Sustainable Marketing Research Practices

Sustainable Marketing Research Practices

I had the great pleasure of asking current lecturer of Digital Marketing and AMA advisor, Andrew Dahl a few questions in regards to successful marketing research practices. Andy has an Applied PhD in Research and over a decade in the field of Marketing Research. When I asked where you should start when conducting a Marketing Research project his response was “You need to understand the purpose of the project, and what information you need to have to successfully complete the project.” He also noted that you not only know what information you need, but how you will go about getting that information; is it through surveys and focus groups or through secondary research, we must also know how to interpret this information and what it means to our project objectives.

We then discussed the various differences between focus groups and surveys. He explained how focus groups are best viewed from an exploratory perspective and should be used as a testing method for larger projects. What he means is we should use focus groups to explore how our target audience perceives a certain brand, product or other topic of discussion and how they can help us uncover other problems or topics that need to be addressed in our project. After conducting our focus group, we then get a better understanding of how our audience feels, leading to potential survey questions we could then ask. Qualitative research is mainly used to explore, quantitative research on the other hand is used to generate results and the interpretation of numbers.

Andy also touched on the importance of communication throughout project and how we should maintain an unbiased perspective to both our clients and audience. Whether it’s with an account that you are working with or your colleagues, you must have an advisory committee. This committee should consist of decision makers within your group as well as the clients you are working with. Andy also informed me a “Pyramid researching approach”, this comes from building your knowledge from bottom up. The bottom of the pyramid being the advisory committee, where we communicate our objectives, what needs to be accomplished out of a project. Then we move up to our secondary analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, all the way up to our focus groups, surveys. At the top of the pyramid is the refinement of our findings and then further analyzing our alignment with our overall project objectives.