A ‘Market Survey’ is the most reliable method of understanding a market. Often, entrepreneurs identify a need and create a solution for it believing that it is the ultimate answer to the problem. The only way to test how brilliant it is by directly asking the consumers. The answers may be shocking, but undeniably true.
Market Survey’s are usually conducted by addressing the target market with a set of questions and seeking answers that help the marketer deduce certain conclusions that aide decision making. It may be the whole or a part (focus group/sample) of the existing customers or the target market or any of the distribution/supply chain players. Depending upon the nature of the information to be collected, a surveyor may choose the most appropriate method and tools.
In case, it is a focus group to test a certain product, one may invite selected participants to a closed door session where they are made to try/experience the product and share their reactions/feedback. For a larger group, one may interview them and record/capture their inputs. The most often used method is by having the participants answer a questionnaire either on paper or online.
In each scenario, the questions must be pointed to get the most accurate insight into the hypotheses the surveyor wants to validate. So if one has to capture the likes and dislikes of the sample it is ok to ask objective questions with ‘Yes’- ‘No’ – ‘Maybe’ options, or anything quantifiable like quantity, price or frequency can be gathered by asking customers to chose a given range most preferred. But if a surveyor wants to gather the qualitative experience of the sample, then it is important to garner more descriptive answers.
More importantly, one has to identify the right sample for the survey. In case one wants to identify what are the features his product or service lacks asking existing customers for feedback has its own merits, but asking a competitors customers will truly reveal the reason why they chose the competitors product or service and therefore disclose the missing features in your offering. The sample size is also a critical factor. If your offering is for a niche market even a small sample size will give u adequate information but if it is a mass product or service, the sample size can neither be too small nor too large. It should always have adequate representation of each subset of the customers you plan to cater to such that you would have heard the voices of each sub-segment of your prospects.
It is always advisable to use a user-friendly feedback form, a pleasant interviewer and really brief and few questions in a questionnaire to get best results. Most surveys call for the individual to enter personal information that participants may be reluctant to share. But those inputs are necessary to profile the participants. Hence one will have to choose to ask just enough questions to get the demographic profile and not invade on the participant’s privacy.
There are several pitfalls for a surveyor/marketer when relying on market surveys. Firstly, there is no way to force the participants to share their true inputs. Often participants lie/misquote right from their personal details to the critical answers to the questions being asked. Secondly, individuals may chose to answer the same questions differently at different points in time or when asked in a different manner owing to lack of certainty or changes in circumstances and temperament. The only way to counter this is to ensure that the critical questions are presented in more than 1 way.
Surveys always leave the surveyor with loads of data. One has to collate and organize the collected information into relevant classifications and analyse the statistics to draw solid conclusions. This is very difficult in case of descriptive inputs. Invariably the interviewer has to interpret the descriptive message into data points such that it can be viewed statistically and help in decision making. The final analysis of a market survey will be in correlation to various demographic subsets of the sample. So the qualities of the sample will form one axis while the percentages will form the other. A marketer is compelled to view the statistical results of a market survey with multi- dimensional perspective. Market Survey is not a solution, it is only a tool to identify the solution to a given challenge. Its results may not always be the absolute truth but will be indicative of the right direction. A marketer has to use the results of the Market Survey with historical information from other sources along with one’s past experiences and a generous helping of one’s own intuition to surge forward in business.
