditional distribution channel might emerge into a broader channel in the future, which features enabled by the new technology are most valuable to customers. 

A few issues emerged from the quantitative research that were a surprise, so a final round of research is in order: another focus group or some personal interviews following up with survey respondents or a subsequent survey to a subsegment of the original respondents.  This qualitative-quantitative-qualitative cycle provides the ultimate in thoroughness.

The original questions of the business staff have been rigorously evaluated to come up with the best ideas for the business.  Another successful research effort!  Now, if only it didn’t have to take three to six months to complete. 

Tomorrow’s post:  Compressing the idea-generation life cycle.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research

Quantitative market research provides hard data that can be extrapolated to a larger population, using proven statistical techniques.Qualitative market research, on the other hand, seeks to provide narrative, the story behind the story that illuminates the perceptions of a population.

Both techniques are complementary:qualitative research helps when first seeking to understand what might be going on with a target audience, while quantitative research helps to assess the frequency of identified attitudes or behaviors.

	Qualitative	Quantitative
Purposes	Contextualization	Generalizability
	Interpretation	Prediction
Research Questions	Vague	Precise
Project Life Cycle	Earlier in Cycle	Later in Cycle
Approach	Inductive	Deductive
	Interpretive	Measurable
	Avoids numerical analysis	Emphasizes numerical analysis
	Uses interviews	Uses fixed survey instrument
	Fusional	Analytical
Participants	Few	Many
Researcher Role	Personally involved and partial	Detached and impartial
	Subjective understanding	Objective portrayal
Traditional Methodology	Focus groups	Telephone surveys
Web Methodology	Online research communities	Web surveys

Sources:

• Qualitative versus Quantitative Research: Key Points in a Classic Debate
• Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Introduction
• Quantitative Research vs. Qualitative Research