Array
(
    [child_of] => 122
    [hide_empty] => 
    [orderby] => name
    [order] => ASC
)

Array
(
    [child_of] => 124
    [hide_empty] => 
    [orderby] => name
    [order] => ASC
)

Array
(
    [child_of] => 135
    [hide_empty] => 
    [orderby] => name
    [order] => ASC
)

Are you launching a start-up? Then I bet you have hundreds of questions about your potential product and your target audience.

 

From conceptualization to market sizing and scaling, innumerable questions must be answered in order to build a solid foundation for a successful business.  Fortunately, a full range of qualitative and quantitative research, primary and secondary research, and data analytics solutions exist to help you discover actionable answers to those questions throughout the entire process.

 

During the initial conceptualization stage, you’ll need to gain a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of the problem and potential solutions. You’ll also need to understand the tangents, side-conversations, and unspoken truths and myths that people won’t necessarily share with just anyone. To gain these types of insights from your target audience, qualitative research will be your go-to method.

 

Numerous qualitative techniques can help you at this point so let’s start by learning about in-depth, individual interviews.

 

 

What are individual interviews?

 

As the name suggests, individual interviews are in-depth conversations between a trained moderator and one other person. If the product or service is specifically designed for 2 or 3 people to use together, dyads or triads with colleagues, best friends, children, partners, or spouses may be used as well.

 

Key to this technique is working with a trained moderator. Although everyone has experience chatting with consumers, customers, or clients on a one to one basis, a research interview is completely different from a “chat” or “conversation.”

 

Trained moderators have unique skills which include understanding and responding to the body language of the person they’re interviewing. They have learned how and when to use specific language to encourage someone to share more detailed and personal insights. And, most importantly, they actively strive to prevent bias from unconsciously creeping into a conversation.

 

Interviews are an excellent way to deeply connect with your target audience and get a first-hand look into their emotional and physical real world. Interviews will allow you to:

• Spend meaningful time with them such that they open up about their personal habits, behaviors, needs, drivers, emotions, and opinions.
• Watch and listen to them struggle using unsuitable, existing products and services in their real world, whether that’s in their home, school, office, or gym.
• Watch and listen to them as they attempt to shop for alternative products using both online and offline channels.

These observations will guide you towards a thorough and unbiased understanding of what the problems and required solutions really are.

 

What follows are key questions that an interviewer might address during the initial, conceptualization stage.

 

 

How are people emotionally connected to the problem?

• How do you feel about this situation? What types of emotions do you have dealing with this situation? How strong are those emotions?
• How does this situation interact with different aspects of your life – at home, at work, with your kids or parents?
  
• How do you feel about the available alternatives or lack of alternatives? How do you compensate for the lack of easily accessible alternatives?
• What is your emotional state when you really need an alternative and can’t find one?
• How do your personal finances and resources fit into finding alternatives?

 

 

Who are the primary and secondary stakeholders?

• Who uses or needs the product? Who else might use it if they saw it lying around? Who would do the shopping for it? Who would approve and pay for it? Who would ensure the product gets used? Who would help you use the product and how would they help you use it?
• What frustrations and pain points do you have during the situation? What are the pain points of people who must find alternative options and pay for alternatives for you?
• Who is negatively and positively affected by this situation being unresolved?

 

 

What alternative solutions are being used now?

• What compromises do you make regarding this situation?
• What do you wish you could do? How would you solve the situation?
• How do you find and learn about potential alternatives?
  
• How do you physically manipulate or use current products? What other items do you use the product with? What do you buy to support using the current product?
• Where do you use current and alternative products? How do you use them?
• Where do you store current products and packages? What are your fears about storing them?

 

 

 

What’s Next?

During the conceptualization stage, your main goal is to listen and understand the problem without bias. You need to truly hear people and learn about their personal experiences so that you can identify both major and minor problems that may need to be solved. Individual interviews are the perfect solution for understanding people’s most intimate perceptions and behaviors. You’ll build a broad and deep baseline for what the key problems are and the range of major and minor issues that need to be resolved.

 

If you’re ready to deeply understand your target audience with individual interviews, please get in touch with us. We’d love to help you grow your start-up into a successful business! Email your questions about gathering information to support your startup to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com.

