How to choose a research company
There are many things to weigh when hiring a market research company. The starting point is accepting that no one (including the research firms themselves) knows every side of the problem better than the client does.
So for the study to succeed, you have to share that knowledge and your open questions with your future research partner. In other words, commissioning research means sharing details of confidential strategic plans, sensitive ideas, concerns or upcoming changes to products & services.
That’s why the relationship has to rest on trust that whatever comes to light, whether flaws, weaknesses or opportunities, will only be used by those entitled to it.
The second factor is competence. An important prerequisite is that the research firm already knows your market, having worked in the area before, so it doesn’t have to “learn” everything from scratch before it can start the analysis.
Finally, there’s commitment. The team running the study has to dig deep into the subject to actually arrive at the answers you need. After all, if the questions were simple, you wouldn’t need to commission research in the first place.
These three factors are prerequisites, and they matter equally to the success of the research project and of the relationship.
Commercial negotiations should only move forward once these requirements are met. Since they’re not easy to assess, here are a few tips to guide you:
• How big is the research firm relative to the size of the project? If it’s very large, commitment may suffer, since the work might be handed to interns or junior staff. If it’s too small, it may lack the expertise and experience with similar projects
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• What are the firm’s facilities like? Does it have offices, equipment and infrastructure, even if modest, or is it purely virtual, run out of people’s homes, on the side of other jobs, or even entirely from a cell phone?
• Does the firm focus on research, or does it just “also do research” alongside marketing, communications, advertising, recruiting & staffing…?
• Which of the firm’s clients can give you a reference?
• How long has the firm been in business? Is it a member of an industry association such as ABEP, ABIPEME, SBPM or ESOMAR?
• Which parts of the work does the firm do in-house, and which does it outsource? If it outsources, is it core work or support work? How much control does it have over field researchers, training, supervision, back-checks, data entry and recruitment? Are these activities handled in other cities or by outsiders such as telemarketing agents or IT contractors?
• Who works at the firm, and who will actually run your project? What are the professional and academic backgrounds of the people you’re trusting with your future or your investment decision?
Finally, keep accumulated knowledge in mind.
Your relationship with a research firm should be long-term, not limited to one-off projects. It’s like working with an ad agency: you don’t (or at least shouldn’t) hire one only for a product launch or for each new holiday campaign!
Ideally, the relationship should follow a clear logic and be guided by measurable goals over the longer term.
Yet in research, it’s still common for projects to be awarded based on price quotes alone. Not that price doesn’t matter, quite the opposite; it just shouldn’t be the only criterion.
Each study adds to your understanding of the target market, but not every piece of information makes it into the presentation, either because it wasn’t relevant to that particular question at the time, because it was secondary to the project at hand, or simply because there wasn’t enough time to present and discuss all the results.
Still, that unique knowledge, held by the research firm, already belongs to the client. It gives future studies an edge at practically no cost, with a powerful multiplier effect!
Trends and shifts in behavior become easier to spot because the experience is already there, especially if the same research firm keeps building on that knowledge over successive projects!
But that only happens if the relationship continues and new projects create opportunities to share the knowledge already built up.