Surveys: The Swiss Army Knives of Market Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Apr 06, 2010
This morning Brian Koma and I gave one of my favorite research webinars, The Seven Steps to Highly Effective Surveys. This was my fourth revision to the webinar, and it was good to look at it with fresh eyes (it had been five months since the last time we gave it). I give us props for asking attendees up front, "Can you meet the goals without doing a survey at all?" But I thought we could better make the point that other market research techniques can be more useful than surveys.
Surveys are not a one-size-fits-all market research technique. So I added this slide:
| Bad Survey Goal | Better Approach |
| Let's brainstorm new product ideas. |
Online community |
How well do our stores comply
with our service policies? |
Mystery shopping |
| What are our customers thinking right now? |
Focus groups |
| What are people saying about our brand? |
Social media research |
| How are people actually using our products? |
Ethnography |
Because surveys are quick and inexpensive to do, it is easy to apply them to any research problem. No wonder they are the most widely used market research technique by far. They can be used for representative research (quantitative), or they can be used to collect general comments (qualitative).
Surveys cut through the noise to ask people direct questions that they are not likely to be thinking about or discussing. Surveys uncork ideas and comments that can help with continual process improvement. Surveys file off the rough edges to provide metrics that can predict business outcomes.
Surveys are the Swiss Army knives of market research. But they do not make elegant cutlery. Use them when no other technique is better.