Market Research as a Marketing Communications Tool

In Brief: Market Research can provide insights that yields a long running conversation with your customers, if you remember to include them.

Market research nearly always recruits consumers with promises that their responses "will help us improve our service, develop new products, improve your experience, etc." but rarely follows up with those customers to tell them how their answers will or did change the company, and the experience they can expect in the future. 

Market research organizations worldwide seek to distance themselves from spammers and telemarketers, especially those who engage in the deceitful practice of Mugging/Sugging (Marketing/Selling under the guise of research), and are even more concerned with tipping their hand to the marketplace.

These concerns shouldn't stop organizations from engaging with customers after conducting research. Here are a few ideas based on recent work conducted with clients.

1. Say Thank-you: Our client conducts in-depth surveys with customers, which take 15-20 minutes to complete.  At the end of data collection, this client sends a brief thank-you email to all clients. Best practice - include a brief finding from the research, such as "We were glad to see how many people were happy with our reps knowledge, but we'll be working hard to reduce your wait time". 
2. Ask to follow up: Every survey should end with a request "Can we contact you if we have any further questions about your answers". Don't forget to ask for email/telephone. In one instance, our client was surprised by the answers from a particular segment. We contacted 50 of them by telephone, conducted 5 minute IDI's. In under a week, for very little budget, we developed context and insight that would have previously been a question mark.
3. Use market research results in sales efforts: We recently conducted B2B research for a service provider. The outside sales team participated in a debrief of the research. They were able to use this information to tailor upcoming sales calls to clients, whether they participated in research or not (e.g., We understand from recent research that some people want more information about our small business product. Can I take 5 minutes to talk about that?)
4. We're listening - a marketing campaign: Ina recent customer service survey, our client discovered that the greatest pain point of their customers was something that they had already planned to correct - with a new service being launched this Spring. Armed with the insight that this new service is strongly desired by the customer base, a very bold marketing communications plan is being developed to launch the new service with a splash. 

Often, when conducting research on product & service design, it's easy to forget to talk to and listen to consumers at all stages. Here's a few ways that research can be used in that communications process.