Holiday Card

If you are one of the many people on our snail mail list, you probably received our company holiday card. For those of you not familiar with our cards, they have featured a research snowman for the past 7 years. We put great effort into coming up with a new idea every year.

Based on the responses we have received, I think this year's card is our best so far. We have received many positive comments. If you want to take a look at this card, and the entire snowman saga, visit http://www.cooper-roberts.com/snowmen/

My thanks to Brenden Mendoza, our stellar designer, for a great job!

Thank you!

About this time last year, I wrote in my blog that I would be happy to see 2008 go. But I also wrote that things were looking promising for 2009. I’m happy to report that 2009 was indeed a good year for us. Business started picking back up in the first quarter and continued to grow throughout the year. To that end, I would like to thank our employees, clients, vendors, family and friends. Your combined efforts and support made 2009 a good year for us.

At this point, 2010 is looking good, and I am hearing other researchers say the same thing. But I’ll still exercise a lot of caution - holding back on new hires or other expenditures until we are sure things are completely back. I hope 2010 is a good year for all of us.

Some of you have asked where I have been with my postings. Fortunately, I have truly been too busy. But I promise to try to post more regularly next year.

Have a safe and happy holiday.

Attention Panel Companies – Your Panelists Want to Talk to You

In the course of conducting studies, we have inadvertently discovered something about panel companies. They don’t want to talk to their panelists. True to the nature of their online business, they want all correspondence with panel members to be through email or the panel member portal. They make it close to impossible, if not completely impossible for a panelist to talk to them on the phone. I understand being “true to the method” and the cost implications a panel company could have if they actually talked to their panelists, but I still don’t get it. As consumers, and yes panelists are consumers (or we wouldn’t want to talk to them), we all know how frustrating it can be when you want to talk to a real person. Think about the last time you called your bank, an airline, or your cable company. It probably was not a fun experience, but with some diligence, you hopefully did get to speak to a live person.

As a matter of policy, when we place product for an in-home-use-test, we provide respondents with a toll free number. The intent is for them to have a way to contact us if they have any issues or concerns with using the product. But we have noticed more and more respondents are calling us because they want to talk to their panel company. By default, we get the calls.

Panel companies, it is time for you to address this. If you don’t talk to your panel members, it will only be a matter of time before they are talking about you – and not necessarily in a good way.

Research Snowmen

Many of you, who are friends, clients or business partners with our company, have received our Research Snowmen holiday cards over the years. What started as a humorous card in 2003, with a bunch of somewhat geeky Snowmen Researchers, has continued as an annual tradition. The 2009 card will mark our seventh edition.

We had planned for the Snowmen to make a onetime appearance. But they proved to be quite popular, and we have kept them around. The problem is – our designers who originated the idea are long gone. It has fallen on our shoulders to come up with a new idea every year. While I think we have come up with some great ideas, it has become a challenge. So we are turning to you for help.

If you aren’t familiar with our Snowmen, or you need some inspiration, turn on your speakers, and mosey on over to http://www.cooper-roberts.com/snowmen/. There you can experience all of the cards, with the appropriate holiday background music.

The rules are simple: the card must include the Snowmen, they should have some general (non-religious) holiday association, and hopefully have some tie back into marketing research. If we select your idea, you will be given credit for the inspiration on the back of the card.

And BTW, there is no gender bias – it’s just that Snowpeople doesn’t sound right to us. I know for a fact that the inspiration for some of our Snowmen were women.

You can respond here, or to keep your idea secret, respond to snowmen@cooper-roberts.com

Is your research broad enough?

On a recent flight back from Dulles, the twenty something sitting next to me asked me what time it was at least three times. This didn’t surprise me at all. In fact, it frequently happens on flights. I’ve learned that his generation generally does not wear a watch. They count on their cell phone to tell time. An airplane is one of the few places where they can’t use their cell phone to check the time. I wonder if watch manufacturers even considered cell phones to be a threat to their industry. Actually, I wonder if a lot of industries and businesses have considered the competition and threat from outside their core area.

• Hollywood Video was probably worried about other brick & mortar video stores such as Blockbuster, but did they see Netflix or On-demand TV as a competitor?
  
