Homemade surveys
are the worst
09/03/2020
Homemade surveys are the worst
29/01/2020
Surveys are the WORST homemade option for conducting market research. However they are the best when professionally & scientifically done. Here’s why.
With the economy becoming more and more competitive with each passing day, having apt knowledge about the concerns and preferences of your customers has become integral for any business. Market research is the best way to increase customer satisfaction, understand the factors that affect your business, and to elevate your performance. It does take work to achieve all of this.
Sample size & response spread
Conducting sound & accurate research is heavily dependent on the ability to obtain a large enough sample size along with the right spread of your target audience. Here at Onest we refer to Harvard’s definition of response spread which simply refers to the different demographics & types of people your target respondents are made up from. Or in other words, your future consumers!
Benji Zammit,
Business unit leader
Fact: I do 5 mins of skip rope everyday
Benji Zammit,
Business unit leader
Fact: I do 5 mins of skip rope everyday
Surveys are the WORST homemade option for conducting market research. However they are the best when professionally & scientifically done. Here’s why.
With the economy becoming more and more competitive with each passing day, having apt knowledge about the concerns and preferences of your customers has become integral for any business. Market research is the best way to increase customer satisfaction, understand the factors that affect your business, and to elevate your performance. It does take work to achieve all of this.
Sample size & response spread
Conducting sound & accurate research is heavily dependent on the ability to obtain a large enough sample size along with the right spread of your target audience. Here at Onest we refer to Harvard’s definition of response spread which simply refers to the different demographics & types of people your target respondents are made up from. Or in other words, your future consumers!
Conducting your own surveys is almost assuredly not going to work. Unless you have some real reach & powerful distribution channel to push your survey through, in which case conducting market research likely wouldn’t be an issue to begin with, you won’t get anywhere near a meaningful sample size which in turn means taking high risk decisions based on inaccurate research. We wan’t to avoid this at all costs.
The best homemade alternative
If getting experts to build and distribute your survey is 100% not an option, there are homemade alternatives that will provide a level of clear insight. All you need to do is to just have conversations with a handful of people in your target market. If your target is mothers for example, figure out a method of having an in-depth chat with these mothers. Speak to as many as you can. While your results will not be as broad, in terms of sample size and generalisable results, there will be far more depth to the responses you get, and you’ll be able to follow up more easily. You’ll leave these conversations understanding your market a bit better than simply conducting a survey you dreamt up one random morning.
Conducting your own surveys is almost assuredly not going to work. Unless you have some real reach & powerful distribution channel to push your survey through, in which case conducting market research likely wouldn’t be an issue to begin with, you won’t get anywhere near a meaningful sample size which in turn means taking high risk decisions based on inaccurate research. We wan’t to avoid this at all costs.
The best homemade alternative
If getting experts to build and distribute your survey is 100% not an option, there are homemade alternatives that will provide a level of clear insight. All you need to do is to just have conversations with a handful of people in your target market. If your target is mothers for example, figure out a method of having an in-depth chat with these mothers. Speak to as many as you can. While your results will not be as broad, in terms of sample size and generalisable results, there will be far more depth to the responses you get, and you’ll be able to follow up more easily. You’ll leave these conversations understanding your market a bit better than simply conducting a survey you dreamt up one random morning.
Beyond that, the best free option requires a lot of guesswork, creativity, and some research skill. You can reverse-engineer your competition. If you’re selling printers and you want to better understand your market, look into how Canon and HP and Epson sell their printers, how they position themselves, etc. Odds are they know what they’re doing, and odds are they’ve got reasons for doing what they do. Or if you have a niche, like your printers are cheaper, or much easier to set up than most wireless printers, think critically. Who would want cheaper printers? Students, young people, low-income people. What are they looking for in a printer? How do companies best market to them? How do they shop? Where do they shop? When do they shop? You can probably find that information out easily.
Beyond that, the best free option requires a lot of guesswork, creativity, and some research skill. You can reverse-engineer your competition. If you’re selling printers and you want to better understand your market, look into how Canon and HP and Epson sell their printers, how they position themselves, etc. Odds are they know what they’re doing, and odds are they’ve got reasons for doing what they do. Or if you have a niche, like your printers are cheaper, or much easier to set up than most wireless printers, think critically. Who would want cheaper printers? Students, young people, low-income people. What are they looking for in a printer? How do companies best market to them? How do they shop? Where do they shop? When do they shop? You can probably find that information out easily.
At Onest we know how to find all of this information
& the best research result is founded on the ONE source of truth.
We obtain this one truth by accessing our large pool of data information & connecting it to your target market’s insights through our scientifically engineered surveys & powerful distribution channels.
Doing it yourself
Back to explaining how you can conduct your own product research. Let’s imagine your product is a luxury good, then you know your market largely consists of people with disposable income. This would be young professionals, wealthy old folks, and households making >€XYZ/year. Once you know that, you can look for further detail on those groups. You can quite literally google “how to market to older consumers,” or whatever and find a ton of valid sources about that.
Search for the information you need using as many different formulations of the same phrase/question as you can until you get what you need. “what ads to older consumers respond to” “what appeals to old consumers” “successful marketing campaigns old consumers” “what old consumers look for in a product”
While it’s typically the case that when using a search engine, entire phrases like that are ineffective, when looking for blogs and articles about this stuff, we find it quite easy to get results.
We hope this helped you out a bit to understand how you can understand your business a bit better from the comfort of your sofa. Conducting research through surveys may seem fairly obvious & intuitive but in actual fact accurate research is an actual science & sometimes best left to the scientists. Important to note that in this article we haven’t even touched upon the science behind asking the right questions in a survey…
