Researching market research

BtoBOnline's Kate Maddox has an interesting article on the current prospects for market research. One of our favorite tidbits comes at the end, though, where one of her interviewees talks about the challenge more data poses to researchers.

"Almost every market research technique involves going out and talking to customers, but response rates are going down like a rock," [Don Schultz, professor emeritus-in-service of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University] said. "You can build a very sophisticated sampling technique, but if you can't get anyone to respond, you have a problem."

Schultz said another problem is data overload. "Organizations have huge amounts of data and they don't know what to do with it," he said. "Most market research activities focus on getting more data, but what we really need is better analysis."

We couldn't agree more.