• Did parking meters (yes, they are a revenue stream, so I consider them to be a business) see the impact of debit cards, where people no longer generate the change needed to feed a meter?
  
• Did FedEx realize the impact email would have on their business?
  
• And we all know that most newspapers were blind in terms of the crippling effect the Internet has had on so many aspects of their business.
  

Most research, trying to maximize the information garnered for the minimal amount of the respondents’ time, concentrates on the core category and known competition. Such studies would probably never give an early warning of competition from outside the core sector. But this path of efficiency could be dangerous, if not life threatening. I strongly recommend that at least once a year, and ideally twice a year, your research, whether it be qual or quant, explores outside the box. Study evolving ways that consumers do things. Like the cell phone has hurt the watch business, what is lurking out there that could hurt your business.

DIY Disasters: Part 2

My posting last week about DIY disasters seems to have touched a nerve with quite a few people. People emailed me with their own examples. Given the nature of the topic, they choose to email rather than add a comment. After reading some of the notes, I saw a recurring theme. I had talked about design driven disasters. The examples brought to my attention were all about interpretation disasters. In other words, bad business decisions were made based on the research.

A common problem was the lack of perspective. For example, one fairly new CPG company did a concept test. Based on a 35% “top 2 box” purchase interest score, they rolled out the product. A seasoned researcher would question the wisdom of rolling out a product with such a low score. But they thought it was a great score. They felt they could reach a third of the market, which was more than enough for them. The product went to market and it bombed. A detailed analysis of the original DIY results, by a research professional, easily identified the problem.

Another example was an ongoing customer satisfaction study that a service company was conducting via a DIY platform. Everyone was happy with the consistent 80% satisfaction score they were receiving. Then they started losing subscribers. They did another DIY survey, and could not figure out why. They eventually turned to a professional researcher for help. First, they were advised that rather than gloat about 80% of your customers being satisfied, they should be worried that 20% were not satisfied. The typical company threshold for unsatisfied customers is 5-10%. A little analysis gave them some big insights. They failed to see that the dissatisfied customers were downright irate with the service. They also failed to see that these customers were the heaviest users of their services. Losing 1% in customers from this group equated to losing 5% of revenue. They also failed to see that these irate customers were experimenting with competitive services.

In both of these cases, the execution of the research was fairly strong, but the interpretation was weak. Actions taken, based on these projects, were far more costly than it would have been to call in a professional in the first place.

More DIY Disasters

I have written before about the pitfalls of DIY research. Online tools such as Survey Monkey and Zoomerang make people think that anyone can design and execute a survey. And this is true, anyone can. But many people who try DIY surveys wind up with problems. DIY surveys do have their place, but too many people try to use them when they should not. I think of them as the Draino of research. You reach for the Draino when you have a simple clogged drain, but when the problem is more systemic, you call a plumber.

We hear about many of these disasters because clients call us to see if we can help them salvage what they have done. We try our best to help them, and in most cases some valuable learning comes out of the exercise. But we came across a couple recently that caused real problems.

The first project appeared simple enough. The problem is that the first question has multiple choice answers about product use, and more than one choice is appropriate. In fact, most consumers would have more than one choice. But the client inadvertently programmed the survey to only accept one answer. This meant that when people checked a second or third answer, the software deleted their previous answer. And since the software did not allow for a rotation of the answer list, this meant the survey reported a disproportionate, suspect number of people using the product at the bottom of this list. To complicate this problem, answers to this question drove the logic for almost all remaining questions. We could salvage some of the information, but most of it was lost.

The second project was a DIY survey where the client intercepted respondents on their own website. They hoped to get 400 interviews. They promised all respondents who completely the survey a $10 Amazon gift certificate. One little problem – the DIY software lacked quota control, or at least lacked one the client could find. Within 24 hours, they had about 5,000 completed interviews. Suddenly they were liable for $50,000 in incentives instead of the $4,000 they had budgeted.

So the next time you have the need for marketing research, ask yourself if you should reach for the Draino or call a plumber.

