Market Research
Understanding markets and customers is the bedrock on which business planning and strategy is built. Without knowing your customers needs and wants or understanding demand, your business will be under constant threat from competitors and may be failing to extract the maximum value from your market.
dobney.com provides excellence in market research through our extensive experience in working with and for blue chip clients. We focus on providing better research techniques, more able to understand why and how customers make choices and a better research process, based on understanding the business and commercial context. See some examples of our work.
"dobney.com research responded very well to our brief and delivered timely and powerful insight which gave us very clear indications of what actions the business should take and what it should avoid. Their expertise and rigour inspires confidence and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them"
Research Manager, Associated Newspapers 2008
Excellence in research techniques
We can and do provide straightforward qualitative and quantitative research techniques for a full range of research areas. However our main focus is on understanding and affecting decisions and choices to increase business and marketing effectiveness.
- Conjoint Analysis/Market modelling
- Segmentation
- On-line and Internet Research
- Pricing Research
- Brand equity and brand studies
- Hierarchy of needs studies
- Quality of Service Review
- Customer satisfaction
- Sensory-emotional decision making
- Usability research
Innovative Research methods
We are known for our innovative methods of research but we also offer standard face-to-face, telephone and internet based research (both qualitative and quantitative). Our focus on understanding choices means we often design research using trade-off and experimentation techniques often started with qualitative research. Our innovative methods include telephone group discussions among blind people, mixed mode post and telephone conjoint, web assisted telephone interviewing (WATI) with tailored respondent prompts and options, executive depth interviews using quality of service reviews among other areas.
Improving the research process
Market research does not sit in a vacuum. The design and outcomes of a market research project have to reflect not just the results from the data, but the way in which your organisation could and should use the data.
Our research process is designed so that we take more care to understand your goals and constraints and use this to deliver better value from the research we carry out. We find that effort up-front pays great dividends at the end in terms of the quality of the recommendations from the research.
Increasingly we believe that more companies will want to be involved in carrying out their own research with their own staff in order to become more customer focused. We provide a range of research resources for these sorts of companies and can help in the design or management of large scale customer involvement studies. See our papers on One2One Research techniques and DIY Research for more information.
Understanding the business and commercial context
The aim of market research should not just be about identifying areas of customer demand, it also has to identify areas that can be profitably exploited. This means understanding something of the real business implications and existing business practices. Communication and sharing of results, understanding production and supply implications and identifying stakeholders and influencers for the research are all important in making a research project successful. A brief case study illustrates how the understanding the business context impacts on the research outcome.