List and describe two entrepreneurial tactics in market research.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER: Students may choose to describe any two of the following entrepreneurial tactics in market research:
• Guerrilla Marketing: The use of nonconventional tactics and unorthodox practices applied to marketing research. Realizing that there are an unlimited number of ways in which to collect information regarding a given question, the entrepreneur must thrive on tapping into unutilized sources of information and collecting information in very creative ways.
• Insights in Ordinary Patterns: The entrepreneur needs to understand that patterns emerge over time, so identifying and tracking them is invaluable. Here are a few of the identifiable trends:
o Potential customers buying at certain times of the year.
o Questions that customers ask employees at similar stores.
o Information sources customers rely on for different types of purchases.
o Patterns in the characteristics of repeat users of similar products.
o Methods that potential customers rely on to reduce risk when they are purchasing.
• Technological Tools: Today technology can be extremely valuable to entrepreneurs and their research efforts. Tracking software can be used to see exactly how a visitor to the firm's website behaves, what features the visitor uses, and how long the visitor remains on the site. Technology that facilitates surveys, such as Survey Monkey, could prove helpful. The emergence of smartphones that allow customers to take pictures of things that interest them represents another research tool with rich potential. Tools to track response rates to advertisements or promotions placed in certain media, especially the Internet, are also valuable.
• Customer Observation: Insights can be gained from observing situations as they occur. Observational approaches can take many creative forms. They can be obtrusive, where the subject is aware that he or she is being observed, or unobtrusive, where he or she is not aware. An example of the obtrusive approach would be having potential customers use their smartphones to identify preferences and questions as they peruse their choices. An unobtrusive example would be when the entrepreneur counts cars or people that pass a given location at certain times of the day. Either method can be a systematic means of capturing market information.
• Web-Based Surveys: As we mentioned in the technological tools earlier, Survey Monkey is one of the easy-to-use tools for creating online surveys. These services help an entrepreneur to design a survey, drop it into an established online questionnaire format, and post it on a secure website. These web-based services will format the data and provide the statistical analysis as well. Web-based surveys are inexpensive and can reach a large number of people in a short period of time.
• Focus Groups: Gathering small groups of potential customers (usually 6–10) for an in-depth discussion about the new venture the entrepreneur is proposing may be a valuable source of insight. Participants elaborate on their feelings, beliefs, perceptions, and experiences with this new venture. Because they are small and less representative of entire market segments, focus groups are valuable for getting preliminary insights that are relevant to a particular venture decision.
• Lead User Research: Find lead users in the marketplace or in particular industries—people who have needs for which no solution exists and who often have ideas for effective products that have not yet been developed. They sometimes are experimenting with prototype solutions that, with modification, have the potential for addressing the lead user's needs. Lead users are often experienced in a particular field of endeavor and are driven to seek a solution to a problem they recognize. These prototype experiments do not produce satisfactory solutions, which creates the opportunity for innovation. The lead user approach would allow the entrepreneur to take pieces of information from these experts about the future and combine them in novel ways.
• Blog Monitoring: Blog sites have produced a new source for market research insights. A blog is a website that includes user-generated content, typically on some focused topic where anyone can post opinions or information, allowing for interactive discussions. Photos, videos, audio inputs, and links to other websites can also be posted. Simple content analysis can be applied to identify prominent terms or themes that appear in blog discussions. Today there are technologies that foster linguistic observation and social network analysis as well.
• Archival Research: Archives are a collection of records that have been created or accumulated over time. These records might be written documents, magazines, videos, computer files, online databases, patent records, and so on. Access to most archives is free and the information is objective. They are a type of secondary information that can reveal important insights to the creative researcher. For example, the historical records of Country Business Patterns from the Bureau of the Census can reveal growth patterns for certain industries in different regions of the country. As we discussed in the section on secondary research, there are numerous files and data available if the entrepreneur is willing to search.