Market research on the Web: guidelines for success

Communication World, Oct-Nov, 1998 by Dick McCullough

THE WEB IS ALTERING THE LANDSCAPE OF BUSINESS IN MANY WAYS. ONE OF THOSE WAYS IS IN MARKETING RESEARCH. MARKETING RESEARCH IS A TOOL FOR BUSINESSES TO GATHER VITAL INFORMATION ON WHICH TO BASE SOMETIMES CRITICAL BUSINESS DECISIONS.

One complaint with traditional marketing research is that the value of the information often isn't worth the research cost. Another complaint, particularly in industries with short product life cycles, such as high-tech industries, is that the research process takes too long.

Web-based surveys offer tremendous potential to the business community. Web-based surveys are potentially faster to conduct, generate more accurate information and are cheaper by several magnitudes. Because of the web's tremendous advantages over traditional research methods, more companies than ever now have the opportunity to conduct formal market research. Used properly, web-based market research will, in the near future, vastly increase the amount of customer feedback on which managers in all industries base critical business decisions.

But where do you start?

You only need to follow a few steps to successfully conduct a web-based survey. Here they are:

* Understand clearly what questions you want answered

* Know who you want to talk to

* Write a questionnaire and put it on the web

* Build traffic to that questionnaire

* Analyze the data

What is it you want to know?

You'd be surprised how many Fortune 100 companies mess this one up. Sounds simple enough. But a common mistake is to assume you know the answer and jump right into writing a questionnaire. If you want to be happy with the results you see at the end of the project, it is critical that you stop, take a deep breath, and explicitly write down your objectives. Once committed to paper, it often becomes apparent that these really aren't the issues you need to answer. Keep writing and rewriting these objectives until you are certain that if you had the answers to these exact questions you could make the business decisions you need to make. And don't try to trick the system by making broad, general questions like "what should I do to increase profits?" I'm talking about specific, measurable questions like "Do my customers prefer to pay $5 for a product with feature x or $10 for a product with feature y?" Specific, measurable and useful. That's your goal.

Who to talk to?

This question is particularly relevant to web-based surveys because, increasingly, everyone and his grandmother are finding their way onto the web. It's clearly not the haven of geeks and the army any longer.

But this is also one of the areas where web-based research really shines. Low incidence samples, say people who raise orchids as a hobby, are very expensive to reach the traditional way. One would need to make a lot of telephone calls to generate 300 completed surveys from a group of people that represent only 0.1 percent of the total population. On the web, you don't find these hard-to-find people, they find you. How? By visiting web-sites relevant to their interests, such as orchid growing, genealogy, ice hockey goaltending, ballroom dancing, etc.

Write a web survey!

This is actually the easy part. Web surveys are very similar to traditional surveys. The only real difference is that web surveys have substantially more flexibility and control. For example, I can program my web survey to check your answers to make certain they fall in given ranges (no 10,000-pound respondents, for example). I also can display color photography or video clips anywhere inside the survey. But for simple surveys, think of web surveys the same way you would traditional surveys. Once you know what it is you want to learn and whom you want to talk to, if you just don't think too much, you will quite naturally write a decent survey. I do have a few helpful hints, however:

* KISS (Keep it simple, stupid!) My best advice for any survey, but especially for web-based surveys, is don't try to do too much. Be as simple and straightforward as possible. Certain issues resist this philosophy rather well, e.g., pricing, new product configuration, brand imagery, etc. For issues that advanced, you will need to employ techniques that go beyond KISS. But for most issues, simple is definitely better.

* Don't ask what they can't answer. This is the flip side of the KISS coin. There are some questions that you may want to ask that your customers simply don't consciously know the answers to or that they may be unwilling to answer truthfully. I have seen numerous examples of "Did this ad make you buy more of the client's products?" This is a really stupid question. It's a good research objective, but a really stupid survey question. Why? Because most of the time, the customer doesn't know the true answer. Advertising works subconsciously and long-term. It's like asking, "Did your toilet training experiences as a child affect your sex life as an adult?" You can ask the question. You may want to know the answer. And, unfortunately, you will get an answer (respondents will give you an answer to any question, no matter how stupid). But it won't be the truth.