Surveys
One of the reasons for outsourcing your market research is the design and conduct of surveys. This is a complex area, which would be extremely time-consuming if you kept it in-house. Furthermore, staff would have to be specially trained for this assignment and would not be available for other tasks for the duration of the project. It makes much more sense and is more cost-efficient in the long term to outsource your surveys to a professional provider of market research like Market Researchers.
Surveys are at the core of gathering information in any area of market research. From examining a small sample of a market or market section you hope to be able to deduce the status or development of the whole market or market section. This can be done by a variety of types of surveys. One of the basic distinctions is that between quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative surveys aim to gather the hard facts about your business, e. g. how many people know about you, saw your advertising, bought your products. Qualitative surveys on the other hand are about soft issues such as what consumers think about you or why they would buy products from you.
In order to conduct quantitative surveys you need questionnaires with fixed questions. Since you want to obtain objective measurements of certain parameters, it is extremely important that all people answer exactly the same questions. This is why questionnaire design is a key factor for the success of quantitative surveys and is therefore best left to experts. The research team at Market Researchers has years of experience in designing questionnaires for companies across a wide range of industries such as banking, insurance, IT, private equity, media, engineering and retail.
Conducting quantitative surveys can be equally challenging to the layman. Surveys in written form such as letters or emails might not be very difficult to carry out but telephone and face-to-face interviews require a high degree of skill. Again you would need experts to successfully complete this kind of surveys. The interviewers at Market Researchers are specially trained in order not to stray from the script, for example, and receive the objective information, which is required if the quantitative survey is to have any degree of validity.
With qualitative surveys it is even more important that the interviewers possess a high degree of skill and routine in order not to bias the answers. Whereas in quantitative surveys there are fixed questions, qualitative surveys consist of either one-to-one depth interviews with open questions or focus groups, in which the participants discuss freely with the interviewer only guiding the discussion. So here the success of the survey rests to an even larger extent on the skills of the interviewer, in this case his or her ability to guide without bias and let the interviewees explore the topics in question in their own terms.
As you can see, designing and conducting surveys for market research is by no means a trivial task and requires highly-skilled personnel. It is far more cost-efficient in the long run to hand this task over to professionals instead of trying to train your own staff for assignments which are out of their depth. Market Researchers offers professional survey design and conduct for any area of market research over a wide range of industries.
