Category — IT Participants

I was reading an interesting market research article by Tim McAtee. This line near the end of the article really jumped out at me: “…this approach can make research more enjoyable for the subject by making survey vehicles less boring.”

This raised a couple of questions for me:

1. How much fun do our participants have when they are engaged in a project with us?
2. Does it matter to the outcome of the research?

Fun can certainly add value. Any interviewer knows that getting someone to relax during the interview results in more honest answers and better research findings. We purposely write our interview guides to start off with more general topics so we can get the participant engaged.

Of course, you do have to cover the topic of the research well, but if the participant is qualified to talk about a topic, they probably really enjoy talking about it. And of course a completely boring survey, especially with too many ranking or rating matrix questions, will have a huge drop-off, or if the stipend is really good, they’ll speed through the survey to get the completes without giving thoughtful answers.

On the flip side you can have some bad results in a focus group when there is too much positive energy floating around the room – which is just as bad as an overly negative atmosphere. You can’t have an environment where people are hesitant to share negative viewpoints because they don’t want to bring everyone down.

IMHO there are some definitive statements about fun and market research:

• Boring is NEVER good for market research.
• Participants who enjoy the process  give better feedback.
• Fun cannot come at the expense of research goals.

I have one more theory: If the researcher is engaged and enjoying the study, that helps the outcome too. Here at Dimensional Research, we love what we do! We find the IT professionals we have the pleasure to work with endlessly fascinating. They have a truly difficult job and their creativity, tenacity, and smarts consistently impress us.

One of the realities of doing technology market research is that you end up dealing with people in the real world. For those who work in roles that deal only with the hottest new innovations, it can be a bit of a shock to shift gears from the cutting-edge of hype and the  super-early-adopters that use new technology.

There is definitely good news. Your technology market research project will give you a good dose of reality and a much better understanding of the market that you’re actually marketing and selling into. And any good market research firm will help you to find exactly the group you need to hear from: whether a cross-section of the entire market, a group of early adopters, or conservative corporate IT executives.

However, bear in mind that the market research project may not feel like the rest of your life. Everyone you talk to on a daily basis may know about your technology and your space, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the world does.

A few important things to remember:

a. “Buzz” usually isn’t happening with the entire market. It may feel like everybody is talking about cloud computing these days, but in reality they aren’t. There are plenty of smart, informed people that simply haven’t got cloud computing on their radar because they are focused on other things.

b. Your competitors are not “everywhere.” We know it feels like that to you, but in reality, only a small percentage of the market uses your competitor’s tools.

c. Even your own customers aren’t as educated about your product as you are. Don’t expect to have the same deep conversation with them that you have in your internal meetings. Remember:  you spend 120% of your time thinking about your product. Your customers probably spend only a fraction of their time doing the same.

d. In the real world, corporate IT doesn’t get as excited about change as technology startups do. It may feel like a wet blanket to hear corporate IT research participants finding the negative aspect in the amazing new technology that you know is going to change the world.  But the reality is that it’s much better to hear the objections, so you can deal with them.

You should work with your research provider to make sure that you understand exactly who you want to talk to, and it helps to be realistic about the level of effort it takes to find exactly the right people and engage them in a beneficial conversation.

This blog post can be summed into one sentence: “I talked to some people I know” is NOT market research!

Of course you should talk to people you know about your ideas, but you need to ask yourself, who is your target market?

Will your drinking buddies ever buy your enterprise software?  Maybe they will, and count yourself fortunate if you play poker with only CIOs. But you probably interact with a lot of other people who are not actually in your target market.

It’s a good idea to get ideas from everyone, but you should put significantly more emphasis on feedback from the people who are actually part of the community you target.

It may be obvious that your high school buddy who runs his family’s (very successfull) car dealership doesn’t know enough about technology to give you feedback.

The really problematic conversations are usually the ones with people who are in the periphery of your target, just not IN it – people who sell to IT in other companies (especially ones with big established brands!), VCs who invest in tech companies, journalists and bloggers – even your fellow co-workers.

