Marketing Research FAQs

Question:The benefits for my product are: Value, Performance, Reliability, Quality, and Reputation. Is this correct?

Customers buy product benefits, which are abstract concepts. You can find benefits by asking the simple question: What do you mean by that? This is from an old technique called "funneling." For example, if you say that "value" is a benefit that customers are looking for in a product or service, then ask yourself (or better yet, the customer) "What do you mean by that?" What you will typically find is that people will respond by using less abstract and more meaningful words, like "a low price." Quality works the same way. If you ask, "what do you mean by that?" you will find that quality actually refers to specific benefits that customers are seeking. For example, depending on the product category, quality may refer to "good tasting coffee" or "reliability" or even "safety." If you keep asking the question, "what do you mean by that?" you will eventually find that you can only answer this question by using tactics or concrete product attributes. When you hit this point, you have typically found the right level to describe a customer benefit. For example, if you ask "what do you mean by that?" to "good tasting coffee", you probably can only answer that question by referring to the concrete beans and roasting equipment that are used. With this technique in mind, you might now consider the other major ideas that typically follow under the heading of customer benefits, but are simply too high. These include terms like reputation, image, or the ultimately useless idea (that I often hear) "it works the way I expect it to work."

Question:I've never done a questionnaire before. Where do I start?

Here are some things you should think about when putting together any type of questionnaire: 1. Efficiently ask all the questions that are important. Avoid questions that seem off topic. This requires that you first clearly identify what it is you want to know. 2. Shorter questionnaires are better than longer ones, but more important than length is how easy it is to complete the questionnaire. So, you need to make your instructions very clear and make sure the wording of all questions is unambiguous. 3. Pretest a questionnaire to make sure of the above. Do this with real respondents, or at least coworkers. This is very important; pre-testing ensures that the questionnaire is easy to fill out. 4. Open-ended questions, while often necessary, are the least likely to be answered. You may need to use them, but you’ll increase your response rate by translating them into a scale.

Question:I've heard about conjoint analysis as a technique. What is it for?

The heart of your question really has to do with understanding how customers make tradeoffs. Understanding tradeoffs is one of the most important aspects of consumer behavior when it comes to selling a product. Conjoint Analysis is a technique to understand how customers make these tradeoffs. What makes conjoint so useful from a practical sense is that the data you require is ranking data. That is, you just need to know how customers would rank various product configurations, rather than asking them for their specific preferences for various benefits or attributes. These preferences "unfold" upon examination of customer rankings. This analytical technique can also be used to understand how customers make tradeoffs in benefits, and thereby can be used to ultimately segment a market. Conjoint analysis is also useful for understanding how customers make tradeoffs in attributes, and this can be highly useful in designing products, understanding price sensitivity, and examining other practical issues.

Question:What is a Marketing Matrix?

A Marketing Matrix is essentially a plot on a two-dimensional plane according to how well they meet customers' key requirements. You can do this by drawing two lines in the form of a cross. These two lines represent a continuum of bad to good performance for two benefits or attributes that are the most important in an industry. For example, take computers. If the two most important things to customers are "performance" and "price" then, put the word "performance" at the top of, say, the vertical line and put the word "price" to the right of the horizontal line. High performing computers would be plotted at the top of the vertical line, and low performing computers at the bottom of the vertical line. Now, for each computer in the market you would plot where that computer fits on the performance line (compared to other computers) and on the price line. One comment: A marketing matrix is essentially a perceptual map. You can read more about snake plots as a better way of doing this since a marketing matrix forces you to do this in 2 dimensions, and often more than two dimensions properly characterize a market.

Question:"Scales" on a questionnaire should have how many points?

The way to think about this question is as follows. The more scale points you have, the more information you will get. Thus, if you ask people a yes/no question, they can't tell you if they feel indifferent to the question (that would require a 3 point scale). Since surveys (which I assume you are using this scale for) are for getting information, the more scale points the better. Having said this, you can easily ovewhelm people with a large number of scale points. So giving people a large number isn't good either. In fact, with a large number of points respondents tend to demonstrate "floor" and "ceiling" effects, which means they answer the extremes of scale. This tends to through your results off. One other issue is the use of an odd or even number of points. While some people want respondents to use an even number (and thus forcing a choice), this is really inconsistent with human behavior. The reality is that we often are not sure or are indifferent, and this should be reflected in the scale. So, an odd number of points is best. Having said all of this, we would recommend a 5 point scale. It eliminates most of the problems just mentioned.

Source: marketingprofs.com

 

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