Dimensional Research

Technology Market Research

Research Bias: Market Research And Social Media

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At Dimensional Research, we are big fans of social media. We blog here.  You can follow us on Twitter @DimensionalR. We’d love it if you fanned us on Facebook.

So what is the place of social media in market research? 

This is a topic that is constantly evolving as social media changes, but let me make one important observation about research bias. 

I think Twitter is an AMAZING way to get feedback from people who are on Twitter. The ways to interact and test are absolutely revolutionary and should be evaluated as a potential component of any company’s arsenal of feedback mechanisms. Now the question is – is my target market on Twitter? 

If you sell to corporate IT, I’m going to make a bold claim: Twitter is NOT the best way to get feedback from your target market! I’d argue that the people spending money on enterprise technology are particularly under-represented on Twitter.   (Now all the Tweeps can argue with me – please do!)

Using Twitter is a great way to reach the part of your target market that is on Twitter.  Maybe your early adopters are on Twitter.  And you may sell a solution that is more likely to be discussed on social media.  But caveats aside, think carefully about how your overall target market can be reached for feedback.

Bottom line: Know where your audience can be reached.  Execute market research that represents your entire audience – both the portion of it that is active on social media and the part that isn’t.

How Much Time Does A Market Research Project Take?

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So, to be honest- it really depends.  But I know that’s not an answer to a very pragmatic question, so let me give more details here, bearing in mind that it really does depend on your specific project.

Here are suggested minimum schedules assuming stakeholders respond in a timely manner.  However, these timelines are never compressed – only made longer when you hit unexpected roadbumps.

A typical market research project takes six-seven weeks. This is pretty standard for a small project, say 10-30 in-depth interviews or 4-8 focus groups.  Larger projects take longer, of course.  And we’ll talk about Web surveys later.

Here’s a pretty typical schedule for a single stage project with one series of focus groups or in-depth interviews – excluding unforeseen “bumps” or unique requirements:

Week 1: Project go-ahead. Write and approve recruiting guide. Identify source for recruiting participants – internal or external.

Week 2-3: Recruit participants. Write and approve interview guide or moderator’s guide.

Week 4-5: Conduct research. This may take less than two weeks, depending on your goals. Four focus groups all in the US can be done in just one week if everyone is available.

 Week 6-7: Write and present market research report.

WARNING: The biggest schedule slippage that happens, aside from getting all the approvals in place for the project go-ahead of course, is with identifying internal participant contacts.  Using in-house lists or asking account managers to give us their contacts for recruiting may be time consuming and the schedule should be adjusted as needed.

Web surveys are usually faster. A typical schedule for a straightforward web survey project is four weeks. For example a survey with only a few demographic cuts (role and geography), 20 questions or less, 1 matrix question and no open-ended questions could have a schedule that looks like this: 

Week 1: Project go-ahead. Determine goals. Identify lists for participation.

Week 2: Write and approve questions. Upload them to survey tool. QA. Run test survey.

Week 3: Adjust survey as needed based on test.  Field survey.

Week 4: Close survey. Do analysis including filtering and correlating findings. Write market research report.

If the survey is being conducted as a collateral piece to support outbound marketing efforts such as PR or lead gen, add another week for copy-editing and layout.

Online Focus Groups: How Do They Work?

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Online focus groups are a highly effective market research tool.  My clients love them.  They save the time and cost of travel while making it easier for participants and observers.

Most importantly, these benefits don’t require you to tradeoff for lower quality research. Online focus groups still facilitate the “brainstorming” dynamic that you get at an in-person focus group, where one participant’s comment sparks a comment by another participant and so on. The brainstorming dynamic enables the group to dig deep into an issue, so that the client can get a very clear picture of market acceptance of their product and of any issues they need to deal with.

Participants love online focus groups too, because they give them an opportunity to listen to the feedback of others in the industry. This is an important benefit for participants, especially in customer advisory boards, which encourages them to join.

Online focus groups are conducted using conference calls and Web-based meeting technology such as WebEx, GotoMeeting, etc.  In many ways they’re similar to traditional face-to-face focus groups, except you’re not in one room. We recruit participants in the same way, set a time for the meeting, and prepare a moderator’s guide. If relevant, we can review a presentation with the participants. Just as in a traditional focus group, where the client can listen in through a one-way window, the client can listen to an online focus group on a muted phone line. And we can use Web technology to poll participants similarly to a visual “show of hands” or “nod of heads” in an in-person group.