 

 

 

Learn more from our case studies

• Building a Strategic Business Plan Grounded in Industry Data – A pharmaceutical data analytics case study
• Creating a Beverage Launch Strategy in a Competitive Market – A beverage desk research case study
• Developing a New Nutritional Pasta Product – A survey + desk research case study
• Identifying Optimum Price Corridors to Predict Volume Share – An advertising price simulator case study

 

 

Podcasts You Might Like

• Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
• The Tim Ferriss Show
• Business Wars with David Brown
• How I Built This with Guy Raz

 

 

Books You Might Like

• What It Takes: How I Built a $100 Million Business Against the Odds Hardcover by Raegan Moya-Jones
• The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: It’s Your Turn to #Jointheride Hardcover by Darren Hardy
• What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 – 10th Anniversary Edition: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World by Tina Seelig

 

 

Conferences You Might Like

• CES Consumer Technology Association (January)
• AWE (June)
• Collision Conference (June)
• The Startup Conference (May)
• SaaStr Annual (September)

 

What is brand equity?

Think about a brand you absolutely love – a store you can never wait to go to, a product that makes you grin just thinking about it.

 

Now think about brands you absolutely hate – a product or company that makes millions of people roll their eyes and groan with disgust.

 

That’s brand equity! Or lack thereof.

 

Brand equity is a complex construct. At its core, it’s a subjective perception of a brand’s value, quality, performance, and personal relevance. It incorporates consumer perceptions related to the product and its packaging, presentation, mission, vision, and values.

 

An easy way to think about brand equity is that it’s the difference in price and preference between an unbranded (or store brand) product and a branded product. Even though they’re the exact same thing – soda, butter, oil, beef, corn, eggs, many people will choose the brand name version because of the higher value they perceive it to have.

 

It can take a long time to build brand equity but one wrong move and it can be destroyed in seconds.

 

 

Why is brand equity important?

There are many benefits to building brand equity, and collectively their benefits are massive.

• Premium pricing: One of the key benefits of high brand equity is the ability to charge premium pricing. When people believe in and love a brand, they will pay more for it. Coffee is coffee but people will pay more for coffee that comes in a cup with a Starbucks brand on it, a name they know and trust. That higher price leads to higher profits which, of course, leads to greater financial success.

 

• Low price elasticity: When people value a brand, they are more likely to purchase that brand even in competitive situations. High equity brands don’t have to worry as much that competitive brands will ‘steal’ their customers with a great BOGO or intriguing offer. And, they don’t have to spend as much time and money creating offers to convince competitive buyers to try their products.

 

• Customer lifetime value: When brands create high equity, their customers are more loyal to the brand and purchase more of their products over a longer time period. Even better, those loyal customers are more likely to try new products created by the brand, whether in the same or other categories. The trust has already been built and customers don’t have to overcome the fear of trying a new brand. They simply need to determine whether the new product meets their needs.

 

• Market resilience: Products with high brand equity are more likely to endure during uncertain circumstances. When environmental, social, and political events necessitate a change in purchase and behavioural patterns, people will still try to retain consistency in their lives. High equity brands offer consistency, trust, and reliability when consumers need it most.

 

• Market power: As a high equity brand that people trust and desire, you have increased opportunities to attract and demand the best. Your demonstrated power in the marketplace means you can attract the best employees, the best suppliers, the best investors, and also negotiate the best prices and rates.

 

 

 

How to Build Brand Equity?

Brand equity can take a long time to build. However, there are a number of strategies and tactics that companies can leverage to get there. The key is playing the long game.

• Understand consumer needs and values: By understanding what consumers truly want and need, you can ensure your products and services are relevant to them. Take advantage of quantitative questionnaires and qualitative focus groups and interviews to understand customer journeys, gaps and pain points, customer personas, and customer segments. Dig deep to uncover their physical, emotional, social, psychological, environmental, and spiritual needs so that you can discover what might convert them from casual tryers to long-term, loyal advocates.

 

• Understand product differentiators: Not only do you need to understand your buyers and prospects, you need to understand what attributes elevate your products and services ahead of your competitors. Primary and secondary research will help you understand the competitive marketplace, market positioning, innovation opportunities, or opportunities for product optimization.

