Brand research study plays a critical role in solving most business problems and improving brand performance. There are however certain mistakes you must avoid in the process of designing and organizing brand research.
Choosing the wrong team members
A wrongly designed survey will give you incorrect results to the detriment of your brand. This is why it is important to work with a team of research partners you trust to understand your business structure and provide fact-based solutions to the problem you’re facing. One way to create a great research team is to ask reliable persons to recommend a great research agency or specific individuals within an agency that can work well together to get the job done. You can also have your research conducted internally particularly if it requires simple processes or sensitive database. Complex analyses such as customer segmentation are however best undertaken by specialist agencies.
Botching the research design
One of the many ways to mess up a research design is performing a quantitative research instead of a qualitative research and vice versa. A quantitative approach will give you understand a brand problem, with figures to back it up while a qualitative approach such as customer insights, can explain the depth of a problem with facts to back it up. Other possible mistakes in this regard are using a wrong representative sample, failing to randomize answers or designing a survey with a completion time that’s longer than 10 minutes. Most respondents fail to complete surveys longer than 10 minutes or end up picking random answers without reading through to the end.
Showing prejudice
A brand research should be objective if you want to get the best out of it. This means that you should set your knowledge and biases aside when designing the research, in order to have an impartial result based on facts rather than opinions. Prejudice can be subtle sometimes. For example, if you phrase your questions in a way that suggests or limits the respondent’s choice of answers, you have put them in a box already and will not have objective responses.
Deciding wrongly or being undecided
Small and medium businesses that cannot afford to do brand research sometimes employ the research done by others and work with published data from other companies, without considering why or how the research was carried out. Making critical decisions with such data can put you into trouble. The next time you’re tempted to use such research findings, do yourself a favor by checking the sales results of these brands and do a comparison, you just might be astounded. Big companies on the other hand are often guilty of being undecided with their research results. They conduct many routine brand researches and then disregard it in the end.
Don’t fall into any of these traps. Rather, let the goal of your organization guide your brand research and be sure to allow the results to guide your decision-making processes.