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When ready-made market reports with information important for a given company are not available or do not contain the required detail, then usually a decision is made to commission a specialised agency to carry out a custom market research project. This happens frequently because many firms face non-standard challenges or consider entering niche or innovative markets.

How does custom market research support the client's company growth?

Here are just a few examples of questions for which it is very difficult to find answers in ready-made market research reports. What customer needs do my company's and competitions products satisfy? What are our target clients opinions and why do they choose one supplier over another? Which supplier or distributor should I choose to cooperate with in a new market to provide my company with a fair return on investment?

Custom market research can give answers to all questions of this type. What's more, a properly implemented project can also bring additional benefits in the form of expert, practical tips on specific actions to be taken. For example: How should I modify my current offer to meet customer requirements and outstrip competitive products? How should I negotiate the cooperation with a potential supplier or distributor to get the highest benefits?

What is the basic condition for success of custom market research?

One of the most important conditions for success during a custom market research is entrusting this task to experts. It seems to be an obvious assumption. After all, customers – before the decision to choose a research service provider – very carefully check the company they want to cooperate with.

Well, clients verify the research company. It means that they get acquainted with its references, potentially talk with their existing clients, get to know their employees (e.g. customer supervisor, research department manager, experienced market researcher). But clients often forget to ask one more question important for the quality of the research agency's work:

Who will actually conduct each stage of the custom market research project?

In research agencies, an experienced sales and research team usually takes care of acquiring new clients. Experts participating in the initial meetings ensure that throughout the cooperation they will be project managers and will look at quality at every stage of the work.

Unfortunately, even if such declarations are reliable, in practice, the research study may not always be top-quality. Sometimes a project manager has many clients and they cannot spend enough time with each of them. At other times it is a person who has less knowledge and experience at a sufficiently high level to verify the quality of work of other people involved in the project. In other situations, the project manager is such a highly-paid expert that part of their tasks are conducted by cheaper (usually this means: less experienced) employees or even students.

It is extremely important to protect your company from the situation when the project manager is only the "face" of the research company and the project itself is carried out by less experienced staff. Such a model increases the agency's profit margin but does not always provide high quality services to the client.

When choosing a research company, it is worth to ask these questions: Who will conduct each stage of the project? Are they full-time employees, trusted freelancers or students during an internship? What experience does each of these people have? Are there other clients' references regarding cooperation with these people?

See also: Custom market research is not about cutting and pasting data from different sources 

If you do not want to risk commissioning a custom research project with a company that may delegate the work to others,  feel free to contact us! We are happy to present you profiles of not only our senior experts and partners, but also the team implementing operational aspects of research projects – analysts, moderators and administrative staff.

Contact us to discuss how we could help your company >