An old-time baseball player once said, “If you have any questions, just go ahead and ask. Of course, be careful who you ask.”

The same principle holds true for primary marketing research. If you’re not asking the right people, the best and most focused survey in the world won’t return useful results. In fact, the results may be completely misleading and lead to costly mistakes in product promotion and even new product development.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this comes from the consumer side -- although the same exact principles apply to B2B research, or, really, any research at all.

A soft drink company approximately 20 years ago was eager to introduce a new product (brand extension) with the “healthier” look and “feel” of a clear, shimmering liquid. Since this was several years after the “New Coke” debacle, the marketing team was careful to prepare the ground thoroughly for this new breakthrough. So research was commissioned to determine what consumers thought about the idea of a “clean-looking” carbonated beverage.

When the results were analyzed, the marketing gurus were ecstatic. The public loved the idea! A transparent soft drink was “clearly” attractive to the public, and was associated with health, purity, fewer calories, and every other positive, healthy attribute short of puppy dogs and apple pie. Based largely on the survey results, the new product was rushed to the market.

It flopped. Sales started off slow, then went lower. The product was a failure. Why?

The key factor was that people who associated clearness with health and purity were not, by and large, soft drink customers. Their concern with health, calories, and so forth tended to translate into purchasing beverages other than carbonated sodas -- water, seltzer, iced tea, etc. The soda drinkers, meanwhile, tended not to care what the product looked like as long as it delivered what they wanted: taste. (This writer is one of them.) Since there were plenty of soft drinks on the market that already had their fans, due to their taste, there wasn’t really any room for another one.

Because the survey was asking (to a large extent) questions of the wrong people, its foundation was built on a flimsy premise. To sum up what went wrong, in approximate increasing order of importance, the survey was:

• Directed at a small sample size
• Directed at respondents who were insufficiently screened for their buying habits, so that people who rarely purchased soft drinks under any circumstances had excessive impact on the results
• Crafted in a way that failed to challenge preconceived notions that 
  clearer = healthier = more attractive to buyers.
  

Allowing survey results to challenge preconceived notions is a good start. But designing surveys to challenge preconceived ideas is also important. In my next post, I’ll discuss some ways to do this.