I enjoyed speaking today to over 150 people at the Marketing Research Association annual meeting in Philadelphia on the subject of Market Research 2.0 (slides can be found here). We discussed how market researchers should be expanding into user generated content and Web metrics, so they can help companies sort through the news from the noise in market information. As usual, I learned something when one of the participants asked me a question at the end of my presentation that I had never considered before. I hope you are interested, too.
It was such an incisive question that the first time around I didn’t even understand it. (Some expert, huh?) A market researcher stood up and asked, “What role market researchers play in attracting user generated content, specifically ratings and reviews?”
This was a new idea to me.
Now, I am familiar with companies offering incentives to get the ball rolling. In an interview for my book, David Seifert, Director of Direct Marketing Operations for outdoors retailer Bass Pro Shops, explained how they offered a discount coupon in return for a customer review in the early days of seeding their site. But market researchers know that incentives can be fraught with danger. (Nothing ever seems to be fraught with happiness.)
Market researchers understand that incentives, done improperly, can lead to the wrong people providing feedback. Or worse, they can lead to people providing any old feedback just to collect the incentive. Market researchers struggle with offering just the right incentive every time they conduct a survey or a focus group. The incentive must be just good enough to attract the right people, but not so good to attract the wrong people.
And here I was standing in a roomful of people who do incentives for market research for a living. Of course they have something to contribute. If you are figuring out how to jump-start your user-generated content, you could do a lot worse than to ask a market researcher to give you advice on the proper use of incentives.
