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Don't Buy an MROC

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An earlier version of this article was originally published in the Vovici monthly newsletter.

Three times in recent weeks I have found myself talking prospects out of building market-research online communities (MROCs). Such communities have certainly developed a lot of buzz; in fact, a recent ESOMAR survey ranked MROCs the third most valuable of a dozen techniques associated with “new MR” (the first and second were netnography and co-creation). But just because MROCs are the popular new technique doesn’t necessarily make them the right technique for the problem you are attempting to solve. Questions to ask yourself:

1. Are you looking for quantitative information, qualitative information or both kinds? MROCs shine for developing rich, qualitative information, but you can’t accurately extrapolate from an MROC to the target population that you are studying (customers, prospects, etc.). As Ray Poynter says, if an MROC rejects an idea, it’s a bad idea, but if they like it, you need to test it with a wider audience. In one case, as I delved deeper with a prospect, I realized almost all the questions they needed to research were quantitative (e.g., what percent of the population has this attitude?), making a survey a better solution for them.
2. Do you, at this minute, have dozens of ideas for which you need qualitative information? For an MROC to be successful in the long term, you need to have a rich series of ongoing information needs, so that community participants regularly have new reasons to log in to the community web site. If a few weeks go by without any activities in the community (because you didn’t have any information needs those weeks), members will stop logging in and will stop participating. A great sign that you need an MROC is that you have a backlog of qualitative research needs. One prospect had only a short list of qualitative information that she needed; for her, I recommended either a short-term MROC (six to eight weeks) or in-depth interviews (IDIs).
3. If this is a customer MROC, do you have the bandwidth to act on the feedback you receive? Customers have submitted over 7,000 ideas to My Starbucks Idea, yet Starbucks has implemented only 100 ideas. And this is a community with CEO support! Do you have the resources to do better? I encouraged one prospect to increase the frequency of their annual customer satisfaction review to a quarterly cycle (touching each client once a year) to provide a greater pace of customer feedback while not overwhelming their organization’s ability to innovate and use the feedback.

Think about your goals and then let us help you direct you to the best methodology for your objectives. If you can answer yes to the above three questions, then you are going to find that market-research online communities have the power to transform your business!

See also:

• PluggedIn - The most important question to answer before starting an ongoing MROC
• Research Rockstar - Market Research Online Communities: 3 Key Questions