How To Hire the Right Research Firm By Writing a Market Research Brief
Are you still getting feedback on your questions about new products or services from friends and family? If so, please stop. People who know you will have difficulty telling you the truth about your venture.
If you want to explore questions about your consumers or clients, market research is logical, to begin with, for consumers who don’t know you and match the target audience you want to reach.
Qualitative and quantitative research can be practical tools to help you understand the pain points, problems, and difficulties that your product, service, or solution might solve. You need to research people who don’t know you or have any reason to make you feel good about your project.
Simply put, you need to hear the truth about your research questions from unbiased individuals.
The Brief Beginning
Hiring a research firm should start by writing a marketing research brief. It can be one or two pages and clearly outlines what is in your head. You may need to have each firm read your brief and sign an NDA before starting. That way, anything shared is kept confidential.
Follow this outline to create a concise, crisp, and transparent research brief.
Provide Some Business and Project Background
Write a paragraph or two introducing your company to the market research firm, giving them an overview of who you are and what you do. Give them context, so they understand the current situation. If you have been in business for thirty years but starting a new venture, make sure they have a helpful overview explaining why you are moving in a new direction.
Include your mission, vision, industry status, trends, market performance history, competitive context and give them existing research. If profitability is an issue – state it. If you have an NDA in place, share information that provides the researcher with the ability to partner with you. Don’t hold back.
What Are Your Business and Marketing Objectives?
Your objectives should define why you want to conduct this research. What is the critical issue or challenge you are facing? What are you trying to achieve? What questions are you trying to get answers to?
For example, maybe your branding or messaging isn’t working and resonating with consumers. You might need to identify gaps or white spaces – unserved opportunities in the market. Who isn’t being served?
When Untuckit, the men’s shirt company, was started, the founder wanted to find cool shirts you could wear untucked. He stumbled upon a problem that millions of men shared.
In an interview, the founder once said that when he did some consumer research, he saw that many men, unaided, raised the problem with men’s shirts that he was having too. He wasn’t alone in his need. Research can help validate a hypothesis or theory about an opportunity. Five hundred consumers validated his suspicions.
What are Your Research Objectives?
A research objective addresses a specific question and outlines the insights you want to gain. For example, if you’re going to understand what motivates people to buy a particular type of product, what questions should you ask them?
If you’re going to identify underserved opportunities, be specific. The clearer the objective, the better the research can be.
Some research can be about brand perception or attitudes toward a new app or service. A research objective might be to define better who you should target or how you might rebrand your effort.
An objective might be to show 5 product concept drawings and get consumers to rate and rank them. Or you may be trying to gauge brand awareness unaided or learn about consumers’ pricing sensitivity, often referred to in research as purchase intent.
Your research objective is one of the essential elements of your brief, as it dictates how your study will be conducted and the quality of results. When you draft a market research brief, you also align your colleagues internally on your plan.
Target Market
Are you focused on people who already shop in your category, or do you want to explore people outside the segment?
In this area, you identify the demographic information and other profile details. (Where they live, age, income, etc.) The narrower the target – the more expensive the research can be.
For example, if you want to find left-handed Hispanic women, work part-time, and have four children, your target is harder to reach. If you aren’t clear about who to target, the research firm can provide some guidance to help make your study more effective.
If you want to reach women who live in the US under 49, that’s a big target and perhaps too broad.
But as you narrow that further, adding household income level, country of origin, family size, religious affiliation, etc., makes the cost to find that exact match more expensive.
The research firm’s pricing will be mainly driven by how easy it is to find consumers who meet your criteria to ask questions.
Methodology
You may not know enough about research to request a particular methodology. But if you have done research previously, you might want to consider the benefit of describing that you prefer qualitative stakeholder interviews over quantitative surveys.
For example:
Monadic test: Monadic testing introduces survey respondents to individual concepts products in isolation. It is usually used in studies where independent findings for each stimulus are required, unlike in comparison testing, where several catalysts are tested side-by-side. Each product/concept is displayed and evaluated separately, providing more accurate and meaningful results for specific items.
Discrete choice modeling: Sometimes called choice-based conjoint, the discrete choice is a more robust technique consistent with random utility theory and has been proven to simulate customers’ actual behavior in the marketplace.
Qualitative research: Qualitative forms of research focus on non-numerical and unstructured data, such as participant observation, direct observation, unstructured interviews, and case studies. Focus groups are an example of qualitative research and can be done in-person and online. Some qualitative work will involve interviewing 12-24 people. Although a small sample, you get richer detail and insights through conversation.
Quantitative research: Numbers and measurable forms of data make up quantitative research, focusing on ‘how many, ‘how often, and ‘how much, e.g., conjoint analysis, MaxDiff, Gabor-Granger, Van Westendorp. This type of research can help you look at two or three groups of respondents, too, so you can see cross-tabulation of data. For example, men may like the idea more than women, who people in Texas plan to buy, whereas people in Maine aren’t as interested. Often this type of research will be conducted with hundreds of people to get a larger sample completing the survey.
Deliverables
This section should outline precisely what you hope to receive from the research work. What is the deliverable you want – for example, a written report that provides their interpretation of the data? It can outline your responsibility as the client and theirs as the vendor. Are you looking for a recommendation? If so – be as specific as possible.
Some marketing agencies can research and provide concept ideas for you to consider. For example, if you want to see how you might act on the learning, a marketing agency with research capabilities might provide you with some sample ads or imagery to help you visualize how to proceed. This will add to the cost and help you visualize the learning with a concrete mockup image.
Remember to state clearly if you want a PowerPoint presentation, written Word document, the crosstabs of data, raw datasets, preliminary (top line) findings and final report, etc.
Timing and Cost
Be clear when you want this work completed. Once you have agreed to a statement of work, research can take as little as two weeks to as long as 13 weeks or more. You can share it to exceed $X dollars if you have a budget. If you share this RFP with a few agencies, provide a budget range like under $100Kor $10-30K.
Contact
Who will be the point person for your company? Provide all relevant contact details.
If you need help putting a document like this together or finding the right agency, set up a time to chat. I can help as I have created dozens of creative briefs for research projects. And, I know many great companies who can over-deliver value for you.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
