Market research is an extremely valuable tool that can help companies fine-tune their product or service offerings and their marketing efforts.  Market research can assist companies in answering a variety of questions, for example:

• Why do/don’t our customers buy our product/service?
• How do my customers feel about my competitors?
• How can I do a better job of making our sales message clear to our prospects?
• How can we do a better job of positioning our product/service in the marketplace?

Essentially, there are two types of primary market research methodologies: quantitative and qualitative.  Quantitative research methodologies are used to develop statistics about your target market. To do this, you gather data concerning your target audience using mailed questionnaires, the telephone or the Web.  Regardless of the technique appropriate for your project, quantitative surveys are appropriate for answering numeric questions such as "How many ...?" or "How much ...?" Quantitative research can give you a snapshot of a market at one point in time.  And, if properly executed, the results of a properly run quantitative survey can be projected to the larger universe of the entire target audience.  

By contrast, qualitative research is used when you want a "feel" for the target audience or if you need very fast input on an idea from your target audience. Qualitative research is also the preferred approach if you want to probe specific issues deeply with a target audience.  If you want to "get inside their heads" to find out what they like and what's bugging them, qualitative market research is the appropriate tool.  Qualitative research can include focus groups, mini groups, triads, depth interviews (one on one), and other techniques.  

Qualitative and quantitative research methodologies are both very useful research tools. Which one you use depends on your questions, your research budget, how sure you must be about the answers to your questions  and how fast you want to collect those answers.

QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES  -- SURVEY RESEARCH.  When you need detailed information from a target audience and you need to project the results of your research across the entire universe of your target audience, use a survey.   Questionnaire development is both an art and a science. You want the questionnaire to be comprehensive enough to answer your questions but not so big as to dampen response. A balance must be struck.   In addition, you want your survey results to be representative of the target audience and projectable over that audience.  So you must carefully tailor the sample population to be appropriately representative, watching to make sure that small but important segments of your target audience are included as part of the survey.  

After the questionnaires are returned, you need to analyze the results to get answers to your original questions. Simple statistics (means, medians, and the like) will take you part of the way but often the survey results will yield even more information when coerced by more powerful multivariate statistical analysis. Once again, choosing the right statistical analysis approach is both an art and a science.

If you don't have a lot of time or if your target audience is small, then a telephone survey may be the appropriate methodology for your project. Usually, you use telephone surveys to contact tens or hundreds of people for the survey. If you want to survey thousands of people, you'll need a substantial research budget.  The reason for this is that telephone surveys cost more per respondent than self-administered (e.g. mail or Web) surveys.  Yet telephone surveys enjoy several advantages over self-administered surveys.  First, telephone surveys are used when a target audience is hard to reach or hard to identify by other prior methods.  You can survey a hundred people over the phone in days.  And, phone surveys can be guided: based on answers given to the telephone interviewer, questions can be skipped or the appropriate follow-up questions can be asked. In contrast, with self-administered surveys the respondent controls how the questionnaire is filled out.

For their part, mail and Web surveys can gather tremendous amounts of numeric information and can be used to gather attitudes and satisfaction levels.  For the sheer amount of data collected, self-administered surveys are far and away the leading survey method. The reason for this is simple: these surveys currently provide the lowest cost per respondent in most cases.   However, you should expect to get back only a fraction of the surveys you send out because the targets for these surveys are busy people and many simply won't respond.

QUALITATIVE APPROACHES -- FOCUS GROUPS AND DEPTH INTERVIEWS.  Put people in a room with a good, trained moderator for two hours – together with sufficient quantities of cookies, coffee and cola, and these people will tell you everything .  Focus groups can take place at any time of the day and can be used to cover a variety of topics, but they are best used when you need to understand more deeply “why” a particular group feels or acts in a particular way.    Topics often covered in focus groups include reactions to product ideas and product prototypes, messaging tests, ad testing, and customer needs identification. The groups are taped (video and audio) for later analysis, and you and your colleagues can usually observe during the focus group – either at a specially designed facility, or via a videoconference or Web-based hook-up when the session proceedings can be viewed remotely.

Sometimes you need to survey hard-to-reach people such as company presidents, vice-presidents, CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, CXOs, and the like. These people typically will not come to a focus group because their time is too valuable. You can, however, reach these people through depth interviews which are one-on-one discussions with a researcher.  You may also wish to use depth interviews when privacy factors (the topic, the companies discussed, etc.) preclude the use of a focus group methodology.

Used appropriately, market research is an invaluable tool that takes the guesswork out of marketing. 
Beacon Technology Partners