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The New Market Research

The lesson for other bootstrappers is straightforward. Explore natural settings. Observe. Listen. Really listen. Put aside biases. Analyze. Those are the ingredients of the new market research that blue-chip companies and market-research firms are leaning toward. The beauty, of course, is that unlike market surveys or fancy focus groups, these new methods are quick and can be adapted by any company.

Joshua Macht is an associate editor at Inc.

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Virtual Shopping
Have you seen a game like Quake?" Raymond R. Burke, professor of business administration at Indiana University, asks, referring to the video game that features eye-popping graphics of a quake-devastated city. "My idea is to harness that same 3-D horsepower for 3-D market research."

Today, Burke's lab in Bloomington, Ind., with its 20-inch touch-screen monitors and $20,000 PC workstations, is creating a virtual world to determine exactly how products catch a consumer's eye in a store. Computer graphics simulate the feeling of walking past shelves of soap and shampoo, just as a video game might simulate a violent encounter with a kickboxer. And this virtual world is similarly interactive--consumers can pick items off the shelves to examine them more closely and can indicate which items they would buy if this were real-life shopping.

Burke believes that virtual reality is less contrived than a focus group because it offers shoppers product choices in a natural, "cluttered" environment. Companies using his program can instantly change variables like packaging or price and get immediate feedback. Burke's software tracks, records, and tabulates a shopper's moves and hesitations. Not every product can be tested this way, however. Burke doesn't test clothing, for example, because the shopper can't feel the fabric or try on the items.

Burke's technique has already attracted big-name clients like Goodyear Tire and General Mills, but he believes that virtual market research will prove itself increasingly relevant to small companies. "As the price of computers comes down and as 3-D graphics become easier to do on the low end," he says, "we'll see these types of simulations used much more frequently." --Mike Hofman

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Why The New Market Research?
We asked Roger D. Blackwell to help make sense of the impact that accelerating product cycles has had on market research. In his role as professor of marketing at Ohio State University and as an independent consultant to companies such as Victoria's Secret and J.C. Penney, Blackwell spends his time studying consumer behavior and the retail sector.

INC. : Why is it more important than ever for companies to speed up their market research?

BLACKWELL: Fierce competition. There are too many companies chasing too few consumers, and the survivors are getting better and better at providing what consumers want. In the past, many companies faced competition from great, average, and bad companies. But the bad and the average are being eliminated rapidly, and we are left with only top-notch companies that are more likely to strive to have what the consumer wants. That puts pressure on all the surviving corporations, whatever their size, to conduct precise and speedy market research so they can offer products that match consumers' desires sooner than the competition.

Product cycles have shortened in part because new products and product improvements have come from countrywide chains. A good idea in one part of the country quickly rolls out across the landscape. Local companies no longer have the luxury of waiting years before their competitors come up with better ideas. Now new products that have been tested elsewhere--including in other countries--quickly become competitive with local products. Honda, for example, has cut conception-to-production time from years to a matter of months. Technological advances in product design and development also have greatly sped up the pace of new-product offerings.

INC. : Does consumer opinion change more rapidly today?

BLACKWELL: For sure. Information now travels so quickly that consumers learn about new products and competitive improvements almost immediately. If Intel has a problem with a new chip, the information flies over the Internet in nanoseconds.

INC. : Does information that flies around so quickly force the company owner to make faster decisions?