Looking for a cheap and easy way to do market research? Contact would-be customers for advice.
When Karen Scott got started in the mail-order baby products business, she put together her own focus group -- using the local newspaper. After clipping 250 birth announcements, Scott contacted the new moms. She sent them surveys and conducted phone interviews, asking what products they would find interesting or useful. Based on the responses, Scott added more travel products at her company, Chelsea & Scott, in Lake Bluff, Ill. Ten years later, travel products are top sellers at the $28 million business.
For good secondary research resources, visit your school library. There you can access online fee-for-service data sets, including referred literature, trade literature, and large data bases of newspapers from around the globe. Government sites like the Census, USDA (for food and agriculture), DoE (energy), EPA (environment), and CDC and NIH (medical) are all very helpful as well.
Also click here for a catalogue of sites with government research statistics.
The following are examples of ways that companies are breaking away from traditional market research techniques by getting out of the laboratory and into the space where people live.
Julia Knight, founder of frozen baby food company Growing Healthy, dressed like a shopper and cruised the frozen food aisle to watch parents at work. She discovered that children didn’t like that cold area of the store, and pressured their parents to move on before the parents had a chance to carefully observe and consider the product. Knight lobbied supermarkets to place cutaway freezers in the baby food section, thus creating a more hospitable market for her product.
Brendan Boyle and Fern Mandelbaum of Skyline Products, Inc. set up focus play groups for 6-8 children. With the kids, they got down on the ground and learned firsthand what was appealing or not appealing about the toys they planned to market. Although they found that the children were pretty frank in their responses, the pair learned even more by asking parents what the children said in the car on the ride home. In some cases, the children revealed more about their true likes and dislikes to their parents than they would to strangers.
Judy George, CEO and founder of furniture chain Domain Stores, placed a video camera in one of her stores to observe customer behavior. Her tapes revealed that nearly all of the customers arrived in pairs. The male partners seemed uncomfortable in the environment, creating pressure on the females to leave the store before they had an opportunity to make purchasing decisions. George was able to combat this situation by creating comfortable spaces for men to sit and watch sports on television while the women explored.
From “The New Market Research,” by Joshua D. Macht, Inc. Magazine, July 1, 1998.
