Happy Holidays from The Market Research Event!

We're going to be taking a much needed break from the world of market research to celebrate the holidays with our family and friends. A huge "Thank You" to you, our loyal readers for your insight, news and communication about our shared market research experience. We look forward to 2009 and all of its glorious opportunity!

Thanks again and have a very joyous holiday season.

Top Posts at The Market Research Event

As the year draws to a close, let's look at the most popular posts from TMRE in 2008! Most of the top posts were live blogged from the TMRE conference in Anaheim! If you weren't there, take a chance to look back and find out what happened!

Top 5 posts of 2008 on TMRE:

Really Cool Research Deliverables

Dr. Pepper Snapple Group’s Targeted Shopper Marketing Approach

Who's Drinking the Wine?

So Many Presentations, So Little Time

What Women Want

Market Research Through iPhone

I came across this YouTube video from the Fox Business Network with Christian J. Ward, CEO of Ockham Research, in which he unveils their new application on the iPhone called Stockrazor. Unlike the app that comes with the iPhone that allows you to solely check your stock quotes, Stockrazor gives an in-depth fundamental analysis going after cash numbers, sales numbers, and dividends. Take a look at the video here.

The 2009 Consumer

So are you preparing for the 2009 year? With the current economic situation, it's important to be in sync with your customers, and know what they're ready to buy. TrendWatching.com has posted some of the things consumers are going to be looking for next year.

Google Trends...are you following them

I recently found an article at Ezine that looks at how valuable Google Trends can be for you and understanding your market online.

Some benefits of Google Trends are:
-Viewing and monitoring online search results
-Supporting information and current relative news trends that surround your web site's focus
-Find out who is searching for your information and where they're searching from

Read the article for a focused look at what you can do to leverage Google Trends as research.

Sampling methods

Quirks recently posted the most common ways to collect data for samples in the USA. They are: face-to-face, address based, RDD telephone (random digit dialing), directory listed telephone, low-incidence targeting and the internet. The article also points out that combining several different methods can prove to be very effective. Read more here.

Don't fall into the traps

At The Inquirer, they recently addressed consumer insights and how they affect market research. One particular section that caught my eye was two traps that will keep you from finding new market opportunities for your customers.

Don't fall into these traps:
1) Begin held back by your best practice, or fear of the unfamiliar
2) A mindset that complex and sophisticated search and market understanding, or market approaches that are at the expense of similar but richer ones

Why market research needs to stay in the budget

At Marketing-Interactive.com, they recently wrote an extensive article on why market research needs to stay in a company's budget, despite the hard economic times. It is crucial that marketers continue to know what is going on in the mind of their customer, especially in this economic down turn. The best way to do this is to continue doing market research. By seeing what customers see as "must haves" and "have nots," motivations behind their actions can be judged, and help the company continue to meet the needs of the customer. Read more here.

Measuring data from online communities

Computer World recently took a look at how some companies are mining online communities and collecting the rich amounts of data that their users can provide by using the online community. They gave Kimberly Clark as an example as one of the companies who is using their space to collect information.

Kimberly-Clark is now using the warehouse to link data compiled on its community site with customer profile information, helping it identify its most loyal customers and determine which content they view or tools they use. Thus, the company can serve up the content most sought by the site's users, Hoerter added.

Have you started mining your social networks to find out more about your customers? What have you discovered?

Neilson now measuring radio for Clear Channel

In a recent article at Ad Week, they reveal how Neilson plans to capture numbers of listeners and what they listen to for Clear Channel. They'll be collecting using the diary method, as well as both qualitative and quantitative methods. They'll be collecting their first round of research in March and April 2009 with groups of panelists numbering from 1,200, 1,600 or 2,200, depending on the size of the market the listeners are in.

For more information, read the article.

Market research in developing countries

When expanding to a new country, it's important to get a grasp on the new culture your product is targeted to. With a new culture, market research could prove to be easier for several reasons: the response rates from door-to-door interviews could be as high as 90%, interviews are cheap and plentiful, and the structure of the culture often makes it easy to identify the sources for respondents. For more on effective market research in developing countries, read Quirks' An insider's guide to conducting effective research in developing countries.

Interesting Learnings on "The Experience Generation"

Hello all, it's been several weeks since I was on hand at TMRE 2008 and had a chance to share with you all my perspectives from the conference. There was so much to participate in, there were still some thoughts I had that I now finally have the chance to share with you all. I had the pleasure of meeting both Tamara Sachs, CEO and Robert Miner, President of SachsInsights at The Market Research Event in October. We posted some details from this presentation before. Their compelling qualitative research work is supplemented with high quality "video storytelling", and it's fascinating!

I was fortunate to sit in. So here is a small clip of the workshop Robert Miner gave on "MilleniAdults--the experience generation."

Mr. Miner mentioned several key points that define this segment:

1) Belief in a Kaleidoscope of Options

2) Definition of Success Varies Across the Segment (financially secure, life experiences, making a difference)

3) Entry Level Debt

4) Online Social Networking

For more video footage of the ethnographic study conducted by SachsInsights, you can visit their website.

Good stuff!!

April Bell

Just a little market research goes a long way

Karyn Greenstreet recently commented on the importance of market research, no matter what the size of the company. Doing a little market research, and that's more than the few people who are within your company, can go a long way. Find out if people want your product before you push it out into the market. She's also written two other articles on market research, "Ground Truth" and the Importance of Market Research and Yes You CAN Do Your Own Market Research.

European Demography Report out

Demographics can be a huge asset when companies are trying to figure who what their customers want. The European Demography Report recently came on November 21. Have a look at it here. What kind of valuable information do you find in a report like this?

Measuring ROI for Market Research

According to Nick Hague, 74% of Pharma companies do not calculate their ROI for market research. Of that 74%, 39% don't do any sort of performance measurement and the others rely on the satisfaction levels of their internal clients for research. Most of the companies believe that the more general the market research objective is, the harder it is to calculate the ROI for the market research.

What do you think about this? One of the major reasons Pharma companies don't do market research is because the fact that market research comes so early in the chain of events leading to a project launch – it is far removed from the end result. What do you think? Do you agree with this?

Measuring coupon usage

In the December edition of CPG Matters, they address the issue of companies investing in coupons, and then being unable to fully understand and analyze what motivates customers to use them.

Bill Bittner, president of BWH Consulting of Mahwah, New Jersey, states "Measuring coupon effect is not done in a vacuum. It's difficult to sort out the single effect of a coupon. There are so many factors that affect performance, the general economy being the big one today, I don't know how you isolate."

To conduct this specific research, APT advocates that tests and controls be set up for retailer-CPG colalboration, by dividing a chain's loyalty cardholders into many test groups to receive different offers, based on thier prior spending patterns. The controls are samples held out from each of these group to not receive a particular offer.

Then, the researchers must look at both the tests groups and the controls. Find out more about these tests here.