Despite the many similarities between in-person focus groups and online focus groups, there are also a few differences. The most obvious one is that you don’t get the non-verbal clues from the participants. Because of this, the moderator needs to make an extra effort to draw out all the participants and balance the input. To facilitate this, we typically have a smaller group (4-6 participants per group rather than 6-8 for an in-person group) for the same amount of time. We may do more groups as a result – 5 instead of 4 for example. 

Of course, there is also the option of conducting video online focus groups.  As technology evolves, these are becoming more common and are easier to set up.

Another major benefit of online focus groups is that they reflect the majority of real-life interactions with customers. When selling to Corporate IT buyers, more and more meetings are being conducted online rather than in person, so online focus groups reflect that same scenario.  If your messages work in an online focus group, they will translate well into an online sales call or a Webinar.

Technology Professional? Want your opinions to be heard?

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Are you a technology professional? Do you like sharing your opinions? You might enjoy being part of a Dimensional Research Project.

The only real qualification is that you work with technology in your profession – we’re especially interested in people who work in corporate IT.  We welcome participation from around the globe!

Important information for participants:

  • This is market research – no one will every try to sell you anything.
  • Your input will be anonymous. Nothing you say will ever be attributed to you or your company in any way.

What do you have to do?

Register here (you may need to scroll down a bit). We’ll ask you a few questions about yourself. Then, as research projects come up that you seem to fit, we’ll contact you with some more detailed questions and information about the specific project.

What is involved?

The actual level of participation depends on the project. For our Web surveys, we’ll send you a link and you can go online to complete the survey. For in-depth interviews we’ll contact you and schedule a time to talk – usually about an hour. For focus groups we’ll let you know when (and where, if necessary) and see if you’re available – usually about 1½ – 2 hours.

What’s in it for you?

This depends on the project. For a Web survey, it may be a copy of the final report or a chance to win a cool prize. For a focus group or interview usually it is a cash stipend payable via Paypal or US dollar check. And of course, with all projects you have the knowledge that you’re influencing the future of technology in some way!

REGISTER HERE>>

Using Market Research To Uncover False Beliefs

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We just completed an extensive series of in-depth interviews with great IT participants from around the globe. These participants were smart and articulate. They knew their job, and were very good at it.

But as smart and capable as these participants were, we discovered during the interviews that many of them – at least half –  held a completely false belief about my client’s product.

During the interviews with these participants, they kept repeating the same idea.  The details are confidential to that client, of course, but the important point is that this audience really believed that their perception of the products was true. This wasn’t a minor technical detail – it was a major assumption about environments the products operated in.  But the problem was IT WASN’T TRUE! This was verified by my client, by independent evaluations that we found while investigating the conflict, and by some of the other participants in the study.

So here you have a very well established fact about a product, but at least half of the customer population believes something else. In other words: even if something is not logical, and even if your customers and prospects are technology vendors who tend to be logical, they may still believe in something wrong. And it could negatively affect their buying decisions.

This type of dynamic is extremely important for vendors to understand. If there are things that your audience believes about your solution that are not true, you’d better know about it so you can take action.

You’ll notice that I’m referring to this as a “belief”. Beliefs are harder to respond to than competitive FUD or outright lies.  These are things that your target market thinks are true because they’ve never really thought about it.

A formal market research methodology is the best way to uncover and to root out these false beliefs across your target market. You can’t rely on day-to-day conversations with customers, because if these issues do surface during such a conversation, you tend to correct them immediately with that specific customer and then forget about them since it didn’t make any sense to you to think that way.

IT Vendor: Things Your Customers Think That Might Surprise You

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I worked in vendor marketing roles (product marketing, product management, campaigns, etc.) for the first half of my career, before becoming a market researcher.  When I started doing technology market research and spending my days talking to corporate IT without any sales motivations, the conversations changed and I learned a few things that really surprised me and I wanted to share them with you. 

