Ø  Focus Groups and Qualitative Research

MOI use focus groups as a qualitative marketing research methodology to understand how people make decisions about - and what factors influence - their use of products or services.

Focus groups possess a distinct advantage over other market research methods. They capitalize on the moderator’s communication with participants and the flexibility to move the discussion. It allows you to extract meaningful insights and opinions.

The purpose of the group is not to arrive at a consensus or agreement on the topic. Instead, it seeks to identify and understand customer perceptions of a brand, product, or service.

Ø  Representative Telephone Surveys and Quantitative Marketing Research

MOI use telephone surveys as a quantitative marketing research methodology for determining what people think and how they behave. Well-designed, high quality telephone surveys are an ideal tool for conducting awareness and image studies, customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty studies, branding and market segmentation studies, and political polls.

Advantages of Telephone Surveys

1. Higher response rates.

2. Ease of implementation and greater complexity.

3. Greater length of interview.

4. Greater depth of response.

5. Cultural appropriateness. 

Ø  Email Surveys and Web Surveys

Email surveys and web surveys are used when the population to be surveyed can best be reached through the Internet.

Internet-based surveys, although still in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail methods.

Ø  Mail Surveys

Many businesses and organizations use mail surveys to gauge customer satisfaction or member satisfaction. Mail surveys are especially helpful due to their comparatively low data collection costs and ease of administration.

An advantage of mail surveys for business is the relative cost-effectiveness (based on postal rates) of survey distribution and receipt. Low administration costs and the ability to reach broad geographic distributions are additional advantages.

Ø  Intercept Interviews

MOI use intercept interviews to gauge visitor satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Intercept interviews are especially helpful due to the immediacy of the customer's experience with the organization. Often called an exit interview, this marketing research data collection method benefits from the respondent's ability to recount details of their experience, which is still fresh in their mind.

Intercept interviews are a useful way of surveying the opinions of a broad sample of users in a short time. They can help test initial findings (or ‘hunches’) that have emerged from other research (like ethnographies, in-depth interviews or quantitative analysis).

Ø  Internet-Based Market Research

The Internet is a vast source of information of varying degrees of quality and accuracy that is constantly changing. Internet information is created by many different groups-individuals, academic institutions, newspapers, activists, government departments and agencies, politicians, businesses, associations, non-profits, church groups, schools, and so on-and is used for all kinds of purposes.

The basics of internet-based market research are similar to most market research surveys. Decide who to talk to. Find out how to get hold of them online and then design mechanisms to find the information required.

Ø  In-Depth or One-On-One Interviews

In-depth interviews are a marketing research interviewing technique used in situations where expert opinions are needed, or to gather detailed information from customers or users of competing products or services. In-depth interviews are most appropriate for situations in which you want to ask probing questions that incite a meaningful conversation/response designed to produce a depth of information from relatively few people (as opposed to surveys, which are conducted with larger numbers of respondents).