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You can't talk to an audience that can't talk back

Rudolf Flesch

Effective market research can save you thousands (or even millions) of dollars by enabling you to target the right people with the right messages. But it can also lead you astray if your methods are unsound.

Carter-Harwell offers a full range of market research services, including survey development and administration, analysis of existing research, and focus groups.

And we'll make sure you don't commit any of the "seven deadly sins" of market research!

The "Seven Deadly Sins" of Market Research

By Carl D. Carter, APR
President, Carter-Harwell Public Relations

  1. Failing to define the objective (measuring the wrong thing). If you can't say in one sentence why you're doing research, you probably don't know.
  2. Using the wrong method. These days, the most common sin is to substitute focus groups for quantitative research, usually with the intent of saving money. The irony is that the focus groups are often more expensive.
  3. Developing an inadequate instrument. Are the questions clear? Do they mean the same thing to respondents as they do you? Are there hidden biases?
  4. Failing to get a good sample. There are at least a thousand ways to go wrong in choosing your sample, and if you're not careful, one of them will get you. Is it random? Does it need to be stratified to ensure that all groups are represented? Is it a sample of the right population? If you can identify anything that makes those in your sample different from those who aren't, you probably have a bad sample. Example: Enclosing a readership survey in a publication. By definition, only people who at least read part of the publication will ever see the questionnaire.
  5. Drawing results from an inadequate sample. A common mistake is to get an adequate number of respondents to draw conclusions about the whole population, but then break it down into subsets that are invalid. A sample of 370 or so may be perfectly fine for a population of 100,000, but if you break it down so that you're drawing conclusions about 10,000 of those from a group of 37, you're on shaky ground, to say the least.
  6. Failing to analyze the results. I have no idea why, but often as not, the numbers come in and go on the shelf without ever being analyzed even at surface level. Nobody ever knows what the numbers are saying, and of course, nothing changes as a result.
  7. Comparing apples and oranges. I've seen side-by-side comparisons of results from focus groups, mail surveys, telephone surveys and mall intercepts. Actually, this sort of technique can be quite useful. You don't learn anything about the population, but you learn a great deal about the researcher.