Market research glossary

B2B market research companies provide services to other businesses, rather than to individual researchers. Companies who specialise in B2B research, such as FieldworkHub, provide recruitment, facilitation of research, and data analyse to end clients, who are therefore able to build informed strategy plans from accurate data provided by B2B market research companies.

Back-checking is utilized in market research as part of the quality control process. A small selection of participants are re-contacted to help verify their original responses and identify any errors made during the data collection or transcription process.

In market research, the term a balanced scale refers to a rating scale used in questionnaires that includes an equal number of positive and negative responses with a neutral midpoint. This structure is beneficial as it offers an unbiased amount of potential responses, leading to more reliable data.

A bar chart uses rectangular bars to display different categories of data in a digestible format. Different bar colours and lengths represent different sets of comparable data. An example: a question could ask what a participant’s favourite product feature was, and bars would represent the amount of responses each answer received.

Behaviour modification involves intevention to change a person’s behaviour or reaction over time. The use of positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements can be used in market research to condition a participant to react a particular way to specific stimuli.

A field that explores how psychological, social, and cognitive factors influence economic decision-making. It is widely used in market research to understand why consumers make purchasing decisions that differ from those predicted by the traditional assumption that individuals individuals act in a way that is purely rational and motivated by self-interest.

A survey question type which offers an alternative to Rating Scale questions. Rather than asking respondents to rate attributes on a standard scale (e.g. from 0 to 5 where 0 means not at all important and 5 means very important), respondents are asked shown all of the attributes at once and asked to identify just the most important and the least important. This is designed to overcome personal and cultural differences in responding to rating scales and also any tendency for respondents to say that most attributes are fairly important.

BHBIA is an acronym that stands for The British Healthcare Business Intelligence Association. It is a UK-based association promoting professional standards in companies that deliver healthcare market research to clients. The BHBIA offers training programs, events, and resources to its members and provides a comprehensive Legal and Ethical Guideline within which they work.

The meaning of bias varies somewhat between qualitative and quantitative research. In qualitative research, bias tends to refer to personal preconceptions that influence decisions and judgements, or to the way in which unskilled moderators can influence the findings of the research through the way in which they conduct the discussion. In quantitative research, it commonly refers to sample bias, i.e. a situation where the sample of people who complete the survey does not accurately represent the population that the research is trying to assess. For example, people who are not confident in using a computer or smartphone will tend to be under-represented in online surveys. However, poor questionnaire design can also introduce bias into quantitative research.

Market research in which the participants do not know the name of the end client. See also Double-Blind Market Research. The technique is used to avoid introducing bias into the research findings.

Market research designed to find out how familiar respondents are with particular brands. The standard method of doing this is via an Unprompted Recall question (e.g. when you think of toothpaste brands, which names come to mind?) followed by a Prompted Recall question (e.g. which of the following brands of toothpaste are you familiar with?).

Brand Price Trade Off provides a way of assessing how consumers place relative value on a product or brand and its impact on brand consumption. In BPTO studies, respondents are expected to consider a basket of brands at a number of different price points. At each price point, respondents select their preferred brand(s). This helps to build a view of price ranges that brands can operate in and still retain customers.

Brand tracking measures the health of a brand in terms of customer usage and opinion. This can be carried out for both B2B and B2C brands with the aim of obtaining  insight into a brand’s progress at a macro level and diagnosing the changes that will deliver improvement. Key brand tracking metrics will typically cover awareness, consideration, usage and loyalty, as well as attitudes and perceptions.

A market research brief is the foundation of a project. Sent by the sponsor of the research, it outlines the purpose of the study, the methodology, the intended audience, and the timeline in sufficient enough detail for a researcher to undertake the fieldwork.

An online bulletin board that invites and encourages interaction amongst participants, as well as a dialogue between each participant and the moderator. This approach is often used to collect feedback on product concepts or features.

This type of research targets respondents in relationship to their work as opposed to their behaviour as consumers. It often involves gathering their views on particular products or services which they use in their job, or which they are responsible for purchasing on behalf of their employer.

This describes the types of market research that businesses (and other organisations) conduct with consumers who use their services or products, or may be interested in using them in the future.