Quantitative Market Research to uncover More Key Insights than before

A large industrial franchise operation, ENZED, wanted to repeat a quantitative research to assess the current market and consumer status. What they didn’t realise initially, was how many more previously unrecognised key strategic insights were available to be found.

The Situation -

A large franchise operation, the leader in supplying an important industrial service wanted to repeat a quantitative research study to assess the current market status including changes in customer needs, competitor status & positioning, performance delivery, pricing, value for money and brand & advertising awareness.

In the previous studies conducted by leading market research field companies half or more of the data base contacted & researched were the client’s franchisee customers supplied by the franchisor with the other half coming from an unknown data base. Thus the results were not market based and therefore any market share figures were meaningless. In addition the proportion of industry groups surveyed was out of alignment with the volume of business. Finally the numbers surveyed, n=285 in 1991 and n= 401 in 2000 were too small to survey all states for a national picture.

How Solutions Marketing helped -

We recommended the following:

• Selection of a reliable data base edited via ANZSIC code, business size and name exclusions to significantly increase the proportion of likely users of the client’s service. Thus the data base would represent more closely a market based study where the proportion of the client’s as well as the competitors’ users would resemble market share.
• An increase of the sample to n=600, obtained from all states roughly in proportion to the estimated share of business in each of those states (not too far removed from population share). Smaller states such as ACT, Tas & NT were combined with larger states namely NSW, VIC & SA respectively
• A banner in the final tabulation that was double the size of any in the previous research studies. This enabled additional important cross tabulations by ‘customer target group’, ‘customers vs non-customers’, ‘degree of importance of the service’, ‘company turnover’ and respondent demographic data, none of which had previously been supplied. (possibly because it significantly increases the analysis & reporting component of the project)
• Use of our sophisticated research analysis tool, “Plenari Investigator’ to dig deeper to find more key insights

The results -

The final report in PowerPoint form was over 200 pages of graphical & tabular data proof, but the 10 key insights extracted were summarised up front, in an easily readable form with recommendations as to the strategies required to address the issues. This executive summary has become the client marketing managers ‘hip pocket’ reminder as to the important areas to focus on no matter where he goes!