subject: The Breakthrough of Paid Market Research [print this page] Marketing research is an initiative from a company who would want to acquire information to make informed decisions regarding their products and services. This is not an easy task because there are a lot of factors to be considered, like the demographics, socio-economic background, personal habits and the number of respondents that they need to survey in order to have a sample that is representative of the entire population that is the focus of the survey. The conventional market research is by mobilizing marketers to go out and find these people whose opinion they need to gather. With the advancement in technology, this is now fast becoming a thing of the past. There now exists, paid market research. Whether the companies decide to do their own research, or get the help of a third party marketer, the theory of the execution remains the same. Marketing people uses the internet to gather more respondents. They made the surveys more appealing by creating paid market research. The logic behind is that it not only makes it easier to get people to answer the survey questions, but it also minimizes the bias of surveys. Without paid market research, they run the risk of getting only the respondents who feels strongly about what they are gathering data for; therefore there is an inherent bias on the respondents answer already. This may well jeopardize the neutrality of the survey. By opting to do a paid market research, this risk is minimized, if not entirely eradicated. What researchers did was to create a panel to gather participants that would equate to information they need. With the use of the internet, they were able to have a wider reach, especially those people who dont have so much time except for work and internet surfing for a little while each day. With the incentive of getting paid, these participants are now easier for market researchers to tap and to entice into answering the surveys. The work of marketing people doesnt end in having the surveys answered. But the data gathered from paid market research is the key into producing an analysis out of the data from the survey answers. Without this data, even the best marketing team will not be able to make informed decisions. Having a more reliable data is still cheaper for a company even if they have to pay for it. In all marketing textbooks, data gathering has been emphasized to be a crucial stage of the marketing process. This has been proven a lot of times because in the end, the markets opinion would still be the best basis to know whether or not a product should be launched, created, manufactured, changed or abandoned all together. Up to this day, the marketing portals for these surveys are still continuing to grow in number. This is another indication that this kind of marketing works and has created value for those companies that subscribe to them. This is considered a breakthrough in market research which has solved a lot of headaches for researchers.