  1. Customers do not spend anywhere near as much time thinking about your product as you do. Even customers that use the product on a daily basis spend most of their time thinking about other things – from people issues to process issues to the other 14 tools they use every day.  They really appreciate it when you make your product and messages simple so they can get on to the other parts of their job.
  2. Customers really WANT to give feedback – happy or cranky, mature or brand new.  They want to talk about their experiences.  Some are very busy and don’t have time, but in general customers love being asked to join customer advisory boards or participate in research projects. There are a few caveats of course:
    • They don’t want to jump through a bunch of hoops to get permission – but that’s easy to solve by offering them anonymity for participation.
    • They want their feedback to go somewhere and yield real results.
    • They want to talk about the products they own not just the new stuff you want to sell them.
  3. Customers HATE IT when you change the names of the products, or product features, they know.  It took them a lot of effort to learn your product, and they don’t like having to relearn everything, or struggle to talk about a product they love because they don’t know the lingo anymore.  And just to be clear, this is not a “minor annoyance.” It’s a HUGE negative.
  4. Corporate IT is surprisingly consistent across companies and markets. There are differences of course, but there are also a LOT of similarities.   <UPDATE:  THIS POINT GENERATED A COUPLE OF QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT CORPORATE IT, INSPIRING THIS POST.>
    • Geography: America, Europe, APAC all talk about the same pain, and same benefits of products. There are definitely differences in the way they buy products (channel vs. direct especially) and each region has different competitive dynamics and maturity of processes and technology, but for message testing or evaluating opportunities you don’t need to go far to get a view of the pains experiences by IT around the globe.
    • Vertical Industry: If an application is mission-critical, it makes very little difference if it’s financial services or manufacturing. The needs are very similar. Government, education, and non-profit organizations buy differently, but again, the pain is the same.

The discovery that surprised me the most? Realizing that customers actually WANT to give feedback and are willing to take the time to do it. As long as they know their feedback is impacting the company and its products, customers are more than willing to share it.

Market Research: It’s All About Listening

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When you don’t listen to your customers or prospects, you risk losing them.

According to a recent report, “Did not listen to me” is the most widely experienced problem faced by 38% of services buyers. Additionally, 55% of buyers said they would be “much more likely” to consider hiring the provider “if they listened better.”  As Drew McLellan points out, if you add up the “didn’t listen” and the “talked too much,” that’s 63%.  Two thirds of your sales calls are being wasted simply because you talk too much and don’t listen enough! 

Market research is all about listening. It is also about asking the right kind of questions so that you’ll get the right kind of feedback. 

Here are three tried and true tips that I always use in my market research to make sure I actually listen to participants. These tips are applicable to every area of customer and prospect interaction.

  1. Shoot for the 80/20 rule.  Always ask yourself, what percentage of the time are you talking, and what percentage of the time are the participants talking?  I shoot for the 80/20 rule.  If I’m doing more than 20% of the talking, then I’m probably not really listening.
  2. Ask questions that encourage talking – not just “yes/no”.  Are you telling the person what their pain is, or are you letting them tell you about their pain?  A good researcher doesn’t say, “here is your pain – isn’t that right?”  They ask about pain to see if the pain they believe the prospect has actually comes up as a priority.  Of course you can always guide a discussion to keep it relevant, but you need to ask open questions in order to get real feedback – and give customers and prospects a real chance to say “no, I don’t care about that”.
  3. Look for what you don’t know.  Never ask a participant “Do you agree?” 90% of the time they’ll say yes, because that’s the easy and polite thing to do. Your goal is to create an opportunity to hear something you DON’T know. 

To quote the Greek philosopher Epictetus, “we were born with two ears and one mouth, so we can listen twice as much as we speak.”  Thanks for the inspiration Drew.

Market Research: Listening for the Unexpected

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Most businesses have an existing product or market that they are targeting, and their goal is to learn how to serve that marketplace more effectively. Any reasonable researcher should know that if you have a virtualization management solution, it isn’t that useful to talk about HR problems.  But while you need to stay on topic, you also don’t want to miss the chance to uncover information you are unaware of and may be a huge opportunity or a weakness you must address. This is one of the real advantages of qualitative market research where you can spend time deeply understanding the nuances of customer input.

Treat “unprompted” feedback with special importance.

Sometimes the information you don’t know that you need to ask about, is the most important information to hear.  Of course research must have a goal – but work with your researcher so they know your business and can use their judgment to understand what threads are worth digging into and what will take them into a rat hole that does not forward your business. 

The most important tool for unprompted feedback is this question:  “Is there anything else?”  This is the final question Dimensional Research uses for any market research interaction. After you’ve asked all your carefully crafted and specific questions, closing with an open-ended question can yield incredibly useful information.

Of course, this is a very important balancing act and research projects need to focus on their goals – not interesting side topics.  The core questions must be asked. But Dimensional Research makes a point of going through all input from every project with a special eye for the unprompted information.  Most of it is one-offs, with each participant having a special thing that only they are interested in.  But often you can spot trends in unprompted information that are really important. 

We’ve done projects where it turns out there was a critical development tool that needed to be integrated with the client’s product – not something they had realized was vital until the majority of participants talked about it, unprompted, in a series of customer and prospect focus groups.

In another project we didn’t realize that customer loyalty was almost non-existent, until we went through the unprompted feedback from interviews with the highly satisfied, happiest customers, and discovered they regularly evaluated the competition – not a question that we asked about specifically.

