Research Industry Index (RII)

As some of you may know, I author the RII report for the MRA. I was very excited to report a strong gain for the index at the close of 2009. This is very encouraging news for our industry. A copy of the press release is available at http://www.mra-net.org/news/article.cfm?aID=1073. Equally exciting is the growing number of industry leaders who are now participating in the quarterly survey. The RII has one of the largest and most diverse respondent bases of any industry surveys.

Invitations to participate in the next wave of the survey will be going out soon. If you already participate, I thank you and encourage you to continue. If you do not participate, I strongly encourage you to do so. As an added perk, only survey participants receive as copy of the full report. The survey is restricted to business owners or high level executives of research companies and end users.

Personally, I feel good about 2010. I hope the next RII report proves I am correct.

Market Based Pricing

I have been purchasing Girl Scout cookies for almost as long as I have worked in marketing research. So last week when a friend told me her daughter was selling the cookies, I placed my order for six boxes – at $4.00 a box. Like many people, I grumbled that the prices keep increasing and the package sizes keep decreasing. But that was about the end of my snit. Then I happened to mention the cookies to a friend of mine in Colorado. I was shocked to discover Girl Scout cookies sell for $3.25 in Colorado.

Yes that is correct - the Girl Scouts have adopted market based pricing. So like most other products and services, Californians pay a premium to buy the cookies. I am still a bit surprised by this, but I also admire their marketing savviness. After some exploring, I discovered this is a $700 million annual business. This brand has rapidly embraced many new forms of marketing, such as E-vites , YouTube and Facebook . And because the economy is hurting their sales this year, they are using one of the strongest marketing tactics possible – nostalgia (while reducing the average box size by one ounce).

They must be doing something right. While sales are down close to 20% in some parts of the country, they are running 9% ahead of last year in Northern California.

How much did you pay for cookies this year?

Thank You Larry Brownell

As many of you know, Larry Brownell recently stepped down as CEO of the Marketing Research Association. Larry is an Association Management Professional, so he is not confined to the marketing research industry. He has accepted a CEO position in the film industry. This change in careers also gets him back on the west coast, where he has wanted to be for a long time.

While I spoke with Larry last week and personally thanked him for everything he did for the MRA, I also wanted to publicly thank him. He was the driving force behind much of MRA’s recent success. He was also instrumental in the development of two products very important to me – Professional Research Certification (PRC) and the Research Industry Index (RII). My first serious involvement with MRA was on the PRC task force. This is when I got to know Larry. He has a way of reeling you in, and over time convinced me to take on other volunteer roles within MRA. While I believe volunteering to help your profession is important, Larry played an important role in my decision to make MRA the place I volunteered. His professionalism, enthusiasm, and dedication are addicting.

So thank you Larry. And I’m ready to meet you for that Dim Sum the next time you get up to San Francisco.

Thank you MRA!

I was recently honored by the Marketing Research Association, when they gave me the Shining Star Award at the First Outlook Conference and Expo in San Diego. This particular award is bestowed on an MRA member who has provided outstanding volunteer efforts at the national level for five or more years. Winning this award puts me in the company of many of my esteemed colleagues such as Amy Shields, Elisa Galloway and Kim Larson. The complete list of past winners can be found at http://www.mra-net.org/membership/awards.cfm

I have always felt that it is important to give back to our industry. It is that belief that drives me to volunteer for great organizations such as the MRA. I encourage each of you to get involved as a volunteer with the MRA or any other professional organization that you deem worthy of your efforts. While recognition such as the Shining Star Award is great, it is just a symbol. My true reward has been the friends I have made over the years as a volunteer, the opportunities it has given me for personal development, and the knowledge that I have done good for the industry.

Thank you again MRA!

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.