 

• Fine-tune your messaging: Once you understand your consumers and your products, ensure your messaging is in alignment. Primary research will help you ensure your product messaging and campaign research focus on messages that resonate with your customers and address their key values, unmet needs, values, and pain points.

 

• Deliver on promises: It may sound easy, but delivering on your brand promise is tough. Most brands have many disparate channels, all of which need to present your brand and your products in an unrelentingly consistent way. Whether in-store, on the phone, or online, your brand’s character, values, and vision must drive every customer interaction and business decision in a consistent way.

 

• Foster loyalty: It’s important to foster loyalty among your existing customers. Pay attention to your most loyal customers and create opportunities to reward and encourage them. Give them reasons to continue loving your brand whether that’s special offers or enhanced customer service.

 

• Drive awareness: If you’ve been paying attention to the animated image to the right, you’ve probably been able to name the brand behind every single logo. Despite the fact that not a single brand name is shown. This is brand equity. And this is the level of brand awareness that every brand ultimately strives for. When your customers and prospects recognize your brand colors and shapes, it’s far easier for them to find and choose your brand off the shelf, virtual or physical. Run carefully targeted advertising campaigns on a variety of relevant channels that focus on your benefits, stories, and value to help consumers learn, and connect your messages and your branding. Try a variety of relevant tactics such as influencer marketing, celebrity endorsements, or event marketing.

 

• Create positive customer relationships: Customer experiences are no longer confined to the physical store. Brands need to create positive experience across every physical and digital touchpoint including their own online stores and social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Pay attention and respond quickly to customers sharing their opinions on review websites like Amazon, Foursquare, and Yelp.

 

 

 

Positive brand equity vs. negative brand equity

When people pay more for a brand even when there are equivalent yet lower priced brands available, that’s positive brand equity.

 

But, when people avoid or ignore a brand, even when it’s pricing is very competitive, that’s negative brand equity. For some companies, negative brand equity can destroy a brand such that consumers quickly forget it ever existed. For others, the negative equity is fleeting and at least somewhat recoverable.

 

Amazon: Since starting up as a book seller, Amazon’s focused effort on meeting customer needs has resulted in amazing brand equity. Because of their unquestioning return policies, unending selection, and ability to get product in hand in mere hours, customers are fiercely loyal. That’s positive brand equity.

 

Apple: Apple is another great example of a company with positive brand equity. Their customers are massively loyal. Even though Apple products are known to be pricey, customers line up every time a new product is released even if their existing product still works great. Customers trust the quality, reliability, and functionality of Apple products and remain loyal customers for years. Why? Because Apple focuses on creating innovative, self-explanatory products that meet customer needs every single time.

 

Chipotle: In 2015, Chipotle experienced a food poisoning crisis which led to a $25 million federal fine. After years of positive growth, that crisis caused the brand value to decline sharply. It was several years before they managed to regain consumer trust, and recover and grow their brand value. This is a great example of positive brand equity turned negative and then reverting to positive again.

 

McDonald’s: Though McDonald’s has been the #1 burger chain for years, they struggle with ongoing negative brand equity. Customers and consumers have complained about unhealthy food options for decades, and that perception seems relenting no matter how McDonald’s tries to head it off.

 

Starbucks: Want some high-priced coffee? Well, Starbucks customers are willing to pay a premium because they love the high-quality product and they love the top-notch customer experience – even when their name is accidentally (deliberately?) misspelled on their cup. Whether you’re a customer or not, everyone immediately recognizes the logo of this high equity brand.

 

Toms: People love the Toms shoe company. Why? Not only do they make a great shoe, they donate a pair of shoes with every purchase. This human centered value makes customers feel good about their purchases, and keeps them coming back again and again to support a company that matches their own values.

 

 

 

How to Measure Brand Equity

Because brand equity is so multi-faceted, measuring it isn’t simple nor templated. It’s important to incorporate a range of relevant quantitative and qualitative metrics, as well as financial and market assessments to gain a holistic view of brand equity.