All of these people will have insights for you, and you should certainly pay attention to them, but you should never use the info you get from these people INSTEAD of having conversations with your actual target market, the people who will eventually buy your solution. They are the ones you really need to talk to.

If your day-to-day routine does not easily facilitate those conversations – make a point to make it happen.  Find those people and talk to them in a way that gets unbiased feedback. Any market research firm would be happy to help.

At Dimensional Research, we are big fans of social media. We blog here.  You can follow us on Twitter @DimensionalR. We’d love it if you fanned us on Facebook.

So what is the place of social media in market research? 

This is a topic that is constantly evolving as social media changes, but let me make one important observation about research bias. 

I think Twitter is an AMAZING way to get feedback from people who are on Twitter. The ways to interact and test are absolutely revolutionary and should be evaluated as a potential component of any company’s arsenal of feedback mechanisms. Now the question is - is my target market on Twitter? 

If you sell to corporate IT, I’m going to make a bold claim: Twitter is NOT the best way to get feedback from your target market! I’d argue that the people spending money on enterprise technology are particularly under-represented on Twitter.   (Now all the Tweeps can argue with me – please do!)

Using Twitter is a great way to reach the part of your target market that is on Twitter.  Maybe your early adopters are on Twitter.  And you may sell a solution that is more likely to be discussed on social media.  But caveats aside, think carefully about how your overall target market can be reached for feedback.

Bottom line: Know where your audience can be reached.  Execute market research that represents your entire audience – both the portion of it that is active on social media and the part that isn’t.

Focus groups are ideal when you want to gain multiple perspectives in an interactive group setting.

However, one of the things that can happen in focus groups is “group think.” The first person starts off on a tangent – good or bad – and then the entire room goes along with that first opinion. This is a dynamic that every good researcher is aware of. 

So does groupthink invalidate a focus group? Of course not, and in fact it can be very useful as long as you know it’s happening and stop it when necessary. Here are a few tips:

1. First, establish if group think is a good or a bad thing for your project.  Depending on your goals, group think can be a very bad thing. For example, in message testing you’re usually evaluating the kinds of pain/benefit statements that someone experiences in isolation. Groupthink is very damaging in that kind of environment because you end up seeing only one participant’s uneducated, unguided reaction to messages.  In this case, maybe focus groups are not the right medium – in-depth interviews or a Web survey may give you better results.
2. Remember that group think can be very good.  If you’re trying to brainstorm an idea, having somebody to kick off the conversation and then see where the group goes with it is a very good thing. A smart moderator will encourage this kind of thinking for a while and see where it goes. The most creative ideas from focus groups I’ve been in did not come from one single individual. They came from the group members inspiring each other to build off of each other’s experiences and ideas and come up with something more powerful than any of the individual input. When one participants says “what if …”, and then the next participant says “cool idea, but how about this…” and then yet another participant says “or even better, you could take that idea and try…”.  Now you’re cooking!
3. Be prepared to funnel groupthink.  When you see it happening, a good moderator will challenge the group with the opposite assumption.  Prompt some “group think” around the positive ideas, and then redirect the group to talk about the negative ideas. Insist that the group gives you multiple perspectives.

Above all – don’t be scared of negative group think! It’s very good to hear every possible objection your target audience can make about your solution BEFORE you start selling, so you can be prepared with the products, messages, and objection handling you need to be successful.

The answer is “enough to represent your market.” This number varies significantly according to the type of market research you’re conducting.

Web Surveys

For Web surveys this is a pretty straightforward question to answer. You will use quantitative methods to determine a sample size.

There are standard ways to calculate statistical validity, and a very easy-to-use calculator and descrition of the underlying statistics can be found here. You can use it to determine how many people you need to respond to a quantitative study in order to get results that reflect your target population.

