‘How do we get good but cheap market research?’

Q: We’re not a big company yet but on our way. I founded this consumer company some eight years ago after leaving one of the big three consumer multinationals where I was a category manager. That’s where I learned how useful market research is in developing any marketing campaign of any kind.

But over the years, market research has gotten more and more expensive. I get each of my marketing executives assigned to a specific brand to commission a UAI (Usage, Attitude, Image) study for his or her brand at least twice a year.

A business friend of mine who’s in the automotive accessory business told me to try going for a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) marketing research set-up to really be research cost-effective. He told me that you had set up one for them two years ago. But I think our research volume isn’t yet that much to warrant a DIY and right now we do not even have a market research manager. Each brand’s market research needs are the responsibility of the marketing executive in charge. So we’d like to stick to commissioning research to a third-party agency.

Our concern now is how to get the most out of our limited research budget. What can we do? How do we get good but cheap market research?

A: As far as market research is concerned, you actually have two basic concerns. One is immediate and the other is nearly long-term.

Your immediate concern is, as you put it, how to get good but cheap market research if you continue commissioning your research projects.  Your nearly long-term concern is how to get into a DIY research set-up.  We say “how” and not “whether” because eventually you will have to. But this is an issue we’ll reserve for our next Friday column. For now, we’ll diagnose and MRx your more immediate research need.

Let’s talk about your UAI research so that we’re rooted to the actual and let’s talk about options, that is, options versus your continuing to commission your UAI to a full-service survey agency. There are at least two options for getting a “good but cheap” UAI.

The first is to go away from a full-service survey agency and turn in favor of a specialized field-and-tab survey agency. When you explore this option, make sure that you choose from among duly “accredited” field-and-tab agencies. You can check with MORES (Market and Opinion Research Society) for the accredited agencies.

Resorting to a field-and-tab agency means that this agency will do just the mid-stages of the survey process, namely, field data collection and tabulation.

So who’s to do the “book-end stages,” namely, survey design and data analysis? That should be you or your marketing and brand executives.

Of course, one difficulty here (that’s more imagined than real) is your assumption that your marketing executives have never done research designing and most especially, data analysis. You may be in for a surprise if you asked them. Those who have attended our Applied Marketing Research (AMR) seminar already know how because those two skills of designing and analyzing are included in the seminar’s lectures, examples and cases, and exercises and mini-workshops.

Those who were intent in learning may again surprise you when they show you that they can do better research designing and even better data analysis than what the analysts (especially those who are newly hired and inexperienced) from your commissioned full-service agency provide.

If you have no one who has had the AMR seminar training, you have two options again. One is to buy and ask them to carefully read our best-selling User-Friendly Marketing Research book (3rd Edition) and learn research designing, and correct and actionable data analysis from there.  The other option is to send them to attend our next AMR seminar offering.

What’s the alternative to resorting to the services of a field-and-tab agency? For your twice a year UAI survey requirements for each of your brand, you may want to consider subscribing to an “Omnibus Survey Services” (OSS). In his 1999 Opinion Polls book Nick Moon, Director of Political and Social Research at UK’s NOP Research Group, a pioneer of the omnibus survey, says that in effect an omnibus survey “sells space on its questionnaire” to all the riding passengers of the bus, so to speak.  For any omnibus client (or passenger), omnibus surveys represent the most cost-effective survey method as compared to conducting their own survey.

So if you can shorten your UAI survey into asking only 10 or even 20 questions, you can take advantage of SWS’ quarterly and nationwide omnibus survey services known as “Social Weather Surveys.” This is a very affordable nationwide quarterly survey where you can subscribe and you pay by the number of questions you want answered. So your subscription of, say, 10 to 20 close-ended questions will entail only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the P3 million to P5 million total cost if you were to commission this nationwide 1,500 sample size survey. If you’re not after a nationwide coverage and are only interested in one region, say, NCR, then a proportionate large reduction in the total cost of subscribing will accrue to you. This option opens to you doing many more survey, say, from your twice to four times a year UAI, from the same budget. What we said about your taking care of the book-end stages of research, namely, designing and data analysis applies in this option.

We singled out SWS because of its established reputation for high-quality field and data processing. Gallup World Poll has recognized SWS for these capabilities by giving it such an award and by choosing it over even the world’s largest survey agencies when it appointed SWS since four years ago to do its surveys here in the Philippines.

Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!