The key to maximizing market research's value in the age of data science.
The key to maximizing market research's value in the age of data science.
This paper discusses one approach in bridging the communication gap between consumers and technical experts. Despite being a fairly simple product to manufacture, beer is a very complex tasting product. Consumer taste test results have historically been very weak in providing brewers with any actionable direction beyond preference. This weakness lies in the fact that brewers and experts use a different language to describe the taste in beer. Consumer descriptors are usually very general in nature and lack the specificity and flavour note focus that are used by brewers. Historically, our probing of consumers with focus groups and scouring open ends of questionnaires has provided very little to understanding technically what a consumer "likes" about his beer. The descriptors are just too loose to effectively provide guidance to brewing a better liquid. To further complicate matters, a word like "sweeter" does not mean the same thing from respondent to respondent. Expert brewer tasters, for their part, deal in descriptive terms that summarize complex sensory effects and are so technical that only other technical experts can agree or disagree on their presence. Because of this gap in the use of terms, descriptors and meaning, a very large communication gap has existed between consumers and brewers. Our Molson approach not only considered the technical problems but the organizational ones as well. Individuals were assigned from Marketing and Production to be accountable for consumer driven product design. This overall strategic approach has allowed each function to share in their expertise towards a common goal. It avoided the traditional conflict that arises when a master brewer pronounces his liquid as a "crowning achievement" only to have Marketing, through the untrained consumer, say it is not competitive.
Because of the qualitative nature of group discussions, they are often the subject of debate centering around two major issues. First to what extent are the results generalizable to the real world (external validity) and second what effect do certain internal phenomena such as moderator influence, treatment effect, sampling error, group interaction, etc., have on the output (internal validity). This presentation draws together from published literature a list of potential sources of bias which it is believed may interfere with internal and external validity of group discussions. These potential sources of bias were evaluated and rated (on a 5 point scale - slightly harmful to very harmful) by a panel of well known and respected group discussion moderators in Canada and the U.S.A. A consensus was reached concerning a measure of "the harmful effects" of forty-four sources of possible bias.
The main premise put forth in this paper is that most problems related to research quality in fact come from within the profession. As a result, the research profession must accept total responsibility for research which is less than top quality. The research profession must also accept the challenge of "cleaning its own house" before economic pressures manifest themselves in an even further deterioration in the image and status of the profession and thus in the perceived quality of its work.