You will need to know the population size of your audience - the total number of people  in the group your sample represents. Even if you don’t know the exact population size, this is not really a problem. The mathematics of probability allows you to make a pretty good guess as long as you have some kind of basic idea. The number of participants needed is not linear. As your audience gets much larger, your sample size doesn’t increase very much.

For example, to get a result that is accurate 95% of the time within 5%, you need:

Qualitative Studies – In-depth Interviews and Focus Groups

But enough statistics homework for now. The question that is less straightforward to answer, and so is asked all the time: “how many participants do I need for a qualitative study?” such as focus groups or a series of in-depth interviews.

The first thing to do when answering this question is to figure out segmentation. How many types of participants do you need to represent? This can include verticals, countries, roles, years of experience, customers vs. prospects vs. competitor customers vs. partners, and so on.  The most common segmentation when working with Corporate IT is to have two groups: “technology decision-makers” and “economic buyers”.

Once you figure this out, and map any overlap between these areas (for example, partners may also be end-users), you’re ready to go.

In my experience, with corporate IT you need about 8-10 participants of each “type,” with a minimum of 10 participants, to produce a valid study. The only exception is studies with competitor’s customers, where you typically need more participants.

Note that most market research companies, including Dimensional Research, base pricing for qualitative work on the number of participants, so doing a good job right-sizing your project will give you the most bang for your buck.

According to a recent survey from a specialist PlayStation 3 site, geeks make the best lovers.

Let me clarify right from the start that as someone with distinct geek-ish tendencies, who is married to a confirmed geek, I have no intentions of arguing with the study’s conclusions – just with its methodology.

The problem with the survey is that it was biased. Given the audience likely to peruse a PS3-specific site, it’s fair to assume the respondents skewed more toward the “geek” end of the spectrum.

When conducting research you must know who you’re talking to in order to interpret the conclusions correctly. If they had done the same survey with a running site, would they have found out that marathoners are the best lovers?  

In technology market research, identifying your research target audience is especially important.  Customers will give you different insights than prospects, employees, partners, or even the customers of direct competitors! 

If you’re talking to your customers, you need to acknowledge that by definition they have the pain that you’re selling to, or they wouldn’t be using your product. So, you shouldn’t do a customer survey and then announce, “100% of the MARKET does this.”  Of course, it’s completely fair to say, “100% of our CUSTOMERS do this.”

In comparison, if you’re talking to the general market who isn’t as fully educated on your solution, you’ll need to tailor your questions accordingly. If you ask questions that are too detailed and specific to your solution, you’ll get uninformed answers. The type of questions that are appropriate for customers who are familiar with your product, are not the same ones to use for the general market.

For example, if you’re asking about product features, you will get vastly different answers from existing customers who know your product, and from your competitor’s customers who know an alternative approach. Both of these will be different from the answers you’ll get from prospects who don’t have any product experiences.

As with everything in market research, it comes back to goals. Your very first step should be figuring out your business goals. Then, figure out what you need to know in order to achieve these goals. Next, figure out who has that knowledge, and who doesn’t. Only once you’ve answered all these questions, you can dive into the details of the market research project.

So, to be honest- it really depends.  But I know that’s not an answer to a very pragmatic question, so let me give more details here, bearing in mind that it really does depend on your specific project. 

A typical market research project takes six weeks. This is pretty standard for a small to mid-sized project, say 10-30 in-depth interviews or 4-8 focus groups.  Larger projects take longer, of course.  And we’ll talk about Web surveys later.

Here’s a pretty typical schedule for a single stage project with one series of focus groups or in-depth interviews - excluding unforeseen “bumps” or unique requirements:

Week 1: Project go-ahead. Write and approve recruiting guide. Identify source for recruiting participants - internal or external.

Week 2-3: Recruit participants. Write and approve interview guide or moderator’s guide.

Week 4-5: Conduct research. This may take less than two weeks, depending on your goals. Four to six focus groups all in the US are usually done in just one week.

