Comments on: Let’s Stop Demonizing DIY

By: Denyse

Denyse — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:29:51 +0000

Nice one Ron.
My personal belief is that DIY is largely criticized because it does what most MR suppliers do, namely ask questions. Until they realize that a questionnaire or a tabular report is the start and not the end of their job, then they will indeed feel challenged by DIY surveys.
All the comments above are valid concerns about quality and expertise, but it is the suppliers job to offer more rather than just complain about de-valuing what they currently offer.
On a similar theme, now is a great time to be in MR, as all businesses need more analysts to understand their BigData, but I don’t see many organisations standing up to take advantage of the opportunity; pity.

By: Ron Sellers

Ron Sellers — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 02:50:02 +0000

Kerry, I agree with your view of the dangers, but I don’t trace those back to DIY. I’ve encountered plenty of arrogant people who pay for a good research study, then proceed to ignore it, misuse it, or discredit it if they don’t like the findings. Or they try to sabotage it during the design process, making sure it gets the findings they want. I’ve also seen many times when really good research that’s syndicated, published, or otherwise publicly available is misused, misquoted, or twisted to fit a new scenario, then someone relies on those numbers to make decisions. If someone is determined to wallow in their own ignorance, there’s not much we can do to stop them.

DIY doesn’t cause those problems – those are caused by incompetent managers. And incompetent managers will find ways to devalue or destroy the research in their organization, whether that’s DIY or professionally done. LIke the old cliche “guns don’t kill people – people kill people,” but in this case it’s “DIY doesn’t create bad research – incompetent people create bad research.”

By: Kerry Edelstein

Kerry Edelstein — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:33:53 +0000

The concern, in my estimation, is that DIY allows (and arguably encourages) people with no research fundamentals/training to conduct research on their own, in high stakes settings. This isn’t about reflooring your living room or changing the oil, those are reasonably low stakes scenarios that if goofed, pretty much just impact yourself and maybe a couple others. Whereas I’ve seen DIY surveys – poorly designed DIY surveys that capture the opinions of the wrong target population – used to prioritize government funding, or inform entire business strategies. (Yikes!) And that in turn leads to non-research executives thinking that research is misguided and lacking value. For every bit that DIY opens up opportunities for internal researchers, small businesses, and non-profits to get some insight rather than none (and I agree that’s useful), it also offers a promising opportunity to lead companies in the wrong direction and devalue management impressions of research overall.

By: Evan Juro

Evan Juro — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:17:04 +0000

There’s another alternative for those retailers smart enough to know the real risks of employing the ‘survey monkeys,’ yet can’t (or won’t) cost-justify one-off custom surveys, The approach tailors an EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) system to a specific industry vertical, rather than a specific company.

The result is a professionally-designed study that addresses key industry-specific issues, with provision to add some company-specific custom questions — at a cost not much higher than do-it-yourself surveys and (depending on scale) substantially less than one-off studies. That’s because questionnaire and report design is done once per industry, rather than per client, and because of the efficiencies inherent in EFM. .

Additional benefits include: immediate delivery of results; measurement across multiple customer touchpoints; provision to manage and respond to customer feedback; availability of trend data (since data collection is on-going); and, capability to benchmark against competition.

We’ve done it for banks and credit unions (see http://www.customers-matter.com) but the approach is applicable to retailers in other verticals.

Comments and inquiries are invited.

By: Zach Simmons

Zach Simmons — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 22:58:24 +0000

I really enjoyed your post. DIY isn’t a threat – it expands the use of MR within a broader audience. This is a good thing for MR professionals whose skills in gathering and interpreting data are valued by a broader audience. Answertap.com is our DIY tool for on demand online IDIs and focus groups. We think it complements existing tools and methodologies rather than competing with them.

By: Dan Kvistbo

Dan Kvistbo — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:27:17 +0000

Great post Ron. Always enjoy your lines and agree for the most part – including on the above; There’s obviously no reason to demonize DIY as such. On the other hand, I do see questionnaire tools increasingly used in ways that harms the industry – particularly mugging and sugging. While such approaches were always around, they’ve proliferated with the introduction of free or cheap DIY tools.