Research for Your Marketing

4. Field Research

Field research is usually more expensive and difficult to organise than desk research.

There are three main ways of gathering data.

4.1 Use questions to reveal what people think.

• The best form of questioning is usually face to face (singly or in groups).
• Interviewing by phone is cheaper, but demands good technique and may be less revealing. People may resent the call, or you may not have their full attention.
• Postal questionnaires are cheap - and you may be able to piggyback on your own existing mailings. Email is even cheaper. Make questionnaires easy to respond to.All written surveys produce low response rates and those who reply will be a self-selecting group, which may be untypical.

4.2 Use observation to reveal what people do, rather than what they say or think they do.

4.3 Use experiments to see what people will do in a particular, controlled situation.

• For example, will people choose your cakes in blind tasting tests?