Applied Market Research.

The extent to which customers recognise your brand can have a significant impact on the reach of your business. Brand awareness surveys work to find out how potential customers perceive your brand, for example whether they recognise the name or logo in amongst others, and whether they associate your product with these, or simply know the name.

Our team at Global Research can put together a brand awareness survey to help you understand the current perceptions of your brand, and potential gaps in the marketing of your product or service. With the information you will gain from a brand awareness survey, you will gain a better understanding of how your brand is currently perceived, and identify marketing strategies to maximise the reach and potential of your brand.

Conjoint analysis is a research method aimed at helping businesses meet customer needs and desires, while also maximising sales and margins. It works by presenting potential customers with a set of options, for instance product features, and asking them to pick the feature that would be most important to them when purchasing the product. This can be done with a number of different product features and price points to help you gain an understanding of what features are important to potential buyers, and how much they are willing to pay for them.

Conjoint analysis can be very beneficial during product development, as it can help to ensure that your final product is something your customers will actually want, while also ensuring that both sales and margins are being maximised. Our team can take the guess work out of this process and provide you with quality data on product and pricing, enabling you to maximise your success and profits.

Empowering customers to share their experiences, positive or negative, is crucial to understanding how customers perceive your product or service, and maintaining positive customer relationships. When customers have a concern about a product or service, they want to feel heard.

Having a customer experience programme in place can relieve frustration for customers and allow them to express their concerns privately, minimising potential negative impacts this could have on the business. Additionally, this provides an opportunity for the business to respond and mitigate any potential negative impacts for the customer, as well as making changes to benefit future customers.

Customer experience programmes are also effective in gathering information about positive experiences, and what the business is doing well. With this information, businesses can get an idea of the ares they need to improve in, and those they are succeeding in already.

Our skilled team will work to establish a functional customer experience programme for your business that will help to grow customer loyalty, and allow you to better understand how your business is performing in the eyes of your customers. It will also be helpful for identifying potential changes to products, processes or services needed in your business, enabling improvements in these areas going forward.

We collate, read and thematically analyse all the data received during community engagement/consultation projects. Our thematic analysis and reporting identifies what contributors think about all issues discussed, identifying the most commented on, most dividing and areas of common thinking. Our qualitative analysis is comprehensive and thorough, including all feedback, no matter how it is collected, down to those one-off ideas that may be the game changer for your project. Our experience and independence gives you and your stakeholders confidence in the results.

The best way to know what your customers want, is to ask them. Customer feedback is an invaluable tool that helps you improve products and services, and their usability. Providing a platform for customers to share their thoughts and concerns helps to improve customer relationships by helping them feel that their opinions are valued. Additionally, these customer satisfaction surveys can identify areas for improvement, resulting in an over all refinement of products and services.

If you want to find out what your customers really want, let our team at Global Research put together a customer satisfaction survey for your business. The information provided by this survey will highlight the areas in which your products or services are excelling, and those which need improving in order to meet customer needs or desires. This can help you in improving products and services, as well as customer relationships, staff training and other elements of your business.

A qualitative research approach collects non-numeric data in verbal, visual or written formats and presents it thematically, so that ideas and meaning can be extracted. We turn reams of ideas into concise and easy-to-access reports. Our team presents the ideas we uncover in easily-digested and actionable formats. At Global Research we use specialist software, NVivo, to assist with analysis. We are able to quickly and efficiently manage opinions and ideas, and can run queries relating to particular contributor variables. Modern presentation approaches are used to complement our thematic analysis, such as visualisations, data models and infographics.

Evaluations are a valuable tool that help to gauge the success of a completed or ongoing project, programme or initiative. As with other forms of customer feedback, evaluations provide an insight into how customers think about what you are doing.

If you would like to understand the effectiveness of a project, programme or initiative that you have implemented, or are currently implementing, Global Research can help. We will conduct an evaluation that will allow you to see which elements of our project are strong, and where changes are needed going forward. Once you have this information, the way forward will become clearer, and you can have confidence in the project you are undertaking.

Our thematic analysis is the process of garnering meaning from text. We explore ideas for key themes, going beyond simple word searches or sentiment analysis which can be blunt, partially-informative and misleading. Global Research completes social media thematic analysis for organisations so that they don’t have to trawl through reams of pages to find out what people are thinking, and end up confused. Mining that data in a systematic and thorough way using humans, not robots, can reveal insights which are valuable and potential game-changers for your business or organisation.

Knowing what's already known on a subject can help to find the right questions to ask in a research context.

Sometimes before getting a project underway, it can be necessary to do some preliminary research to get a good base-level of understanding of the area being investigated. Our team of researchers regularly conduct literature reviews or literature scans to identify what is already known on the topic (and any potential gaps) or to contextualise big issues.

Businesses and organisations can never assume how people will react to products, services or initiatives. Focus groups can quickly provide clear feedback from a group of participants. Group members are encouraged to express their views, and build on or challenge the ideas of others. The group setting means that the results are more than the sum of the parts – sometimes humans just work better in groups. Focus groups truncate the time it takes to find out what your people think and may be the first step and a multi-stage research approach.

Our skilled focus group moderators and relaxed setting ensures quality discussion is focussed on the topic at hand, including the exploration of new avenues of thinking. All participants are enabled to contribute. Our focus groups generate rich and nuanced ideas as participants build on, oppose, or take ideas in a new direction. This results in valuable information to inform decision-making. Global Research’s facilitation and reporting on focus groups taps the thinking of people who are very important to your success providing you with valuable insights in short timeframes.