Rachel Ray Taught Me Two Things

Anyone who throws a burger on the grill has probably experienced a problem with the edges of the burger shrinking as it cooks. By the time you are finished, the burger can be almost triangular in shape, with the high peak in the center of the burger, sloping down to thin edges. One may be tempted to squash the center down with a spatula, but any wise grill master knows this squeezes out the good juices and can make the burger dry. This has always frustrated me, but not enough that I ever bothered to figure out a solution to my problem.

Then one afternoon we were lazily channel hopping. We came across Rachel Ray cooking burgers. There was the solution I needed. Very simply, when forming the patty, she instructed us to depress the center of the patty, so that the outer ring of the patty is higher than the center. A process similar to what a kid may do in a sandbox to form a “pond”. I tried this the next day, and miracle of miracles, the finished product was a perfectly shaped burger – a similar thickness throughout.

Now I have to confess that I can barely stand to hear Rachel Ray’s voice. Her annoying chatter, frantic pace, and childish smile get on my nerves. I usually flip right pass her when channel hopping. But the burger had caught my eye. It made me give her the benefit of the doubt and I watched the rest of the show. She still got on my nerves, but she also taught me something besides how to cook a good burger. She taught me to keep it simple. She takes basic steps of cooking and explains them in very simple terms. My first reaction was that she was being too simple. But then I remembered Ginelle from our office, who literally had to learn how to boil water when her and her husband first set up house. And I remembered my good friend Toby, who a few years back called me to ask if she needed to freeze leftovers from a restaurant carryout, even though she planned to eat them the next day. The first time she baked a potato, it was a major triumph. Rachel Ray speaks to these people. I hate to admit it, but she provides a valuable service. And yes Jackie, I know you and your foodie friends will cringe when you read this.

I think this is a valuable lesson that we need to keep in mind when designing surveys. Keep it simple. Too often, we, or our clients, assume the respondent knows more about the product or category than they really do. The next time you write a survey, stop and think how Rachel Ray may approach it.

How's business?

First, my apologies for being absent from my blog postings. I managed to post a new piece the first week of July, while I was on PTO, but nothing since. My excuse is that we are surprisingly, and gratefully busy with new projects. I’m also hearing from some other researchers that they have been very busy this summer. All of this is great news for our industry.

But like many people, I still worry about the economy, and I keep trying to find signs of a recovery. So I ask everyone I meet “how’s business”? During a recent visit to my doctor for my annual check-up, I asked my doctor the same thing. It may seem like a strange question to ask a doctor, but remember they are also in business. They have staff and bills to pay like any business.

I think he was a bit surprised by the question, but he had an immediate answer. Business has generally been good – people still get sick, but he did feel people were deferring preventive visits. The biggest surprise I got was his comment about their best customers – those with insurance. He is seeing that the insured, meaning those who are still working, are so busy (likely due to fellow workers being laid off) that they just don’t have time to get to the doctor. They wait until they absolutely have to go. That has impacted his business.

His observations are in line with a recent report that people who take prescription drugs for preventive purposes (such as blood pressure or cholesterol medicines) appear to be cutting back. They may take the drugs five days a week instead of seven. Over time, this saves them a bit on their co-payments.

So again, I am grateful that business is good for us right now. I hope I can hear more researchers say the same thing.

RII Survey

I have written about the Marketing Research Association’s Research Industry Index (RII) a few times. It is fast becoming the most trusted study measuring the health of the U.S. marketing research industry. It has the largest base of participant’s, across the broadest array of the industry (end clients, full service suppliers, field services, panel companies, qualitative and quantitative). The next wave of the survey, to capture second quarter ’09 results, launches this week.

This is my shameless plug to ask you to participate in the survey. If you are the owner or senior level management of a research company, or a senior level researcher within an end client (basically – you must be in a position to understand budget, research purchases, research sales and revenue), you should be taking this survey. While the survey has achieved reasonable media coverage, only survey participants receive a detailed report.

If you are interested in participating, drop me a note with your contact information. I will forward your information on to the MRA so you can receive a survey invite. As with all surveys, your answers are confidential and only reported in aggregate.