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Market Research

This document was written and licensed for publication by MDA 

Market Research describes a range of tools and techniques you can use to find out more about the attitudes, values, behaviours and needs of your target markets (or market segments). There are many different ways of carrying out Market Research, but most of them are targeted at finding out:

  • How aware your target markets are of your existing products and services
  • What they think and how they feel about your organisation and its collections
  • What they currently do with their leisure time and what they plan to do in future
  • The underlying motivations behind their attitudes, beliefs and behaviour
  • Developing trends which are likely to have an impact for your organisation

Based on the MORI web article What is Market Research?

The UK Market Research Society provides an excellent introduction to Market Research for beginners.

Using an External Agency

There are many benefits to working with an external Agency to carry out your Market Research. These include:

  • Access to expertise in selecting research methodology(ies)
  • Advice on shaping research questionnaires to achieve useful evidence
  • Advice on selecting target groups for survey
  • Capacity to project-manage data gathering
  • Access to expertise in statistical analysis
  • A geater impression of independence and impartiality in survey results

There are, however, also a few disadvantages. Market research can be expensive, and you will have relatively little control over the results. An external Agency will not have the specialist knowledge that you have both about your collections and your users and you will need to dedicate time and resources to working with them to ensure that the survey process is meaningful.

The Research Brief

A good Research Brief can go a long way to overcome the difficulties of working with an external Agency. A Brief should provide:

  • A summary of the organisation's intentions in carrying out Market Research
  • The level of detail and type of information required from the research
  • Information about the market segments
  • The intended use of the results
  • The overall timetable for the work
  • The budget available for the work

You should also be aware that market researchers have at their disposal a range of tools, some of which may carry negative perceptions or be regarded as unethical. A Research Agency should respond to your Brief with a Research Proposal detailing the proposed methodology. You should always check the Proposal carefully and work with the Agency to address any areas which you consider to be problematic or unethical.

Doing your own Research

Other than recruiting an external Agency, there are a number of low-cost techniques which you can use to carry out your own Market Research. Even if you are going to do the work yourself, it is often useful to write your own Research Brief in order to keep your work focussed.

Visitor SurveysMost libraries, archives and museums have some experience of carrying out internal visitor surveys. There are some drawbacks to this approach, primarily that it cannot address the needs of non-visitors and there is limited scope in an onsite context to go into significant detail. it can provide a useful part of your research strategy used in conjunction with other techniques. Read the publication Low-cost Visitor Surveys for further information.

Published resourcesPublished resources can provide invaluable information to support your research. These include free statistical information such as the National Statistics and Census data as well as paid services providing more targeted demographic and trend data.

Postal/email surveysYou can also construct your own survey questionnaire and issue it to named contacts. If you are going to take this approach, it is important to think carefully about the outcome you want and the use to which you are going to put the information. You will only be able to ask a relatively small number of questions, so it is essential to get them right. There are also legal and Data Protection implications to issuing unsolicited surveys and storing the responses, so you should always make sure you are aware of the legal implications before proceeding.

Web statisticsFurther information is provided about the potential uses of web stats in the Online Publishing section.

Online feedbackFurther information is provided about the potential uses of online feedback and survey software in the Online Publishing section.

See also the BusinessLink resources on Market Research: What you need to know

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