How To Choose A Market Research Vendor
Introduction
One day you may find that you need answers to critical questions, but require outside help to get the most accurate, actionable results. You may simply not have enough people with enough time to do the research project justice, or perhaps you need access to outside resources, like a large sample of your target audience, or highly experienced professional interviewers. So how do you choose the right market research vendor for you?
First Outline Your Research Objectives
No market research vendor will be able to succeed on your project if the goals are not made clear to them, so a valuable first step is to create an outline of the research objectives.
Whether you create a “Request for Proposal” or a less formal document, get your internal customers to review it and agree on the research goals and information needs before you send it to market research vendors. This creates a reference point before you begin, both to guide the research and to evaluate the work at completion.
The request for proposal (or equivalent document) should specify what you need to learn, who from, and what you plan to do with the information. Giving your vendor a clear understanding of what the research needs to accomplish will enable them to offer the best research design and ask the right questions of the right people.
Specify your target audience and what you know about their “incidence” in the population. For instance, there are many more people with companion animals than there are vegans; the former group has a high incidence rate, while the latter has a low rate. Incidence rates are an important input to estimating research costs, without which the vendor will have to make an educated guess and may need to adjust the costs after data collection.
Learn some basics of market research to help you understand what method of research you are looking for, and to evaluate the vendor recommendations on methodology, including sampling technique, recruitment, and sample size. The Faunalytics research library has a lot of articles and resources to help you get started.
Determine How Much Help You Need
Not all vendors offer the same range of services and you should identify how much help you need early in the process. Most market research vendors have a “full service” option where they will help design the survey, conduct data collection, and analyze the results. This typically comes at a cost, but if you need guidance throughout the process then this is likely the best direction.
Some research vendors offer “sample only” solutions where they provide the respondents, but no other services. This option requires you to design and program your own survey, do your own post-hoc weighting and other tasks, and conduct your own analysis. However, the cost is typically much lower when compared to full-service options.
There are many in-between options as well. The most effective choice will be the one that balances your internal skills with your budget. It is often critical to get outside help to identify your sample and ensure that it is representative of your target audience. But many other tasks can be handled internally if you have people with expertise in market research.
Where To Find Research Vendors
The best source for good market research vendors is recommendations from people you know. What companies or organizations have your colleagues worked with and what was their experience like? What research vendors have been involved in the most successful animal advocacy research projects?
If you strike out asking your colleagues, then you may want to explore directories of market research firms. Two of these are The Green Book from the American Marketing Association at www.greenbook.org and a directory by Quirks market research magazine at www.quirks.com (click on Directories).
Contact at least three market research vendors for comparison.
Evaluating Market Research Vendors
Here are some criteria to help you evaluate different vendors and their proposals.
Reputation: Ask the vendor if they can provide references from satisfied customers whom you can contact. Another assurance of quality is membership in an organization with ethical and professional guidelines, for example the Insights Association (www.insightsassociation.org).
Expertise: Are they skilled in the research method most appropriate for your project?
Some vendors are best at in-depth interviews, while others specialize in complex large-scale studies and multivariate analysis. If you need interviews, how skilled and experienced are their moderators? If you need a large, complex study, how strong are their analytic capabilities? If you need exploratory research followed by a larger study, such as for market segmentation, can they do both well? Can they merge qualitative and quantitative results and analyze them to develop actionable recommendations?
The proposal should explain how the research methods suggested will address your needs. The vendor should be able to suggest a variety of techniques and discuss the pros and cons with you. Watch out for those vendors who advocate using a proprietary method that they try to use for every project.
Experience: Do they have experience conducting research for organizations like yours and on issues like those you are exploring? Have they worked with nonprofits? Ask if they can provide a list of recent clients and describe the types of studies they have done.
Do they have experience with conducting research among the types of people you want to reach? How do they plan to recruit them? Since recruiting your sample is often the most critical service provided by a vendor, you will want to closely scrutinize their approach to sampling and the quality of respondents.
Resources: Does the vendor have resources that you do not have in-house, such as a specialized panel of respondents to recruit from, a call center, or the analytical and data management capabilities to handle complex statistical analyses on a large sample? The right market research vendor may be one that has research panels to help you access your target audience most economically.
Personnel: Find out who will work on your project and ask for their professional biographies, including education and relevant experience. How long have they been doing research and how long have they been at the company? Make sure that the people who work on your project are the ones who have the experience you need, not their most recent hires. The people who impressed you during the proposal stage should stay involved in every phase of the project.
Communication Skills: The quality of communication by a vendor can make or break a project. In the proposal stage, ask yourself if the research vendor:
- Clearly addressed the goals of the research in their proposal?
- Clearly explained method options and why they recommended them?
- Explored and understood what you need to do with the research results?
- Walked you through the stages of the project, and explained what could cause delays or increase costs?
A good vendor will be honest with you upfront about tradeoffs between, for example, sample size and cost and timing.
Reporting: Let the vendor know your reporting needs to make sure that they can meet them. If you need verbal debriefs, a presentation, a written report, and a PowerPoint slide deck, that may be more than what they routinely included in a proposal.
Clarify who will write the report. For qualitative research, ask for the interviewer or moderator to write the report rather than someone working from his or her notes.
Ask if it is possible to see a “blinded” sample report so that you can see if it is well organized, well written, and provides clear, well-supported recommendations.
Cost and Timing: You will have specific limits on cost and timing, but it’s often best not to provide an exact dollar figure. Some vendors may design the proposal to use up your maximum budget. On the other hand, some may limit themselves. You want to hear their best recommendations, even if it goes over the budget, and then you can later discuss how to bring down the cost.
Beware of price shopping! There may be hidden costs. For example, if one proposal does not include estimated travel costs and others do, that proposal gains an unfair advantage. Secondly, the more expensive proposal may be carefully tailored to your needs while the cheaper one takes a “cookie cutter” approach.
Making the Choice
To help you evaluate what each proposal is offering, compare the proposals on key criteria and outline where their recommendations differ, and why. Create a table with cost, timing, sample size, vendor reputation/experience, and a brief description of methodology. Share the proposals, your comparisons, and your opinion on which is the best with your internal customers and discuss them.
If two proposals are similar and a third is an outlier, explore why. Did the third vendor misinterpret your request, or have they thought of a better approach that no one else did? At this point, it helps to discuss the proposals of interest. First do this one-on-one with the vendor to get all your questions answered, then meet with your internal customers, engaging them and getting agreement on the final vendor selection.
Once you have chosen a vendor and found funding, congratulations! But you’re not done yet. You need to stay engaged with the research process every step of the way. For more information, read, “How to Work With Research Vendors.” And if you find yourself completely lost when it comes to research vendors, contact Faunalytics to see if we can help.
http://faunalytics.org/contact-us/
Dorothy J. Rich, M.B.A., a market research professional recently retired from a career spanning 35 years, human and animal rights activist, and parent to two rescue dogs