Research in context

Market research is always demand focused - what do customers want or need or think. For research to have an impact, the business needs to take these demands and turn them into commercial propositions by adding design and operational understanding to meet the demand challenge profitably.

What you do and how you do it, have a clear impact on whether a research project will be successful or not, which is why we build a research process that works with your organisation and market realities.

To help illustrate this, here is a short case study of how the commercial context is important to the research. (This happened a few years before Apple decided to produce computers in bright colours).

Case study - The challenge of colour

A computer company was trying to find ways of differentiating its computer products and hit on the idea of producing computers in colours other than the standard cream.

It was decided to commission some research to find out what the best colour would be. To ensure that the research covered a range of eventualities two questions were asked. What was the customer's favourite colour for a computer to be, and what was the customer's least favourite colour, so as to avoid putting off customers as much as attracting them.

The list of favourite colours was topped by blue and red and somewhere near the bottom was the standard cream along with grey and white. Which begged the question as to why everyone always produces computers in dull, boring colours.

But the list of least favourite colours for a computer was also topped by blue and red, with few people disliking the standard cream or grey or white.

It turned out that those that liked red as a colour for a computer, disliked blue and those that liked blue disliked red. So although some customers would be attracted to the new colours, it would actually turn off more people.

The obvious solution was to produce a range of colours. But to produce products in a range of colours would either require high levels of production downtime as one colour was cleaned out of the molds ready for the next colour or a separate production line for each set of coloured moldings. Not only that, but all the peripherals such as the mouse, keyboard and monitor would also have to be produced in unique colours. Each extra colour was effectively doubling the number of products that had to be carried making stocking and forecasting demand a nightmare. Suddenly from looking at demand for four products in one colour purchasing had to cope with looking at four products per colour with no interchangeability between parts, greatly increasing stocks.

If the benefits of producing a full-colour range could be justified they would have taken that step, but in the end commercial realities set in and the company realised only one colour could be produced economically. The question of what colour to produce thus had to be decided not on what the customer wanted, but on the basis of which colour was going to put off fewest people - back to boring cream again.