Market surveys

© Ross Woods, 2013

 

These instructions guide you to prepare a survey, do it, and record the information you gather. You will also learn to analyze consumer behavior so that you can target your marketing to specific markets and specific needs. For the purposes of this survey, marketing may include:

Your marketing will apply to the whole market or to a particular market segment, depending to what is written in your organization's marketing plan. However, if you are working with the whole market, then you will have to identify the market segment before you start working on a survey.

 

Step 1. Starting

In many cases, you will start with a brief. This is a request to conduct a survey, a defined purpose, and list of specifications stating what they expect. Besides reading it, you will need to find out what requirements apply to you.

  1. Find out your organizations' existing procedures and policies for doing surveys, recording interviews, data entry, data security, and disposing of irrelevant information.
  2. Find out whether your organization has guidelines for the layout and contents of any recording forms and reports. They might have rules about branding and logos.
  3. Find out who you have to communicate with in the organization and how you should communicate with them (e.g. meetings, phone, emails, etc.) This should be specifiied in the brief.

Before you start, check the legal requirements for doing surveys, recording interviews, and storing information. Many kinds of information are private and/or confidential. The main legislation is the Privacy Act, which affects what information you can collect, how you collect it, how you store it, and how you release it. You can only gather information with people's informed consent, and then can only use it for the purpose for which it was collected, and you must protect personal information. Compliance will also generally protect you from the "law of confidence," a body of case law whereby people can be sued for releasing confidential information. By contrast, you will also find that some information is not protected; in some jurisdictions, you can freely photograph behaviour of adults in a public place as long as it is not deemed surveillance. In other jurisdictions, you may freely take photographs, but may not publish them in a way in which individuals can be identified, unless you have their consent.

There may also be ethical guidelines for the ways you collect information such as interviews, for example, what will be considered manipulative or exploitative.

 

Step 2. The market segment

To prepare a survey, you need to know the market segment that you are surveying and gather what information you can on it. You also need to know whether the organization seeking to expand its existing constituency or trying to pioneer a completely new one. The levels of business risk are quite different, as it is easy for a marketing campaign to go wrong when entering an unfamiliar market segment. In fact, the main value of good market research is to reduce risk.

Your marketing plan or existing customer data might already have this information. For example, you should have a good description of the demographics of your target market, including their cultural and lifestyle factors, their attitudinal characteristics, their preferred price range, and their existing product usage. You should also have a good idea their buying characteristics, whether you are targeting active or inactive existing customers, and some way of differentiating core from non-core prospects.

Identify the selling points (i.e. features of the product or service that prospective buyers should find attractive). These features should also be described in the marketing plan. Do those selling points motivate prospective buyers to prefer your product to your competitors' products? Do a test in your target population. Don't forget to check both direct and indirect competitors.

 

Step 3. Assessing current interest

For this stage, you will need access to access to past marketing performance review documents.

Assess the reasons for existing levels of consumer interest. Answer the following questions and give some supporting research:

  1. What do current trends and past performance tell about consumers' need for the product or service?
  2. Did past marketing and market positioning of the product effectively focus the product's appeal?
  3. How did customers respond to previous marketing? For example, you can assess their response in terms of:
    • average value of orders,
    • how often they had contact,
    • their preferred medium of contact,
    • the medium they preferred for your response,
    • their preferred size of order,
    • their preferred price point for a typical purchase,
    • their preferred range of options within a single offer,
    • the most popular add-ons and up-sell products.
  4. What is the effect of individual, social and lifestyle influences on consumers' behavior? Test your answers and assess the affects.
  5. Assess your organization's ability to respond quickly to consumer demand for products or services according to the marketing plan. This includes what it can do and what will take a long delay to do. For example:
    • How long will your organization take to make decisions?
    • Does it handle contract buying, modified re-purchase?
    • Will it accept alternative payment systems and schedules?

 

Step 4. Planning

Decide on a particular set of methods. These vary according to the market segment that you are surveying. For example, consider the different between:

In a larger population, I usually recommend three stages:

You cannot get a large amount of information from many respondents, so you do a kind of trade-off. You can get a small amount of information from many respondents, and you can get a large amount of information from a small number of respondents.

Write your survey instruments and field-test them. The kind will vary according to your research. The main advice: Used mainly closed questions when you need to get small amounts of specific information from many individuals. Use mainly open-ended questions when you need to get large amounts of information from a small number of respondents.

Planning questionaires with closed questions is quite difficult.

  1. Decide how you will select interviewees.
  2. Plan a schedule.
  3. Write a questionnaire with closed questions:
    • Start with questions that interviewees will find easy to answer.
    • Check that they will gather the information you need.
    • You might want to ask the same questions is very different ways so that you can check whether they are consistent.
    • Check that the range of possible answers covers all possible options.
    • Test them for clarity, first with colleagues adn then with a few people from the target population.

