Market Research - A User's Perspective

For some time now, I have been looking at ways in which companies conduct market research online, and persuade people to share feedback, opinions, thoughts about their brand, products etc. In particular, surveys.

There are many companies offering to get your surveys in front of targeted potential customers and users of your products. These range from the YouGov type - high-end, occasionally political, surveys through to the very many consumer market research surveys, from the likes of LightSpeed, Nielsen, Ciao, and others.

Those searching for participants for their market research offer either cash rewards or points, which can be redeemed for prizes with participating stores. Some companies offer a combination of paid / prize surveys and loyalty shopping to their merry band of consumers.

There are several noticeable ways to fail to engage the users and therefore fail to get quality results.

Firstly, those who demand huge quantities of personal information, despite disclaimers saying that all results will be anonymous - big put off.

Secondly, those who offer a prize in return for the survey and in the small print require the user to send emails to x number of friends, and for those friends to partake in a number of similar draws etc before they qualify for the prize - enormous put off, asking far too much in return.

Thirdly, those who only offer the points, prize or cash once you qualify or complete the survey. Invariably, despite having completed a large number of fields as part of the survey and given an amount of personal or useful data to the survey owner, a screen pops up saying you don't qualify.

(There is one particular company who never seem to pay out ever, but who must have gathered incredible amounts of data before the user gets wise, according to the forums on several consumer sites such as MoneySavingExpert.com etc).

Then there are those who gather feedback on new products by sending out samples. One would assume that the drop out rate, and the difficulty in obtaining feedback from customers who were just in it for the free lunch, might prove to make this a non-profitable exercise. But from a consumer point of view tasters and freebies are always popular.

And lastly, those who take the email address of the consumer and then bombard them with messages from highly unrelated companies. Agreeing to this is of course in the Terms and Conditions but there is often no indication of how far or how widely the email address is going to be shared.

Note to consumers: always use an unimportant email address to sign up to any of this type of websites.
Note to marketers: think about the quality of the email addresses you are harvesting, or if you buy lists from this type of company.

Certain companies seem to have managed to acquire a solid reputation in this field, such as YouGov, both with consumers and those for whom they conduct surveys, whereas others must really be struggling in the face of the very negative publicity they receive from consumers.

There are additionally companies gathering user data through the installation of software, not just on PCs but also now on mobile and smart phones. These also offer a variety of reimbursement for the data gathered, which is generally anonymised but may not be. This would allow a company to hold rather too much information on your surfing or mobile habits if the consumer does not take care and understand exactly what the software is capable of.

For those who you wish to engage in market research, and in order to yield workable and usable results, it would seem necessary to offer cash, or points which can be redeemed for a wide variety of prizes from a choice of retailers or online stores.

Cash would seem to be the easiest option in some ways, and has the biggest pull for the consumer, even if only a small amount per survey such as 50p. However, you would need to only send cheques out once a certain amount has been reached eg £20 or £50, and this would require a large number of survey completions in order to do so. This may not be possible for a single company, and may require a group to join together to attain the required number of surveys eg a Chamber of Commerce, or Trade Organisation.

If you are a small business looking to run some market research, why not consider setting up a survey with SurveyMonkey? Or you could set up an Opinion Poll on your website that gathers useful market data from your site visitors.... Both of those options can be free, rather than paying a market research company to upset your potential customers with some of their unpleasant or underhand tactics (as detailed above)!!