 

Quantitative metrics: As part of a quantitative questionnaires, there is a wide range of questions that can be posed to consumers and customers to better understand your brand equity. As you’ll seen in the images below, these kinds of questions can be posed not simply as traditional radio buttons and checkboxes, but also as interactive, engaging image style questions.

• Brand awareness: What three brands come to mind first when you think of washing detergent? What other brands have you heard of?
• Brand perception: Which of the following words reflect how you feel about this brand of washing detergent?
• Consideration: On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to buy the following brands of washing detergent the next time you go shopping?
• Loyalty: On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the following brands of washing detergent to your friends or family?
• Loyalty: How often do you buy the following brands of washing detergent?
• Trial: If this brand of washing detergent were to release a fabric softener, how likely are you to try it?
• Customer experience: On a scale from 1 to 10, what is your opinion about the customer service you received from our online chatbot or our social media or telephone representative?

.

.

Qualitative metrics: Of course, there is far more to measuring brand equity than focusing on quantitative questions. Focus groups, interviews, and other qualitative tools like online communities are also excellent ways to measure brand equity.  By combining qual and quant methods, you can gain a more holistic view of this subjective construct. Here is a sample of some types of questions and tasks to incorporate in qualitative research, again with a couple examples of how more qualitative questions can be incorporated into traditional online measurements.

• What is your opinion of this logo and imagery?
• Describe 3 things you love about this brand and 3 things you hate about this brand.
• Why do you buy the following brands of washing detergent?
• Why would you choose one brand of washing detergent over another?
• Which of the following images reflect how you feel about this brand of washing detergent? Tell me why.
• If this brand of washing detergent was a person, how would you describe it?

 

 

Behavioral/transactional metrics: Financial and company metrics are also extremely important for understanding brand equity.

• Company metrics: What is the value of the company, and is it increasing?
• Brand metrics: What is the market share of the brand, and is it increasing? What is the profit of the brand, and is it increasing? What is the price difference compared to generic brands, and is it increasing? What is the purchase volume and frequency for the brand, and is it increasing?
• Employee metrics: What is the cost of employee acquisition, and is it decreasing? What is the average tenure of an employee, and is it increasing? How many applications per open position are received, and is it increasing?
• Customer metrics: What is the cost of customer acquisition, and is it decreasing? What is the average tenure of a customer, and is it increasing? How many customer complaints are receiving during a specific time frame, and is it decreasing?

 

 

What’s Next?

Are you ready to discover top quality insights about your brand and grow your brand equity? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you better understand your buyers and your brand to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

 

Learn more from our case studies

• Stretching Brand Equity into White Spaces Using Data Fusion – A pharmaceutical data analytics case study
• Benchmarking Brand Awareness and Competitive Brand Space – A consumer food survey case study
• Increasing Enrollment Through A More Meaningful Brand Purpose – An education survey case study

 

 

Books and Videos You Might Like

• Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity by Kevin Lane Keller and Vanitha Swaminathan
• The Strategy of Global Branding and Brand Equity by Alvin Lee, Jinchao Yang, Richard Mizerski, and Claire Lambert
• Brand Equity & Advertising: Advertising’s Role in Building Strong Brands by David A. Aaker and Alexander Biel

 

Journey maps are commonly created in the market and consumer industry to illustrate a set of steps taken to accomplish a goal. Well designed maps help marketers, brand managers, and researchers understand how people perceive and interact with overt and covert stakeholders, products, channels, and services along their way to completing that final goal.

 

Journey maps used to be simple, and the details and processes often seemed obvious. Today, however, with the internet in our pockets providing unlimited opportunities to talk to people around the world, learn about millions of new products and companies, and acquire nearly any product within hours or days of hearing about it, journeys are extremely complex. They’ve evolved from linear 5-step journeys into 30-stage ricocheting piles of spaghetti.

 

As such, it’s important to conduct well-rounded research to ensure erroneous assumptions and misconceptions aren’t included, and to ensure all aspects of the journey, both hidden and obvious, are accounted for.

 

Journey maps are more complicated and more necessary than ever.
..

.

What kinds of journeys can we map?

