Vol.8, No. 3 • March 2000

• FEATURE • Unearthing Market Research:  Get Ready for a Bumpy Ride by Susan M. Klopper, Director Andersen Business Research Center • Arthur Andersen

So, here’s my new twist on the topic. I work for a consulting firm and I search for market data on a daily basis. In fact, it is an absolute expectation of my internal customers that I will deliver information solutions that are, at least partially, predicated on market intelligence gleaned from market research firms. While once forbidden fruit, this type of information has become relatively accessible and reasonably affordable. It can also be very difficult and time-consuming (translate that as excruciatingly painful) to hone in on just the exact desired piece of information one needs. The availability of market research has come a long way, but the process of locating what you need remains precarious and inefficient.
 

What Is Market Research?
Market research is intelligence about a discrete market. The definition of a market can extend from a broad industry (e.g., wireless telecommunications) to a specific market niche (e.g., handheld devices); it can cover a broad technology (e.g., digital video discs) or a specific technology application (e.g., digital duplication); a broad software development (e.g., ERP) or a specific software application (e.g., Peoplesoft applications for Human Resources shared services); its scope can reach across the globe, across a region, or focus on a specific country.

This intelligence comes in the form of market share and growth; identification and comparison of key players, products, and technologies; analysis of the current state of the market; predictions and postulations for the future; and statistical data — lots and lots of statistical data.

And how do market research firms come up with this intelligence? Primary research is conducted by targeting communities of decision-makers, trend-setters, and consumers. Analysts, often consultants in their past lives, are steeped in a particular expertise and think and write knowledgeably about their targeted area of focus. They listen, network, and conduct interviews with other thought leaders in their field. I should also mention that they are merely mortal. In our fast-paced, highly competitive marketplace, there is a tendency to view the word of these firms as gospel. Not quite.
 

How Do Consultants Use Market Research?
Now to the most important question. Why do my consultant clients seek out this information? There are several reasons. To substantiate, demonstrate, prove, or disprove points to a client or prospective client. To include analysis, statistics, and forecasts from recognized research firms. These functions can be important for supporting a position or recommendation. There is another important reason for citing these sources, one researchers should not overlook. Clients expect to see key market research data included in reports. Failure to supply it can make the consultant appear less competitive. Frankly, we must quote key market research firms because our clients expect it and because we know that our competitors will. The key beneficiary of this game of one-upmanship? The market research firms, of course.

In a perfect world, we would have complete access to the full array of boutique services produced by key market research firms. For companies involved in any type of IT (information technology) consulting work, such as mine, that would include firms such as GartnerGroup, Dataquest, Yankee Group, Forrester, Meta Group, and Giga, just to name a few. In a perfect world, access to these services would be reasonably priced. Well, no world is perfect. Full access to this content is incredibly expensive and very few companies can afford this option.

While this article will not detail the pricing structure for each service, I will say that while each is very expensive, some are more so than others, and some will negotiate price more than others. Unfortunately, when it comes to selling content, most still function according to old business models. The services lack the flexibility and creativity to package and price the content to suit the specific information needs of the customer. Instead services tend to force customers to purchase prepackaged content at set prices. To make this harsh reality even worse, in some cases the content is chopped and diced in such as way as to almost force you to subscribe to more than you really want in order to ensure that you get what you really need. In a perfect world, research librarians all over the globe would sing the praises of market research firms. In the real world, a whole other song is being sung.
 

The Negotiating Table: Getting What You Want Out of the Deal
If your firm wants to subscribe to market research reports directly from research firms, expect the worse — then be prepared to negotiate hard. If you are not already very familiar with the content and the way it’s packaged, try it first — and insist on evaluating all the content. Do not assume that you can rely on the name service or the title of the category assigned to the content when determining the most relevant information for your internal customers.

In the IT industry, categories can range from very broad, e.g., Internet Strategies, to very narrow, e.g., Sales Force Management Software Applications. Sounds logical, but in an industry heavily focused on convergence, this approach to organizing content has its perils. Remember what I said about the tendency to chop and dice the content? Many firms replicate the same or very similar content in multiple places, which means you could pay twice for the same information. Firms also often take related content and split it amongst multiple services, hoping this will convince you to purchase more. Do not be surprised by the number of categories or service lines in which the reports are divided. After all, market research firms make money by convincing us of their breadth of expertise. By running tests on all the services, you can apply the old 80/20 rule and determine for yourself what you must have — and what you can live without.

Once you get past the organization of the content, prepare yourself for the interface. In brief, most are sluggish, unsophisticated, and lack precision. The interfaces assume a very simplistic approach to locating information, either with an option to browse by category or title, or with an option to perform a keyword search using a search engine that recognizes simple Boolean connectors but lacks the ability to perform nesting or establish proximity. Given how expensive these services are, how innately complicated and complex market research is, and how exact and minute the information is that users seek to locate, it is appalling how crude the interfaces are. Rather than honing quickly to what you seek, over and over again, the interfaces will force you to open and browse through numerous documents.

Don’t forget to ask about distribution rights under your agreement. Many of the firms have very strict guidelines about what you can or cannot do with their content. Do all internal users have the right to distribute the contents internally, or are those rights limited to “library” level subscriptions? Can your users include content from the market research firms in materials intended for presentation outside the firm, either in its entirety or in parts? Based on how you plan to use the material within your organization, you might have additional questions. The copyright issue is a big one and market research firms are extremely protective of their content. Your internal customers will need to be informed and regularly re-educated about the rules for sharing this information. Take my word: All your clients will want to share the information, and when it comes to copyright policies, clients often have very short memories.

