What Makes You Think Your Research is Correct?

Why We Wholeheartedly Believe in the Value of Research?

I was taken aback at a party last winter when, after being introduced to someone and sharing that I do market research, he asked me:  “what makes you think your research is correct?”  (It was later explained to me that this individual – an attorney – is a socially awkward individual – no kidding!) Fortunately I had a ready answer because I’d heard this kind of question before.  First, following the 2016 election, I heard push back against the polling that predicted Hillary Clinton would win (which, of course she did in the popular vote) and second there has been a lot of pushback against scientific method in the past few years due to the current admi-nistration.

My an-swer went and goes like this:  I’m a researcher so my belief that our research is correct is based solely on quantitative facts.   I’ve had the good fortune over the course of my career to have done research in the context of being a corporate research director.  In that capacity, I was able to conduct research, make recommendations on which products/designs to introduce and then to compare the actual sales of those products against other products – products that management introduced on judgement or without testing. I was able to compare actual sales of tested and non-tested introductions

This internal analysis revealed that products that we had tested and recommended enjoyed a 3 to 1 sales advantage over goods that management introduced based on judgement alone.  That’s a tremendous advantage.  (I should also note that a few products that we tested and did NOT recommend for introduction, were introduced to market anyway, and yes – they always failed.)

Forget the use of research for a moment and just imagine that every product you introduced enjoyed a 3 to 1 advantage over other products.  Think about what you could do with that advantage.

BENEFITS OF ENJOYING A 3 TO 1 SALES INCREASE IN NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTIONS:

1.  Have stellar sales meetings with retailers - confidently presenting your products, providing quantitative data that proves your products will have higher sales than products currently on their shelves, earning the shelf space and support you deserve.

2.  Plan production with confidence, knowing that your products will have strong sales.

3.  Build your budgets with confidence, knowing that your sales will support them.

4.  Aggressively follow successful products with add-ons that multiply that success and bring new growth avenues; opening consumers to ever broader product offerings from your brand.

5.  Further invest in your business, with all the extra sales and profits you will be enjoying.

If you are a product driven client, please remember these significant advantages that our research can provide to you. 

Ask yourself, “have you ever heard such a performance claim from another research company before?”  I’ll bet you haven’t.  I never heard such a claim over the 16 years that I was head of research for Lenox China and Crystal.  That’s because most research vendors don’t have the benefit of ever knowing the outcomes of their research, if the products ever made it to market, and what the actual sales of those products were.  At best, they may know that the client was pleased with the project. They certainly don’t have the luxury of being able to build a database comparing research data points and sales results, as we were able to do. (We tracked sales over the life of the products so we had an excellent database.)

Importantly, having the benefit of long term sales data allowed us to identify the research variables that were most predictive of sales success.  Having perfected our analytics over many years now, our clients enjoy the benefits of our proprietary testing methodology – and 300% sales increases!

Call  609-896-1108 or email us today (Rick@designres.com Janine@designres.com) to learn more about the predictiveness of our research.

Research really does work and we have the statistics to prove it.