 Week 6: Write and present market research report.

WARNING: The biggest schedule slippage that happens, aside from getting all the approvals in place for the project go-ahead of course, is with identifying internal participant contacts.  Using in-house lists or asking account managers to give us their contacts for recruiting may be time consuming and the schedule should be adjusted as needed.  

Web surveys are usually faster. A typical schedule for a web survey project is three weeks:  

Week 1: Project go-ahead. Determine goals. Identify lists for participation.  Write and approve questions. Upload them to survey tool.

Week 2: Field survey.

Week 3: Close survey. Do analysis including filtering and correlating findings. Write market research report.

If the survey is being conducted as a collateral piece to support outbound marketing efforts such as PR or lead gen, add another week for copy-editing and layout.

Online focus groups are a highly effective market research tool.  My clients love them.  They save the time and cost of travel while making it easier for participants and observers.

Most importantly, these benefits don’t require you to tradeoff for lower quality research. Online focus groups still facilitate the “brainstorming” dynamic that you get at an in-person focus group, where one participant’s comment sparks a comment by another participant and so on. The brainstorming dynamic enables the group to dig deep into an issue, so that the client can get a very clear picture of market acceptance of their product and of any issues they need to deal with.

Participants love online focus groups too, because they give them an opportunity to listen to the feedback of others in the industry. This is an important benefit for participants, especially in customer advisory boards, which encourages them to join.

Online focus groups are conducted using conference calls and Web-based meeting technology such as WebEx, GotoMeeting, etc.  In many ways they’re similar to traditional face-to-face focus groups, except you’re not in one room. We recruit participants in the same way, set a time for the meeting, and prepare a moderator’s guide. If relevant, we can review a presentation with the participants. Just as in a traditional focus group, where the client can listen in through a one-way window, the client can listen to an online focus group on a muted phone line. And we can use Web technology to poll participants similarly to a visual “show of hands” or “nod of heads” in an in-person group.

Despite the many similarities between in-person focus groups and online focus groups, there are also a few differences. The most obvious one is that you don’t get the non-verbal clues from the participants. Because of this, the moderator needs to make an extra effort to draw out all the participants and balance the input. To facilitate this, we typically have a smaller group (4-6 participants per group rather than 6-8 for an in-person group) for the same amount of time. We may do more groups as a result – 5 instead of 4 for example. 

Of course, there is also the option of conducting video online focus groups.  As technology evolves, these are becoming more common and are easier to set up.

Another major benefit of online focus groups is that they reflect the majority of real-life interactions with customers. When selling to Corporate IT buyers, more and more meetings are being conducted online rather than in person, so online focus groups reflect that same scenario.  If your messages work in an online focus group, they will translate well into an online sales call or a Webinar.

Are you a technology professional? Do you like sharing your opinions? You might enjoy being part of a Dimensional Research Project.

The only real qualification is that you work with technology in your profession - we’re especially interested in people who work in corporate IT.  We welcome participation from around the globe!

Important information for participants:

• This is market research – no one will every try to sell you anything.
• Your input will be anonymous. Nothing you say will ever be attributed to you or your company in any way.

What do you have to do?

Register here (you may need to scroll down a bit). We’ll ask you a few questions about yourself. Then, as research projects come up that you seem to fit, we’ll contact you with some more detailed questions and information about the specific project.

What is involved?

The actual level of participation depends on the project. For our Web surveys, we’ll send you a link and you can go online to complete the survey. For in-depth interviews we’ll contact you and schedule a time to talk – usually about an hour. For focus groups we’ll let you know when (and where, if necessary) and see if you’re available – usually about 1½ – 2 hours.

What’s in it for you?

This depends on the project. For a Web survey, it may be a copy of the final report or a chance to win a cool prize. For a focus group or interview usually it is a cash stipend payable via Paypal or US dollar check. And of course, with all projects you have the knowledge that you’re influencing the future of technology in some way!

REGISTER HERE>>