MarketTools Blog

From time to time, I hear industry pundits talk about how ensuring research quality is as simple as applying a bunch of disparate tools throughout the research supply chain. These folks suggest that panel companies could match their panelists against industry databases to cleanse out non-real panelists, and that research companies can prevent duplicate panelists and speedsters by applying digital fingerprinting and proprietary speeding measures within surveys.

In my opinion, piecemeal solutions like these don’t address the most critical aspects of quality that clients have been pleading for: “transparency” and “consistency”. If a buyer has no way to audit or visually examine the overall impact that each quality assurance tool has made on their research, then they have no way to measure the quality of the project or the supplier. This doesn’t seem like a fair trade-off for the clients who have stated outright that they are willing to pay a premium for quality – but only if they can measure it and depend on it.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading David Haynes’ article on “Lemon Markets”, which was featured in Quirk’s Marketing Research Review in August, 2010 (subscription required).  As the Chairman and CEO of sample supplier Western Wats, David skillfully makes the point that the online sample market has been acting as a “lemon market” in which suppliers cannot visibly demonstrate quality before the sale, and therefore, buyers can’t evaluate quality either. The common consequence of a lemon market is that suppliers are incented to reduce quality – because without any way of measuring or determining quality, buyers won’t be willing to pay more for it. David says that in these cases, “Objective third party quality validation can augment reputation and enable sellers to credibly demonstrate quality before the sale.” He goes on to say that “Third party quality validation must provide relevant, unbiased, standardized metrics comparable across sample suppliers.”

I would argue that piecemeal solutions where various technologies are applied by different parties in the supply chain do not visibly and credibly demonstrate quality. Only a comprehensive, auditable and consistently applicable solution, like TrueSample, achieves this goal.

Clients like Procter & Gamble and Microsoft are beginning to require that a standardized quality solution be applied to all research projects across all vendors and sample suppliers they work with. And more than that, they want real-time reports that show them exactly how many respondents were excluded and why. This consistent transparency into the "black box" that is online research quality is what TrueSample provides.