The ultimate market research questions are: (1) What drives a marketplace to make a buying decision and (2) what actually drives the customer’s willingness to pay. The more accurate and the more detailed the research answer’s these questions, the better.
So what makes Atenga’s market research different?
Atenga drives research to understand the marketplace in a more detailed, more comprehensive and more dependable way than any other research house.
Here are the cornerstones to our research methodology:
- Anonymity
- Factors and Attributes
- Outcomes
- Research into the entire marketplace
- Behavioral segmentation
- Statistical significance
- Quantitative and qualitative research in the same project
- Checks and balances
- Relentless practicality
1. Anonymity
Many market researchers tell respondents who they are working for. Thus when they take a survey or have a conversation with customers or prospects, the discussion will be tainted by the customers’ wish to get a better deal. The customer will say things –many of them true– that negate the value of the product or service. Often, they withhold information the vendor can use to justify a higher price.
Therefore, it is absolutely essential that the research does not in any way disclose who the vendor is. Not only does the research itself have to be anonymous but also the way the product or service is described has to be abstracted in such a way that the survey takers or interviewees cannot determine who the vendor is. This is achieved by describing a product or service in terms of two categories of data: Factors and attributes. Return
2. Factors and Attributes
Factors are circumstances around the customer that generate and drive a willingness to solve a particular problem. Consider, for example, the appointment of a new CIO, which drives a wish to revamp a company’s IT infrastructure, or, attending a wedding drives a need for a haircut, or, new taxation rules drive a need to engage a tax expert. The factors in these examples are the new CIO, the wedding invitation and the new taxation mandate. These factors have nothing to do with the vendor’s company, product or service. They have only to do with the buyers themselves. Vendors’ need to know them, as they drive the customers’ and prospects’ willingness to buy from the vendor.
Attributes are abstracted features and functions of your products or services, your business processes, your brand, your reputation, your competitors, packaging, bundling, and messaging. Attributes encompass how your products and services are perceived and they influence what levels buyers are willing to pay. Return
3. Outcomes
For some vendors, especially if the vendor brings a new disruptive product or service to market, one cannot abstract its feature and functions into “attributes”. The survey takers or interviewees simply will not know how to respond, they won’t understand the value these attributes can provide them.
So in market research cases covering new and unique products or services, another technique must be used: that of outcomes. The research needs to find out the outcome or ultimate results a customer wants from a particular activity related to the unknown disruptive product or service. In most cases, a customer is looking for multiple outcomes that need to be qualified and rated by impact and importance. This then drives the go-to marketing and messaging strategy of the vendor. Return
4. Research into the entire marketplace
A very common mistake companies make is to research only its existing marketplace. This marketplace, however, is self-selecting around the vendors’ current presentation. A company goes to market with a particular value proposition; a portion of the marketplace accepts this value proposition and becomes its customers and prospects. If these are the only sections of the marketplace surveyed and interviewed, the vendor is likely to miss segments of the market it could serve, with maybe a different value proposition or product/ service bundle.
To discover what marketing messages are most likely to resonate with the marketplace, and segments of the marketplace, a process called Reverse Marketing is deployed. This process captures from the entire marketplace the messages and value propositions that are most efficient. If the market is segmented (and most markets can be segmented), the vendor will know how best to market and sell its product or services to the various segments.
Another important issue when it comes to capturing the decision behavior of the entire marketplace is to use cash compensation. Many companies attempt to capture the sentiment of the marketplace with surveys where the survey takers are not compensated (or the compensation is very low). If research is attempted without reasonable compensation, only a subset of the marketplace, those that have some particular interest –and bias– in the survey topic, takes the survey. This creates a direct bias in the result. It excludes the the potentially-much-larger group of prospects that does not accept the current value proposition.
Think, for a second, about the “satisfaction survey” pop-ups on many websites (where there is no anonymity and no compensation), the data will be completely biased and will drive the company’s decision making in the wrong direction.
Atenga therefore provides its interviewees and survey takers with reasonable cash compensation driving substantially increased accuracy of the resulting recommendations. Return
5. Behavioral segmentation
The most fruitful way to segment an entire marketplace is based on its decision behavior. Atenga Market Research tells you how to best market to the various segments. Statistical analysis groups buyers on similarity in traits and decision behavior.
When salespeople easily can identify the segment a prospects belongs to, they can easily use the messages and the value proposition, along with the product/service bundle, that is most likely to resonate with the prospect, increasing the chances of closing the sale. Return
6. Statistical significance
In quantitative research it is paramount that the results be based on a research set large enough to be statistically significant. “Statistical significance” can mean different things to different people, but Atenga has found that aiming for a 95% confidence with a 10% variance is a good compromise between data accuracy and cost of research.
In practical terms this means that for a company selling to a marketplace with a limited number of customers such as most business-to-business marketplaces, or a consumer good or service that may be geographically or socioeconomically restricted, 100 qualified respondents generally meets our requirements for statistical significance. In a large marketplace, 300 qualified respondents is typically the magic number. Return
7. Quantitative and qualitative research in the same project
Many companies make mistakes in using only qualitative OR quantitative research. Maybe they engage a market research firm to hold a few focus groups or interviews with a few customers (a guarantee for tainted research results) or just use quantitative research. Quantitative research by itself, if conducted properly, is accurate but because it is all numeric in character, it is somewhat dry, and typically it is difficult to use the quantitative data to develop and execute long-term strategic plans.
Atenga’s project is both quantitative and qualitative. The basis of the research is quantitative, but then we follow up with one-on-one interviews with respondents to add a qualitative detail, flavor and nuance to the quantitative data. This makes the research results more actionable and substantially increases the rate at which companies understand the research and implement its recommendations. Return
8. Checks and balances
Research cannot be the “only way”. In the research design we develop for our clients we make sure there are checks and balances; some questions are asked in different ways twice; typically two different “willingness to pay” research methods are used. Respondents who are not consistent with their replies are disqualified. Furthermore, for the on-line portion of a research project the questions are designed so that we can identify a respondent who just “clicks” to get to the end, which again leads to disqualification and removal of that individual’s data from the research set. Return
9. Practicality
Finally what makes Atenga’s research different is the people at Atenga. Your team comes from two vastly different backgrounds. The researchers and statisticians come with relevant academic backgrounds from top universities. Our project managers and management teams are all individuals with experience from operating and building real-world businesses; people who know what works and what doesn’t. Thus, our final deliveries are relentlessly practical, detailed and actionable. Return