Bottom line? You must come to the table prepared to hang tough and hold your ground. You are about to fork over a great deal of money and you should design a deal that insures the greatest benefit from that investment.
 

Do Market Research Firms Give Anything Away for Free?
Many market research firms do post one or two “free” reports each month, usually broad in scope but on a popular topic. In addition, some have a free alerting service that will notify you of new reports matching your interest profile criteria and provide brief summaries of the reports. Both Frost & Sullivan and Forrester offer this feature. Others, such as Datamonitor, even allow you to search across summaries of all their reports and, in some cases, to view tables of contents. Most post some discrete statistical data on their home page. Take a look at AC Nielsen’s site [http://www.acnielsen.com] for some great statistics on advertising spending on the Internet. If you take the time to explore the Web sites, you can often glean some quick, timely intelligence. But if you find something you like, grab it; the “free” content changes quickly. The firms are still defining their own models for free versus pay content. The vote is still heavily weighted in favor of pay, but there are some nice surprises out there. It’s always worth taking a quick peek.

One caveat about the free access: Many of your internal customers will probably try to discover on their own what they can get for free on these sites. That means that you can expect a lot of e-mails requesting that you purchase the report they just discovered online. Be prepared for a rough ride when you get one of these requests. Many of the market research firms package reports especially to advertise to non-subscribers on their Web sites; often when you search the subscription-based content, you cannot find any “exact” match. Go figure!
 

Locating Market Research: So Many Choices
For this article, I have focused on accessing market research reports directly via subscriptions with the originating market research firms. The optimum scenario would be to subscribe to those firms whose reports you access most frequently; unfortunately, pricing structures might make this impossible.

The good news is that many firms are making their reports available to be searched and purchased per page via content aggregators. Dialog’s Profound was one of the first to introduce a new economic model for purchasing these reports that let you view exploded tables of contents, purchase discrete sections, and view or download your purchases in PDF format; this provided a richness of content not available in the ASCII formats of the traditional online databases. Profound completely revolutionized access to this type of information. Other online databases and Web products have followed suit, with Northern Light the most recent to enter the market race.

The online world is now well populated with platforms for accessing market research reports. That is the good news. The bad news is that the demand for market research reports is wildly confusing. If you already know which firms you want, you have to figure out which have made their content available through which aggregators. Most aggregators do publish lists of their content providers, but most only list names of individual market research firms in alphabetical order. If you need to conduct research in a market that you don’t know much about, you might not know which firms best fit your information needs. Investext has a wonderful table that details the scope and geographic coverage of each of its content providers; other aggregators would do well to follow the Investext model.

Once you know where to look, the hard part really begins. In most cases, the same market research firms have made their reports available across multiple databases. Unfortunately the exact report titles are not as evenly distributed across these systems. Varying embargo periods contribute to uncertainty about which service carries the most recent reports. Combine that with precarious search engines and you have a mess. Oh — one more hitch. A few of the big players only pretend to accommodate this new business model for selling their reports. GartnerGroup’s Dataquest has made some of its content available on Investext’s Research Bank on the Web, but you cannot view the table of contents and you cannot purchase discrete pages; it is the whole shebang or nothing. Personally, I think this is playing dirty and I hope that in the future aggregators will stand their ground and require that all the participants play by the same rules.

In most cases, in order to conduct thorough research and make sure that you have tapped into everything out there (or at least everything you can gain access to), you must repeat the same search across multiple databases. In my Research Center, it is not uncommon for us to run the exact same search through Research Bank on the Web, Factiva, and Profound. It is an incredible — but essential — drain on our time, a fact played out time and again by the vast differences in results that the “same” search yields.

How can one make sense of all this? In part, the answer lies in questions — the ones you ask the requestor who initiates the request. Consultants, and many others, have completely bought into the gospel according to the market research firms and often only want information from their favorite firms. We searchers need to persist in feeling out what our clients really need. Market research comes in many packages, and some of the information that is hardest to glean by searching across full reports is easiest to find through other avenues. Savvy, smart searchers can often locate statistical data, such as market share, projected growth, number of subscribers, or revenue amounts generated, more efficiently in industry trade journals, newsletters, or even financial analyst reports, all of which frequently summarize key findings of the market research firms. Combining tactical keywords with a string containing the names of the market research firms (e.g., “gartner? or forrester or yankee or meta”) works quite well. You might also want to include the name of some trade associations as well, since these are also good sources of market data. Applying this approach in files such Gale Group’s PROMT, Trade and Industry, and Newsletter databases, and Responsive Database Services’ (RDS) Business & Industry and TableBase files can successfully yield desired chunks of data without all the mess of searching across full-text documents.
 

Why All the Complaining
Once, we only dreamed about tapping into market research. Now we only pray that we have the time, the patience, and the perseverance to wade through everything we do have access to. Market research firms need to stop dumbing down their sites, do a smarter job of organizing their content, index their reports (now that’s an original idea!), and create search interfaces that reflect the types of questions that researchers ask when they turn to these reports. While I am at it, blow up your current business model for selling your content and stop annoying and frustrating your customers. As for the aggregators who distribute market research firms’ content, set a standard for viewing and purchasing options — and stick to it. Information professionals around the world, make sure you are at the negotiating tables when your firm talks to the market research firms. Make sure you drive a very, very hard bargain.
 
 

Susan M. Klopper is Director of the Andersen Business Research Center at Arthur Andersen. Her e-mail address is susan.m.klopper@us.arthurandersen.com