Nearly any journey wherein people progress through a set of stages, interacting with channels or people, over a short or long time frame to accomplish a goal can be mapped. Here are just a few of the more common journey maps that marketers and brand managers use.

 

• Customer journeys: How do consumers, or your customers, discover the need for and end up buying a product? Where do they learn about various products, who do they talk to along the way, at what point do they finally buy one and how?
• Patient journeys: How does a patient or care-giver discover a health issue and follow through to a treatment plan? What was the initial point of discovery, who did they talk to about their concerns at each step, when did they choose a healthcare provider, how did they choose from among the treatment options?
• Recruitment journeys: How does a person decide to seek employment and follow through until they have settled into a new role? What created the initial interest, where did they turn to for advice about hiring companies, how did they select a best role?
• Financial journeys: How does a person decide to buy a home and follow through on that major expenditure? What caused the interest in the beginning, where did they go for advice about large loans, and how did they choose a mortgage provider?

.

Why create a journey map?

Maps aren’t simply pretty pictures that make great wall posters. In addition to illustrating an entire journey on one convenient page, they serve a number of important purposes.

 

• Facts over factoids: Assumptions about processes, pain points, strengths, and weaknesses are easily affected by context and perspective. Every brand manager, marketer, researcher, and customer has a different view of the journey which is affected by their role, life experience, and current needs. Data-driven journey maps are simply more accurate and all-encompassing than anecdata-driven journey maps.
• Resolve issues: By mapping the journey, you’ll be able to identify strengths, weaknesses, and pain points that are negatively impacting people at any stage in the experience. You’ll learn which mobile apps need improved navigation, identify disjointed online and offline experiences that need fixing, and be better able to ensure people receive key messages at critical times via the channel they prefer.
• Optimize spend: Once you discover which channels people are accessing – or not accessing – during their journey and what the strengths, weaknesses, and pain points of those channels are, you can allocate your spend more wisely. You may discover new channels, realize the need to optimize favorite channels, or decide to eliminate out-of-date channels.
• Innovate: Journey maps will help you identify gaps in product development or processes that can be solved by creating new tools, products, or services.
• Plan for the future: When you understand where your business is today, you can plan for tomorrow. Identify which experiences can be enhanced and improved for everyone.
• Level-setting: When everyone has the same understanding of the journey, it’s easier to ensure that every touch-point meets your high standards and best practices. You’ll be better able to reduce silos and increase efficiencies of functions and tools across the company.
• Understand personas/segments: Every product or service can be represented by multiple journey maps, each reflecting a unique segment of people. As you understand each segment more precisely, you can improve each experience in a more targeted, relevant way.

.

How to conduct a journey mapping research project

Set Clear Goals: The most important component of every research project, including journey mapping research, is to set clear goals and objectives for what you want and need to achieve. In addition to creating the map itself, you will need to specify how you intend to use the map once it’s complete. For example:

 

• Why do so few people use the mobile app?
• How can we better serve omnichannel customers?
• Where are our communication gaps?
• Why do we lose so many consumers after they call our help-line?

Review Secondary Research: Take the time to review any existing qualitative and quantitative research you may have conducted over the last several years. Though it may not directly focus on the journey experience, there are likely to be important tidbits of knowledge that will help you design your data collection instrument – take note of people, processes, and channels mentioned and ensure they are covered in the new instrument.

 

Detail the Research Questions: As you prepare to build your data collection tool, focus on all aspects of the human experiences – who, what, where, when, why, and how. Let high quality data tell you how many stages there really are rather than trying to fit people into preconceived notions.

 

• Who: Which personas would benefit the most from journey mapping? Who are the direct and indirect people the consumer could possibly come into contact with? Consider people at the call-center, people answering questions on Twitter, people in finance, operations, and management who may be called in to help with more difficult problems.
• What: What messages and information people need at each stage? What are their motivations? What are they getting or not getting? What are their pain points and barriers?

• Where: Where do customers seek information or products? Are they experiencing the journey from home, work, school, or the retail outlets? Are they experiencing it on a mobile device, a desktop computer, or in person?
• When: Think about how journeys change when they are experienced in the daytime, evening, nighttime, or weekends. Is the journey one day, one week, one month, or one year long?
• Why: Why did customers start or stop each point in the journey?
• How: How do customers feel about each point? How do they perceive each stage? What are they thinking and believing? Where is their breaking point or their moment of exhilaration?

