Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Actually the ability to conduct market research is becoming easier with all the different online survey products available like Survey Monkey, WebSurveyor, Zoomerang etc.

But to your point, the reasons it may be perceived as more difficult is because many do it yourselfers fail to identify the problem correctly. Very often they address a symptom and not the real problem. By specifying the wrong problem everything else that follows in the process is wrong and leads to erroneous results and recommendations.

It's also more difficult because of caller id. Phone survey response rates are going down as a result and making it far more costly and time consuming to do surveys by phone.

Response rates in general are lower, people just don't want to be bothered. This requires researchers to now try and focus on improving the survey experience for respondents.

Focus your brainstorming around response rates and the reasons they are declining and poor survey design by do it yourselfers.
Good luck.

It's not more difficult - it's easier. The Internet allows information access 24/7 with multiple search engines that allow ease of lookup. And with many people writing online (not just official "press"), there is less of a singular corporate voice.

If anything, "difficulty" has to do with too much information. Who do you trust? What's of value? Online, there's no third party independent verification of data, methods, or results. Instead of being harder to find information, you now have to be better at sifting and evaluating it.

I will also have to disagree with the ‘market research is getting more difficult’ statement. Market research is now done faster and for less money than ever before.

However, if you have no choice, but to write about something that does bothers us, market researchers, it is in my opinion the respondent fatigue to more and more surveys, polls, focus groups, phone calls etc.

To counter this we need to offer incentives for participation in research, and keep reusing the same respondents repeatedly for different research studies.
This approach spawned many ‘professional respondents’, they will sign up for any internet panel they can find, and will click through the survey as fast as possible.

Also like rats through the maze, a ‘professional respondent’ will learn how to spot and answer questions designed for elimination of those who do not qualify for a particular research, contaminating the data.

Good luck,
Luke Zukowski