Net promoter score, or NPS, is a tool that gauges how likely customers are to recommend a particular business to others. There are two types of NPS surveys; transactional and relational. Transactional NPS surveys are conducted after a customer has made a purchase or had an interaction with the company, for example, through its contact centre. These aim to gauge the overall satisfaction with this specific interaction. Relational NPS surveys are conducted on a more regular basis and focus more broadly on customer relationships, looking at the strength of these relationships, and the reasons behind customer loyalty trends in your business. These NPS surveys generate a score that shows the percentage of respondents who are likely to promote the business to others, as well as collating some of the factors contributing to customers who are identified as detractors, passive, or promoters.

If you are interested in learning about your customers’ attitudes towards your business, our team can put together an NPS survey or programme to track this. NPS surveys can be issued at various ‘contact points’ throughout the customer journey, depending on the needs of your business. The information gathered through this survey may help to improve products and services, as well as customer relations.

Do you want to find out from a community what they think about a particular service, product or proposal but have difficulty contacting them or organising them to meet in a physical location?

Online discussion boards are a good way to capture ideas from those whose lives are increasingly busy and lived online. For quick and easy feedback from online communities, discussion boards can provide near real-time insights to organisations on an array of topics. When you can’t get the people you need to hear from together in a physical location, don’t let that stop you finding out, let Global Research bring your people together in a virtual space, in their own time. We will then quickly make sense of their ideas, and you can make your next move, confident you have been informed.

You may want to uncover the thoughts of a group of people on a product, service or initiative but you can’t get them physically in the same place at the same time. An online community focus group is the answer. Group members inhabit a virtual space and are encouraged to express their views, and build on or challenge the ideas of others, in the same way that an in-person focus group is conducted. The group setting means that the results are more than the sum of the parts. Online focus groups truncate the time it takes to find out what your people think and saves the expense of transporting everyone to the same place.

Depending on the topic and the location of participants, Global Research will evaluate whether online focus groups are best for the project. Where this approach is appropriate, online focus groups allow participants to share their views in an online space, enabling response from others. Global Research’s online focus groups eliminate the challenge of face-to-face meetings, and outcomes are reported on quickly, avoiding project delay.

Phone surveys were once the standard method for random-sample data collection. In New Zealand and many comparable markets, however, they have become increasingly unreliable and cost-prohibitive relative to current alternatives.

The key limitations are:

Sampling bias: mobile numbers are generally private and not publicly listed, making truly random sampling difficult. Landline use has declined significantly and is now concentrated among older households, meaning landline-based samples no longer represent the general population.

Low response rates: a large proportion of respondents do not answer calls from unknown numbers. Certain demographic groups, particularly younger adults and those in employment, are especially difficult to reach by phone, introducing further bias.

Cost: interviewer time and the need for multiple call attempts make phone surveys comparatively expensive per completed response.

Our Recommendation

In most cases, we recommend modern approaches: online survey panels; address-based invitations, or mixed-method designs, which typically yield larger, more representative samples at lower cost. Research also indicates that many respondents prefer completing surveys online at a time of their choosing, which can improve data quality and consistency.

When phone surveys have to be used

There are circumstances in which phone surveys remain the most suitable approach, for example, when replicating a prior study to ensure methodological consistency, or when the target population is best reached by phone (such as a defined business or interest community). In such cases, we are well placed to deliver a robust phone survey programme tailored to your specific objectives.

Do you have the next big thing? Have you invented or innovated to create something new and special? Are you unsure how consumers will respond? Does your product or service need a ‘tweak’? Global Research can market test your idea before commercial release. We can find out if consumers are going to react in the way that you predict and you can make modifications prior to an expensive first production run or service roll out.

We will design the best approach and deploy the best analysis method to test your product or service. Focus groups, panels, workshops, design test-labs can gather important insights for your product or service, from future customers or users. Product or service evaluations will ascertain customer perspectives on form, functionality, design or any number of factors you desire feedback on.

Product testing in international markets, particularly for primary produced products such as milk or Manuka Honey, can yield huge benefits for some New Zealand companies. Due to perceptions about animal welfare, traceability of products, product quality and New Zealand’s reputation as a ‘clean green’ country, businesses can potentially charge a premium for products made in New Zealand and sold internationally.

Key to understanding how to maximise economic returns is understanding what customers want, and what they are willing to pay for this. If expanding your product to international markets is something you are interested in, Global Research can help you to test the feasibility of doing so, and better understand what international customers would be willing to pay for your product.

Do you need to hear from individuals what they think in depth on an issue, product or service? Semi-structured interviews are a good way to get a deep understanding or explore a topic. Sometimes people share more in a one-on-one conversation than they do in a group, or they may be experts with unique ideas that warrant deeper exploration.

Semi-structured interviews follow a set list of questions that are adapted to the flow of the conversation and the topics the interviewee raises. Global Research is not only adept at designing good questions and interview flow, but also conducting interviews. Trust Global Research to understand your topic or issue, design an informative set of questions and conduct a series of interviews that gains for you comprehensive understanding, communicated to you in a user-friendly report.

You may have identified issues or topics that you want a particular community or group to comment on. An investigation using multiple exercises, so all participants have the opportunity to express their ideas in the manner that best suits them may be the best approach. A workshop series may be the most efficient way to capture the information you need from your community of interest.

Global Research designs workshops which enable investigation and probing of issues and topics from multiple angles. Global Research designs, facilitates and analyses findings from workshops to deliver comprehensive and robust results. Allow Global Research to custom-design workshops for you which provide multiple information capture approaches, in the best manner for your audience and the information you seek.