Diane, great post!

Anyway, to tie this anecdote back into the post, I wonder how valuable this market research could be in such a situation, where the caller can’t relay the name of the candidates to voters (who may not know either) and who doesn’t know the difference between a senator and a governor. Probably the answer is not very valuable at all.

Sometimes there just needs to be clarification. And most times you don’t get any. Maybe it’s time to introduce the ‘customer satisfaction with the customer satisfaction survey’ survey.

Here goes: I used to work in a Bank. For many years. During my penance, I spent some time in the Marketing Dept that conducted many customer research initiatives, most of which were outsourced to external market research companies (none of this was my responsibility thankfully – I just got to see the outputs). One of the things that was consistently fed back by Business Customers was that they felt that ‘My Banker (relationship manager) doesn’t understand my Business’. This consistently came out as THE Number 1 bugbear for that demographic with well over half ‘strongly agreeing’. This was the case for ALL banks, not just mine.

So far so good. What happened next? Banks did one of 2 things: 1. Took the problem in-house and tried to address it (Result: Little change) or 2. Requested the external agency to come up with some solutions (Result: No change and a lot of moolah spent poorly on external consultancy).
So, where does this lead us to? Market Research (along with many other disciplines that have become industries) is often advertised as a solution. This of course is not the case. The results of Market Research should inform solutions/initiatives most of which (in my experience) will need other external inputs – but from experts in other fields (eg. T&D, change management, IT) and not the Market Research agency. Where, I feel, there is a gap which could be exploited for differentiation, is in the ‘partnerships’ or collaborations that Market Research agencies could form in order to deliver better and more compelling solutions to Companies. The feedback & insights gathered over time by agencies should inform where the best solutions should come from and therefore, where collaborations should be sought.