Identify the Research Method: Ideally, both qualitative and quantitative research techniques should be used to ensure you capture all potential aspects of the journey. Starting with qualitative techniques allows you to probe deeply and ensure that subsequent quantitative techniques are properly informed.

 

• In-Depth Interviews: Whether in-person, over the phone, or virtual, personal interviews are the perfect method for diving deep into every single aspect of an individual’s journey. Not only are first hand accounts great at creating empathy among company stakeholders, the ability to probe with multiple “whys” ensures you can dig down to the inner most held beliefs and opinions associated with a behavior.
• Online Communities: Most journeys last far longer than a few minutes. Buying shampoo could be a ten minute or ten-day journey whereas a house hunting journey could take a year. Online communities are an effective way to bring people together to discuss each other’s unique journeys and discover which steps are common or unique, and why. For consumer goods mapping, you could even ask participants to maintain and share a diary throughout their journey.

• Observational Research: We all know the saying that actions speak louder than words. That’s why it can be extremely beneficial to include observational research as part of journey mapping research. Most commonly, this research is conducted by researchers quietly observing people as they progress through their journey in retail outlets. However, observations can also be made of digital behaviors after first getting permission to record people’s browser activities.
• Surveys: Finally, finishing with a quantitative survey will help ensure your final outcome is not only comprehensive, but also reflective of the broader population.  Remember to build surveys that incorporate data quality techniques and include fun question types that help participants remain engaged during the research process.
  

 .

What’s Next?

Are you ready to gain a thorough understanding of your customers’ journeys? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

 

Learn more from our case studies

 

• Communicating More Effectively with Insurance Customers – A bulletin board case study
• Mapping a Patient Funnel to Mitigate Treatment Barriers – A cancer patient survey case study
• Removing Customer Barriers to Auto Insurance Renewals – An insurance survey case study

 

Learn more from our other blog posts

 

• How to Leverage TikTok as a Consumer and Customer Insights Tool
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research
• The Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of Online Insight Communities

The secret to successful research may not be a secret but in the hustle and bustle of work, we often forget one or more of them. If that describes your day today, then consider this your quick and friendly reminder!

 

 

#1 Don’t sell: solve problems.

As researchers, our job isn’t to sell questionnaire design, scripting, data analysis, report writing, and dashboards. Those may in fact be the specific services we offer but our real job is help our partners discover practical solutions to their business problems – Why isn’t this SKU selling, what new product do consumers want, who are my customers, how can I upsell to a target audience, how can I complete more projects when half my team is on holidays, how can I help a client when I don’t have all the services they need?

 

Our job is to thoroughly understand the business and research problems, and then translate them into appropriate solutions. Whether it’s concept studies, customer segmentation, journey mapping, market forecasting, or providing professional services, if we can’t translate a need into a custom solution, we’ve not done our job.

 

 

#2 Know your audience

A lot of market research starts by truly understanding a specific audience. Who are they – what are their hobbies, where do they live, where do they work, what does their family look like? It’s really easy to calculate a median age and the percentage of customers who are female but the last few years have taught us a lot about intersectionality – it’s not just “women,” it’s “disabled Black women.” In the research world, we understand this as customer segments or personas.

 

After conducting a well-designed survey, focus group, personal interviews, social listening, or analytics, you’ll have the necessary data to run a reliable segmentation and identify 3 to 5 distinct target groups of people within your ideal audience. For example, a couple of common ones are Primary Grocery Shoppers and Moms of Infants.

 

Once the data has spoken, you can then build a unique buyer persona, a fictional character, for each target group to clearly outline each one’s unique characteristics. This will make developing a set of products, prices, messaging, and marketing that genuinely resonates with each one much easier.

 

 

#3 Map your marketing

Researchers spend a lot of time mapping journeys – shopper journeys, patient journeys, student journeys, employee journeys. Building products that people want to use and buy means understanding the wants, needs, and challenges customers experience at every stage of the journey. You might discover that the most problematic stage, in fact, is not the most problematic stage.

