Consumer research is a tricky thing insofar as it concerns the behavior and thought patterns of a consumer which are influenced and keep changing by various advertising campaigns and education. Global economic conditions, films, social circles, altered social consciousness and self image lead to a changing consumer profile which makes him switch brands which suit the identity he has made for himself and his perceptions of the product. As such companies need to revise and refine consumer research constantly to keep in touch with changing needs and preferences.
Talking about consumer research surveys, it is noteworthy that such surveys focus mainly on sampling population. They even select demographics like age, sex, the level of education and income of the household etc. With the help of an end number of email invites, the respondents who are not pre-identified on the basis of their profile are reached by the consumer studies on low incidence. B2B market research on the other hand targets various respondents on the basis of the job function or title, employer size, purchase inputs and so on. For instance business to business market research or B2B research targets small proprietors with work force of up to 100 employees who have the main authority on buying accounting software or some such product.
The general rule that the panelists follow is to consider those small businessmen or professionals who require good incentive to participate in the online survey than surveying general consumers. Theoretically the rule much accepted here is- the respondents who have larger level of income or the job title are eligible to get bigger award so as to attract the survey population. This difference in the award is exaggerated with the length of the survey if it exceeds beyond 10 min. For instance for a house wife the amount of award would be $5 for participating in a 15 minutes long online survey but for the executive working in a good company that amount may exceed to 3 times more i.e. $15.
In terms of the level of difficulty as well as the cost equation, there are limited panelists of survey as well as the market research panels having predetermined or identified business information on their registration. When looked upon with another aspect, it is important to note that usually most of the market research panels possess well researched profiles of consumer’s registration, but there are very less who have the business profiles of these people.
Another main difference between the two is that the consumer profiles rarely change. On the other hand business profiles keep on changing. For instance demographics like date of birth or sex or background information are not dynamic but profiles like education level, marital status, number of children etc are the things that keep on changing from time to time. Taking the case of business, the nature of job or job profile does not change frequently but the same is not true with things like the designation, employer size and number of subordinates, etc. as they keep on changing at small intervals. The major impact of these changing profiles is higher cost for the project of market research.
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