So do stay on topic.  But keep your ears open for the “+1” opportunities or customer issues you hadn’t recognized – especially if you hear them from multiple sources.  Possibly minor product changes or messaging tweaks can help you address a different pain, target a new and lucrative market, or address important weaknesses.

Market Research: Why Methodology Matters

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“You are uniquely unqualified to talk to your customers. You simply don’t think they way they think.”

Jay Ehret caught my attention with this very strong statement. I don’t entirely agree with him – everyone MUST talk to their customers!  But there is an important truth here, which highlights the importance of a formal market research methodology and the key role a good market researcher can play in establishing better communication with your customers. 

The problem is that when you are so close to your product, to your company’s initiatives, and to what you think about your product, you may miss what your customers are trying to tell you. Because, as Jay says, you KNOW TOO MUCH, TOO WELL. 

In this all-too-common situation, a good market researcher can offer a valuable outside perspective on your company and on your product.

I recently got an email from a client after presenting a report. It perfectly captures the value of Dimensional Research:

“I must admit that I was very surprised at how good the results of this project were, especially since you hadn’t worked directly with our solutions or this specific target market previously.  In the course of this project, you learned what’s going on with our market well enough that you articulated what’s happening better than we have been able to ourselves. Thank you.”

Of course, I appreciated the feedback, but I wasn’t surprised.  A good market researcher quickly figures out what’s going on, in part because they don’t know as much as you do.  External perspective can give important insights, not because you don’t know the information, but because you know so much MORE than the basics, that the really key information can get hidden.

Applying a formal market research methodology can bring important information about your business to light and provide valuable clarification. You can then act on that information, combined with your deep knowledge of the product, to drive business results.

Six guidelines for compensating research participants

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There is usually some form of compensation for participating in a market research project. For focus groups and in-depth interviews, research participants are usually offered some kind of stipend in appreciation of their time.  The question I get asked frequently is – how much?

I’ll start by saying that the stipend is usually NOT the primary motivation for participating in technology market research.  I find people are genuinely interested in expressing their opinion. They like to be heard; they like to hear about new ideas coming down the pipe; they like thinking they are influencing the market or the product; and – in the case of focus groups and customer advisory boards – they like to hear what is happening with their peers.  And let’s face it, corporate IT employees are typically paid reasonably well, so a hundred bucks isn’t going to really compensate them for trucking across town to a focus group facility, spending 2 hours talking to you, then trucking back home.

That said, the stipend is key in attracting the right audience, and is perceived as an important added benefit. So back to the question of how much.  The answer depends on a variety of factors:

1. What are you asking people to do?  Focus groups typically take about 2 hours of participants’ time. In-depth interviews usually take from thirty minutes to one hour. In addition, for in-person focus groups, the participants need to get to a specific location.  As a result, focus group participants are usually compensated more generously.

2. How big is the target pool of participants?  The harder they are to find, the more you should sweeten the pot to simplify the recruiting.  If you have a straightforward recruit like “application developers” or “network administrators”, there are plenty of those and you don’t need to have a particularly large stipend to entice them to join. 

However, if you need something really specific like “DBAs responsible for MATISSE databases”, or customers of a competitor that only has a few hundred users worldwide, you want to have a large stipend to make sure that you’re doing everything possible to attract the few people out there that match the recruiting profile.

3. What level of participants are you looking for?  CIOs and other IT executives make more money than sys admins or developers, so the stipends need to be higher to match their expectations for the value of their time.

4. Customers or prospects?  Depending on the context, offering a customer money to give you feedback may be tacky.  Particularly if it’s a customer advisory board meeting, the real value is the chance to be heard.  In this case a nice gift with the corporate logo on it is much more appropriate.  

5.  Give the philathropic option.  More and more corporations have implemented strict policies that employees CANNOT receive any gifts of any kind.  Dimensional Research always offers our research participants the option of donating their stipends to the charity of their choice. 

6.  Web surveys are different.  When you’re looking for hundreds or even thousands of respondents, any stipend, no matter how small, can quickly blow up your research budget. There are certainly options like being entered into a drawing for a gift certificate.  Or the ever popular drawing for the hot electronic item of the day – the iPod Touch has been particularly common in survey drawings in the past year. 

One thing to consider, if the findings are not confidential, is to simply offer a copy of the final report to participants.  This is a very high-value offer to people who care about the topic – probably even more than a gadget – and has the added benefit of not attracting participants who don’t care about the topic and might not give the most insightful or informed answers.