The design of a questionnaire for an image survey is one of the most difficult tasks in industrial market research. The researcher must be aware of four important points before he even puts pen to paper.
A respondent may have an image of a company which varies from the very broad (“I think ICI is a good company”) to the specific (“I think ICI’s sales team is well trained”). The questions should be designed to elicit a broad or specific response, as is appropriate to the survey.
Care must be taken to distinguish between the respondent who simply agrees that a statement is correct and one who has actually evaluated the subject.
If a company achieves a good image it does not mean that the respondent will buy from them. There is no point in asking a respondent to score a company on aspects of its image which have little or no influence on his personal behaviour.
The terminology used in the questions should be appropriate to the jargon of the respondent. This can only be determined by discussions with respondents prior to designing the questionnaire.
The questions which are used to measure image can take a number of forms. They can be verbal rating scales in which the respondent is asked, on a scale, to indicate how strongly he agrees or disagrees with a statement. The question might read:
“I would like to read out a number of statements which people have made about the XXX. Please tell me how much you agree or disagree with each one”.
Some researchers argue that a better distribution of response is achieved if the scale begins with “Disagree strongly” and works down to “Agree strongly”.
A variation on this approach is the numerical rating scale where the respondent is asked to give a score out of 5,7 or 10 on a specific attribute of a company. For example: “I’d like you to give ERF a score out of five for the reliability of their trucks.” The respondent should, of course, be told that five is equal to excellent and one is equal to unacceptable.
Ranking can be used to provide both a measure of image and an indication of the likelihood of purchase.
“I shall now read out to you a list of suppliers of solenoid valves. Which company’s products would you be most likely to buy? And which would you be second most likely to buy?”
This type of questioning lends itself very conveniently to the probe – “why is that?” after each response.
In circumstances where it is unclear what attributes are linked to a company, a long list of adjectives are presented to the respondent to select those which most aptly describe it. This is a prompted word test.
Image measurement can also be obtained in more obtuse ways. In a truck survey respondents were asked to nominate commercial vehicle manufacturers they thought would grow in the future and those which they thought would decline. The results correlated perfectly with other more orthodox questions on image, showing the favourable image companies to be associated with good growth prospects.
Image is a relative measurement. Knowing a company’s image is useful only against the benchmark of its obvious competitors. To know that a company has a good image may lead to complacency unless one is aware that a competitor has an even better one. It is this knowledge of strengths and weakness which is the reason why image research is so valuable. Given such information the marketing team can advise how to improve the company’s products and services , they can correct misconceptions about the company, make capital of its strengths and can hit competitors where they know they are vulnerable.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under Branding, Industrial Research, Market Research.
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