 

Build a plan to understand every stage of the journey from end to end. As eloquently shared by Biz Davis from Abacus Agency, you need to understand whether your brand is lacking in awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, or advocacy, and whether consumers want to be entertained, inspired, educated, convinced, or delighted.

 

 

#4 Think like you search

If you’ve written a questionnaire before, you know how important this tip is. Sure, you could write a questionnaire as if you were Charles Dickens showing off his stunning, grammatically correct 200-word sentences with multiple, embedded clauses.

 

Or.

 

You could search on TikTok and Twitter and find out how people really talk. Use phrases regular people use. Use words everyone understands even if there’s a technically more precise word. Write questions and answers the same way people search and you’ll end up with a questionnaire that people want to answer!

 

 

#5 Promote your content

In the marketing world, this means thinking about native ads, social sharing, and cross-channel marketing. But for researchers, it means sharing your research across the company – from researcher to brand manager to innovation team to development team to marketer.

 

When everyone in the company is familiar with the results of your research, they can each do their part to amplify the outcome of the insight.

 

 

#6 Tell a great story

How do you get colleagues to share your research? Easy! Well, it’s not that easy. Storytelling is a necessary skill that will carry your research results throughout the company. Let people know what is exciting about the insights, how they could be used to reach consumers in unexpected ways, how they could personally benefit from understanding the results.

 

And sure, though the bulk of the research will be educational, informative, and standard, be sure to incorporate just a small bit of fun along the way.

 

 

#7 Become an authority

Don’t rest on the laurels of the research you did last year. That’s old news now. The theory may be correct but times and technology have changed. Follow up last year’s study with one that builds on what you’ve learned from your colleagues, seen among your competitors, and witnessed in related industries.

 

Show your colleagues what your brand could become if everyone worked together to leverage new, innovative research methods, techniques, and skills. Become the expert at your company who constantly pushes everyone forward towards building a better product and a better company. Get that seat at the table.

 

 

#8 Start small to grow big

You could build and execute a 5-year research plan.

 

Or, you could start small with a single project that gives you a solid overview of one product or target audience. Inhale it, memorize it, internalize it.

 

Then build the five-year plan. Because at this point, you’ve seen all the strengths and weaknesses among a specific product, how your colleagues work together, how your company systems work, and what’s happening in your industry. You have perspective now.

 

Now you get it. Now you can think really big.

 

 

My inspiration for this post?

I watched a webinar given by Biz Davis from Abacus Agency in Toronto in which he shared a bunch of his secrets for building an effective marketing strategy. The webinar will be posted on their website very soon so do go have a peek.

 

While watching, all I could think was how relevant his secrets were, in particular, for market and consumer researchers. The headers are his words, and I riffed on the ideas to bring you the research tips.

 

Are you ready to plan a great market or consumer research project from End to End? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com.

 

 

Learn more from our other blog posts

• From Digital Fingerprinting to Data Validation: Techniques to Facilitate the Collection of High Quality Market Research Data
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience

I’ve argued for years that there’s nothing wrong with DIY research. It’s a pretty easy argument given I’ve been a DIY researcher for many years myself. Of course, I’ve also had extensive training and experience in research design and analysis so it would make sense that Do-It-Yourself research has often been my favourite path.

 

In reality, the problem isn’t DIY research. The problem is unskilled people not realizing that conducting valid and reliable research requires extensive training and experience. For example, as much as I’d love to DIY a brand new house for you, I have a feeling you wouldn’t be happy with it even if I read every single Dummies manual.

 

For the sake of this argument then, let’s consider that we’re only talking about DIY research where the person is a qualified researcher with an appropriate designation, e.g., a PRC from the Insights Association or a CAIP in Canada. (BTW, if you’re not already certified, doing so is a GREAT way to tell your clients and colleagues that you are a highly competent researcher who upholds the highest ethical standards.)

 

 

Advantages of DIY Research

Agility: Everyone has been in one of these two positions before: You just discovered you need to get a questionnaire into field RIGHT NOW, or you’re watching a questionnaire already in field and you notice that multiple research participants have just provided the same open-end answer. What do you do if it’s Friday at 6pm? You get it done! You don’t have to wait until your supplier gets in on Monday morning so that they can start scripting and be ready for field by Monday evening. When it comes to being agile, no one can get a survey in field or updated faster than a DIY researcher with direct access to their own scripting licence. DIY FTW!

