Planning For Your Target Population: B2B or B2C?

(part of Chapter 2: Defining Your Project's Scope)

 

B2B and B2C research are two very different animals. Which one are you doing? The answer has implications for partner selection, questionnaire design, and sample source options.

 

Population Parameters: B2B and B2C

In framing the scope of your project, think about the respondents who will be able to give you actionable data. Are you researching attitudes and behaviors of consumers? Businesses? Perhaps both? This has important implications for agency selection, sample source options, and questionnaire design.

 

Agency Selection

Some research firms are far more comfortable with consumer research than with B2B research. Don’t assume all research firms can cover both. There are specific challenges in both B2B and B2C research, and you want a firm that has the appropriate experience. Check out the client names a firm lists on its website: Are they heavily weighted toward retail companies? Business services companies? Consumer goods manufacturers? Technology companies? Are they truly diverse?

If you are seeking B2B expertise, be especially vigilant about assessing a potential supplier’s relevant qualifications. B2B studies are notoriously difficult because it is much harder to get business professionals to agree to participate in research. They are often too busy or might even be prohibited by company policy (due to confidentiality concerns). The more senior a business participant you want, the harder (and riskier) it gets.

 

Sample Source Options

Your agency will provide recommendations about how to find qualified research participants (the sample), but you should still be educated about this in the interest of project quality. Here are four important facts for you to know:

1. Sample sources for both B2B and B2C projects vary, and so do their quality. Be sure to ask what the agency will do to assess the quality of respondents.
• If your agency says it uses research panels, be aware: Panels are not by definition high-quality sources. We all wish they were, but it just isn’t the case.
  
  Some panels have more quality assurance steps to validate respondent identity than others, and other panels are notoriously over-surveyed.
2. Ask what the sample source is, and how many sources the agency intends to use. A professional agency will be able to give you a clear, credible response. If you get a vague, confusing response, beware.


3. If you need to cover both consumer and business populations, be sure you will have a way of knowing which respondents came from which sample source. At some point, you likely will want to look at their answers separately, and compare and contrast them.


4. You can supply the sample, but only do so if:
• It’s a clean list. If you provide a database that is out of date (more than 5 percent of the records have “bad” phone, email, and other critical fields), you will delay the project and incur extra costs.


• You have permission. You might possess a list that you’d like to use, but do you have permission to do so? Do you have permission to share the list with outside suppliers? If you are doing international research, do different laws apply to list members in a given country?
  
  If you are at all unsure, check with your legal department. You might have to disclose your sponsorship (so the research will not be blind, as described earlier), or you might have other boundaries.


• It won’t bias the research or restrict the analysis. For example, is this a list of people you know are likely to be favorable to your brand—and is this a study on brand perceptions? Obviously, that would skew the results.
  
  That example is obvious, but others are more subtle. The suitability of your in-house list is something your agency can advise you on, given your specific needs.


• (For B2B studies) If you have the right contact names. For example, you may have a great list of companies with purchasing department contacts listed. But if the survey requires reaching people who are, for example, in the Human Resources department, that isn’t going to help.

 

B2B and B2C Considerations for Questionnaire Design

How we ask questions of business customers versus consumer customers can vary dramatically. For example, consider research conducted on behalf of PC manufacturers. You can seek the same information from both audiences, but the way that you approach them needs to be adjusted.

Consumers are generally less familiar with technical specifications than their business counterparts, so you need to modify the wording to make a questionnaire accessible for them. Turning them off with “geek speak” won’t help get the information you need.

An agency familiar with your target audiences will know how to modify and present questions so that they are appropriate, but it’s always a good idea to sanity check this yourself. If your study is consumer-focused, look over the questionnaire yourself. Could you, as a consumer, understand the questions and the answer options? Could your spouse? Your parent? Your neighbor? A few minutes spent checking the questionnaire content will save you a lot of pain down the road.

You may even request to have access to pre-test interviews to approve the process before full fielding begins. While this does add time, this step has saved many a career! You don’t want to present the final results and have an executive point out, “If I had seen this question I wouldn’t have understood how to answer it . . . so I don’t think we can trust the responses.” Ouch.

 

This is an excerpt from the book, "How to Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies," which is available on Amazon. Published by Research Rockstar LLC. Copyright © by Kathryn Korostoff. All rights reserved.