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Archive for the ‘Research Methods’ CategoryNext Entries »Swines for distorting factsFriday, September 25th, 2009
In her Thursday Night Insight this week, Emma Flood warns us what market researchers can learn from the ongoing handling of the swine flu epidemic. Have you heard of swine flu? No doubt, like the rest of us, you have been poring over the alarmist messages in the newspapers about how deadly the virus is and how we’re all going to contract it. The alarm caused by the reportage of this strain of flu no doubt caused a rise in hypochondriasis and a serious peak in sick days. So how did the government and the media help the general public on this, and try to avoid the panic which exacerbated these circumstances? Did they carefully communicate a number of select messages to those most in danger? And did they ensure that their messages were consistent? No. We were faced with a series of conflicting advice and information – some of us were told to stay indoors, others to avoid public transport. Some commuters took to extreme measures of wearing face masks, whilst others (like myself!) stocked up on antibacterial hand foam to ward off any potential infection. Suffice to say, thankfully neither I nor any of my family have been struck down with this illness. This caused me to think, however, about our choices when presented with new information and data – what does it mean? What do we do with it? Who is it relevant to? How do we interpret it? In this instance, journalists were provided with a series of often conflicting and misleading “facts and figures” from the government and associated bodies, and of course this was reported in an alarmist fashion – to generate interest and sell more column inches. What I find interesting is the selective reporting of facts. We were provided with a daily update on the number of deaths which had tragically occurred, and this was often reported in true scaremongering fashion with the headlines “swine flu death toll rises again” and “fears of pandemic”. Very little emphasis was placed on the prior underlying health concerns of these victims, and we were all herded into the same risk group, thus further heightening our concern and attempts to avoid contracting the virus. Had the media helped in communicating that those most at risk were those with existing health concerns, we might have avoided such a swine flu frenzy. As researchers, it is our duty to effectively interrogate and deconstruct data, in order to communicate the real findings back to our client. We have to be skilled in drawing out the real facts, and confident that the picture we are portraying is a true reflection and communicates the right messages. We know that our recommendations can lead to strategic change for an organisation, and behind that is often a significant budget. To put your business in the hands of experienced research professionals, get in touch with B2B International’s Research Team, or read on to find out more click here. Market Research: The Second Oldest Profession?Friday, September 4th, 2009
Paul Hague this week takes us on a trip down memory lane to discover the origins, history and development of the market research profession as we now know it. A prostitute, a doctor and a market researcher were sitting around late one evening, and they got to discussing which was the oldest profession. The doctor pointed out that according to biblical tradition, God created Eve from Adam’s rib. This obviously required surgery, so therefore that was the oldest profession in the world. The prostitute said that this may be so but that was engineered by God, not doctors. Eve’s temptation of Adam was a clear indication that her profession was the first. The two turned to the researcher who was listening intently and taking notes. "Which profession do you think is the oldest?" they asked. "Well," said the researcher, "we can’t be sure without a survey and that will take six weeks. However, what you should know is that market research is the second oldest profession." "How is that?" asked the other two in unison. "No doubt at all about it," said the researcher, "because when Adam and Eve had done their deed, the first words that were uttered were, "How was it for you?"". This story got me thinking about the history of market research. Casual questioning, as from Eve, is not the systematic process that we know as market research. It is said that the first recorded straw polls (incidentally, the term comes from farmers throwing a handful of straw into the air to check out where the wind was coming from) were in the early 1820s when newspapers in the United States carried out simple street surveys to see how the political winds were blowing. By the early 1900s a fledgling market research industry had started in the U.S. focusing on advertising testing in one form or another. The industry arrived on the U.K. shores in the 1920s and 30s, and I was reminded of this the other day when I picked up what must be one of the first books published on market research in this country (Market Research by Paul Redmayne & Hugh Weeks, Butterworth & Co – 1931). Flipping the yellowing, musty pages, I was quickly taken back to my formative days in the market research department of Dunlop, where we had an ingenious device for analysing responses from questionnaires. The closed answers were represented on single cards, perforated with holes around the edge, each representing an answer to a question. If a respondent gave a particular answer, the perforated hole would be punched open right to the edge. When all the cards were punched, they could be lined up in the box and a needle would be run through the holes so that we could lift out only those cards which were not punched right to the edge. This enabled us to do a quick count of the number of cards left in the box, which represented respondents giving an answer to a question. Charting in those days was laboriously carried out with my Rotring pen and graph paper. Redmayne and Weeks had some sage advice for the novice market researcher on this subject: "There are many advantages in using a standard sheet of charting paper, so that charts can be kept together in a ring binder. It is useful to make a practice, dating each chart and of indicating to whom it has been shown and for what purpose it was first prepared, together with the original source of the various statistics plotted." Check out this illustration of how they suggested charts should look. You wouldn’t easily turn out 100 of these by hand the night before a presentation!