 

Internal knowledge: Regardless of which side of the fence you usually do your research on, supplier or buyer, you’ve learned the hard way that no one can interpret brand data and tabulations better than someone who has full sight-line into the history, projected future, and context of the brand, its sister brands, and the company – the end-client insights team. The confidential research and proprietary knowledge those researchers leverage while designing and interpreting research cannot be matched by anyone else no matter how much experience they have.

 

Price!: It’s impossible to beat the price of DIY research. When budgets are tight and the work is essential, this makes the decision simple. But make this choice wisely. Read on to make sure you’re okay forgoing the potential advantages of managed research which could force you to unexpectedly dig into your wallet after the fact.

 

 

Advantages of Managed Research

Leverage breadth of experience: Working with a supplier that supports many other types of companies has huge advantages. They’ve seen failures and success in multiple types of projects, companies, and industries. They’ve seen how competitive brands and categories carefully craft questionnaires and discussion guides, interpret unusual data, and solve unexpected, complex business problems. They’re a warehouse of rare knowledge and experience that every client benefits from, even when no one notices. And, they won’t incorporate the unconscious, internal biases that you might have picked up along the way from your standard internal processes.

 

Engage experts: Most researchers are moderately familiar with a lot of different research techniques. And, most researchers are masters of a few techniques. But being an expert in Conjoint, MaxDiff, TURF analysis, JAR analysis, or segmentation doesn’t mean you’re also an expert at running focus groups, interviews, mystery shops, or IHUTs. When you’re able to identify your own unique set of skills, you can reserve them for the projects you’d be great at and leverage the expertise of other researchers who’d be far more effective at the other projects.

 

Focus on high value tasks: When you can avoid spending the bulk of your time doing basic tasks like scripting questionnaires and running volumes of tabulations and simple data analyses, you get to spend more of your time on the value-add components of your business – interpreting results, acting on results, and building your business. You get to spend your time creating positive change!

 

Finish more projects: There are only so many hours in the days. When you’ve got a dedicated team of researchers ready at your beck and call, you can design and complete far more than one concept test, pricing study, or customer experience study every 6 months. Rejoice in the fact that more of your key projects can get done with the attention they deserve, in a timely fashion, and before it’s actually too late and damage has been done.

 

Get creative: Using research suppliers results in unlimited creativity. Imagine a multi-method, multi-country, multi-language study with brand new techniques applied in brand new ways. Oh my. I’m getting excited thinking about what that amazing study could look like! Ok, maybe you really don’t need to do that. But, with a larger team, you can certainly cast aside any limitations based on  access to tools and build the EXACT project you need. Not just the one fits into your template.

 

 

Advantages of a Hybrid DIY Research Model

But really, why must we choose DIY research OR managed research? Why can’t we be DIY researchers sometimes, choose managed research other times, and benefit from the positives of both models?

 

A skilled researcher who has inherent knowledge of the brand partnering with an experienced research supplier who has in-depth and broad experience with research techniques presents the ultimate research experience. Over time, it can even lead to building a dedicated external team that’s always on call, whether it’s during seasonal highs or end-of-fiscal rush periods, or to get through that huge pile of long overdue work.

 

In the end, whether you choose DIY research, managed research, or a hybrid model, an informed choice is the best choice!

 

 

If you’re ready to work with a research partner who will help you generate great quality data and actionable outcomes, feel free to email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you build an engaging questionnaire, script the questionnaire, run data analysis, and write a full report.

 

 

Learn more from our case studies

• Choosing A Set of Flavors To Minimize Substitutions and Cannibalization | A CPG Cluster Analysis Case Study
• Mapping a Patient Funnel to Mitigate Treatment Barriers
• Optimizing Trade Promotion Spends with a Pricing Simulator
• Tracking Customer Satisfaction Across 8 Countries

Learn more from our other blog posts

• 5 Ways to Protect Your Research Sample Investment
• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.