You will have to plan focussed interviews yourself. This is fairly easy, as you only need leading questions, and will be free to ask follow-up questions.

  1. Decide how you will select interviewees.
  2. Plan a schedule.
  3. Write a questionnaire with open-ended questions:
    • Start with general questions that respondents will find easy to answer. This will make them ready when you asked more focussed questions later on.
    • Don't ask people to give names and contact details, unless you have permission and they also give permission.
    • Check that the questions will gather the information you need.
    • Test them for clarity, first with colleagues and then with some people from the target population. It is quite likely that you will need to test them more than once.

You might want to design a database for your survey results. This will help you process exactly what data you expect to gather.

 

Step 5. Survey people in the community

Survey people in the community, using your survey instruments to collect information. Make sure everything is written down.

If you are doing the survey in-house, establish rapport and develop relationships with your customers. Simply valuing what they think will probably encourage their loyalty. (It will be different if the survey is designed to appear neutral and you are not representing a particular supplier.)

Then collate and sort your data, and enter it into the database. An obvious pattern should emerge and you should have enough data to confirm it. Then ask "What do your database scores do to answer the question you started with?"

 

Step 6. Hold focussed interviews

Holding focussed interviews is usually fun if you enjoy the people. It is recommended that you use audio or video recording equipment, and keep a log of your use of the equipment. However, people will need to give informed consent to being recorded. And don't forget to maintain the recording equipment in good order.

As soon as possible after each interview, write up your interview notes as statements, making sure they are accurate and comprehensive.

Assess your information. How helpful was it in achieving the purpose of the survey? Again, an obvious pattern should have emerged and you should have enough data to confirm it. Then ask "What does it do to answer the question you started with?" What will often be most interesting is any kind of conclusion that was unexpected, unforeseeable and counter-intuitive.

 

Step 7. Analysis

If you've been collating your data and looking for patterns as you go, you might have already done most of your analysis.

However, you still need to put it in a useful format that fits your original purpose and shows any significant patterns or trends. This will vary according to the kind of data. For example, you might sort qualitative information into the most useful outline, but you would tend to put quantitative data into a table, chart, diagram, map, or list, and give a summary. You should give a summary for both kinds.

Check

You then need to decide what to do with your raw data documents. Generally speaking you should put it into archival storage. (You might need them again one day for another study.) You might be able to dispose of irrelevant information without further ado. In some cases, you must dispose of information according to legislation, policy and procedure.

 

Step 8. Recommendations

Recommend a focus of appeal for marketing strategies for the product. It should address the innate and acquired needs of your consumers and appeal to the motives that influence their decision-making. Then check that it meets your legal and ethical obligations, and meets the budgetary requirements of the marketing plan

 

Step 9. The report

Prepare your written report. This is simply putting everything you have done into a neat, professional document.

  1. Include your analysis of consumer behavior
  2. Include a rationale for the focus of appeal outlining how influences on consumer behavior will be used to target effective marketing strategies
  3. Include concrete recommendations on what marketing strategies should be developed to influence consumers to be more inclined to purchase the product.
  4. Present it as a professional looking document with good grammar, typing and layout.

 

Reflection questions

  1. What did you learn from doing surveys?
  2. What different kinds of information did you gather? What other kinds of information would have been beneficial?
  3. Why did you choose the kind of information that you did?
  4. What sources on information were available to you?
  5. What were the procedures and security measures for accessing, storing, retrieving and sharing data from databases?
  6. What are the rights of interviewees?
  7. What are the key points of the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) Direct Marketing Code of Practice that apply to your role?
  8. What are the key points of the Free TV Australia Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice that apply to your role?
  9. What other statutory, regulatory and legislative requirements apply to doing surveys?
  10. What ethical principles apply to the analysis of consumer behavior?
  11. What are your organization's marketing objectives?
  12. Explain your organization's structure. How does it affect marketing decisions?
  13. What are your organization's policies and guidelines for analyzing customer behavior?
  14. What are your organization's procedures for marketing?
  15. What are the main characteristics of consumer behavior in your industry? Explain them.
  16. What procedures and security measures did you have to follow for accessing, storing, retrieving and sharing data from databases?
  17. What are the rights of individuals when you interview them and make statements?
  18. How did you use evidence to prove your conclusions? (Your evidence can be interview records, statements or recordings.)

 

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Relevant units:
• Survey stakeholders to gather and record information BSBCCO405A
• Analyze consumer behaviour for specific markets BSBMKG402B
• Gather, collate and record information BSBCCO402A