So what has changed in the market research industry over the last 100 years? Answer: almost everything. The questions we ask are broadly the same but the technology that allows us to ask these questions – the phone and online – has resulted in faster, cheaper and more thorough surveys than ever before. Qualitative research is, as it always has been, dependent on the skills of the moderator, although focus group venues provide an improved environment for viewing and testing products and concepts. In quantitative research, the tools and techniques such as conjoint, SIMALTO, Van Westendorp and the like enable us to get a better fix on prices and product features. I was amused to read Redmayne and Weeks say: "As market research acquires a more established position in industry, its purpose will be better understood and appreciated by ordinary men and women, so that in time we may hope to reach the position of the United States, where the man in the street will respond to questions about his tastes and his buying habits since he can understand the reasons why he is being questioned. The time, however, is still very far off when consumers will have cause to be annoyed by the frequency with which they are approached. It will need a great number of investigations before many of the inhabitants of this country are called upon twice unless the general technique of investigations become so stereotyped that certain representative towns are continually being chosen." There must hardly be a person in the UK who has not been subjected to some sort of invitation to take part in a survey in the last year. Returning to the story of the doctor, the prostitute and the market researcher, it occurs to me that market researchers may or may not be the second oldest profession in the world, but for certain, we will be the last profession hanging in there. When the world finally comes to an end, and we are queuing at the entrance to the Pearly Gates, there will be someone with a clip board and a questionnaire. "Just one more question Sir/Madam before you enter. Can you tell me how likely you are to recommend life on earth on a scale from 1 to 10 where…?" It’s that question again – "How was it for you?" Understanding Cultural Differences Across B2B MarketsFriday, June 19th, 2009
Nick Hague this week takes us on a world tour, explaining why you should never be surprised to get such varied responses to your global customer satisfaction questions. We tend to have a human instinct that ‘deep inside’ all people are the same – but they are not. Therefore, if we go into another country and make decisions based on how we operate in our own home country – the chances are we’ll make some very bad decisions – Geert Hofstede After spending what seems like the last few months living out of a suitcase delivering research findings to a myriad of companies in countries ranging from Germany, Belgium, Spain and Ireland to the USA and China, it has hit home to me even more so, how important it is to understand individual country differences. These differences might be cultural, behavioural or attitudinal, but a researcher needs to know what lies behind a given score before making informed recommendations for action. Carrying out international research is all in a day’s work at B2B International! Enquiries for customer satisfaction and loyalty research have risen in recent months as the global recession bites harder and companies are turning their attention towards retaining their existing customer base. We are often tasked with carrying out customer satisfaction studies that cover multiple geographies. Implementing and evaluating such research requires an understanding of the different cultures and infrastructures within a particular geography; for example will a Chinese respondent answer an unsolicited telephone call or will an e-survey alienate half your target market in Spain? Another complexity that comes up in multi-country studies is making sure a translated questionnaire has the same meaning across multiple geographies. However, one of the most important aspects of carrying out international research is having the insight to why individuals from different countries around the world convey such different ratings; especially customer satisfaction ratings, when receiving a similar if not identical service from the same global organisation. So my Thursday Night Insight rant this week is about response styles and I pose the question: Why do customer satisfaction response styles differ between countries? Typically, in any customer satisfaction survey the norm is to use a 10 point scale where 1 means totally unsatisfied and 10 means totally satisfied. When asking this question to customers across different countries I can definitely make the following general observations:
However, one point that should be made clear is that these observations are generalizations and what we do see is that respondents from North America typically give higher satisfaction scores than their UK or Western European counterparts. One reason, I personally believe, is down to cultural differences. For example, I have an American colleague who works within our European HQ and on his first day at B2B International he greeted me with the question ‘how are you today?’ to which I replied ‘OK’. He looked aghast and said ‘why, what’s the matter?’ There was no problem or issue but my typical English response led my colleague to think that something was wrong based on our different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, based on these differences, Americans would typically rate a product or service as a 9 or 10 (totally satisfied or excellent) while Europeans would rate a similar issue as a 7 or 8 (an okay, acceptable, satisfactory score). Another reason for higher satisfaction scores in the US could be that Americans are more likely to respond to a survey even when service levels are good and expectations are being met whilst Europeans only respond if the service is poor or they have a gripe to bear – however, this is a personal point of view and so like any good researcher I wanted to know if any external research has been carried out looking at geographical scoring differences. Supporting the internal B2B viewpoint is a piece of research I came across carried out with 116,000 employees of IBM Corporation operating in more than 40 countries. Using these findings, Geert Hofstede from Maastricht University developed a framework that identified four different typologies based on national culture that impacted on response styles. These typologies were: Power distance: The degree to which people in a country accept a hierarchical or unequal distribution of power in organizations. Therefore respondents would typically score mid-response ratings and countries showing this type of response style include Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Philippines, China, Brazil, Chile and Mexico Uncertainty avoidance: The degree to which people prefer structured vs. unstructured situations. Cultures high in uncertainty avoidance prefer unambiguous situations and are therefore more likely to use the endpoints of the scale as opposed to the middle, thus exhibiting an extreme response style. Countries showing this type of response include Belgium, Poland, France, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Korea and Japan Individualism: The degree to which people in a country focus on working as individuals vs. working together. Cultures high in individualism are less likely to exhibit a middle satisfaction score because they would emphasize their individual opinion as opposed to their perception of the group opinion. Among all the response styles, individualistic cultures may exhibit extreme response styles and include countries such as US, Canada, Australia, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Italy, Hungary and France. Assertiveness: The degree to which people in a country emphasize traits such as assertiveness and insensitivity to feelings. One could hypothesize that individuals in these cultures would favour more extreme response styles and that “softer,” more “sensitive” cultures exhibit more modesty or middle response styles. Countries that have been categorized as assertive are the UK, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Japan. However, it should be pointed out that Geert’s research is inconclusive with regards to the impact of this dimension on response scores. In conclusion, the key takeaways are thus. Every business needs a feedback loop to assess their performance and provide an ongoing measurement and benchmark for future progress. Customer satisfaction surveys are excellent at delivering this feedback, but different country cultures do impact on responses and response rates and so, when analyzing international research findings, a researcher needs to use their knowledge and judgement to whether a response is based on different levels of performance, or simply because of a result of cultural difference. In the future, when comparing international customer satisfaction research findings, it might be useful to take the following three steps:
Finally, to wrap up this week’s ramblings I should point out that when it comes to customer service and customer satisfaction, one issue that transcends all geographies is that it is imperative that the customer is listened to, and feels valued and cared for. Relationships are key in any business to business market throughout the world, and so invest in your people as they are the face of your business and typically are the driving force behind excellent satisfaction scores whether you are based in Torquay, Tokyo or Timbuktu. Next Entries » |
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