When one thinks about market research, many images may come to mind. The first image is probably the ubiquitous "product registration" forms that we will all complete for new holiday gifts, whether on paper or over the internet. Other methods include surveys (internet and phone), face to face interviews and focus groups. Of course, the most common methods may occur without you knowing it: virtually every time you click your computer mouse on a web site, preferences are likely being stored, sorted and compiled for the use of a company that wants to pay for it. Basically, anyone over the age of 10 in an industrialized nation has probably participated in some sort of market research.
With all of this great information, it should be simple for corporations to bridge the gap between customer needs (voice of the customer) and product development / distribution. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
There are many places where this break-down can occur, but the first is usually at the market research point: companies really don't completely understand the voice of the customer. I was reminded last night of how inaccurate market research can be. I actually participated in a Neilson survey last night where the caller was asking about various movies that I have seen, or plan to see over the holidays. He then asked me if I had a 7 to 13 year old in the house that would like to participate. I agreed, and listened to the conversation while my daughter said she would "definitely" see a new movie that I know she won't. I realized in retrospect that some of my answers were not completely accurate. I then realized that anyone paying for this 7 to 13 year old's data was getting bad information because a 9 year old usually doesn't make the decision to go to a movie: the parent does.
That is the problem with gleaning information solely by asking questions: the interviewee may be in a hurry to answer and not give accurate answers; the interviewee might not know the answer, but give an answer just to get through the survey; or the interviewee might think they know the answer, but really have no idea.
In the niche business of lab diagnostics / medical devices this happens all the time. Many decisions are made based on phone/internet surveys or face to face interviews (assuming any research is conducted at all). While this is important, we at Nexus believe in data-driven market research where questions are complemented by observations. With our 20+ years in the application of Lean / Six Sigma in the lab diagnostics industry, we have developed an approach to efficiently acquire this information as part of a holistic research approach.
Nexus partners have conducted this type of market research at over 1,000 customer sites and for each site there have been multiple cases of where the leadership doesn't actually know the specifics of what is taking place in the laboratory. In a recent multi-site project we found many cases where the manager would answer questions completely differently than the employees who use the automation. And in some cases, observations revealed a third variant. In some ways this can be expected, but in others it is an important gap to consider. More...
Read Full Article
December 21, 2010
