The DIY dilemma

Yesterday we carried news of the launch of a DIY on-demand research service called AskYourTargetMarket.com. Reader Steve Taylor was far from impressed, however.

“It’s a DIY service with low worth sample which will probably stop even more people turning to research professionals to commission quality research,” he said. “Why Research thinks it’s worth publicising this is beyond me.”

You can judge for yourself the worth of the service here – which leaves me to explain why we felt it was worth covering such a story.

The answer is simple: as Steve says, services such as AskYourTargetMarket could “stop even more people turning to research professionals to commission quality research”.

A key part of our job is to report on opportunities, threats and challenges that the research industry faces, and the rising numbers of DIY survey tools and services surely fits one of those descriptions – but which? That is the real question the industry needs to ask.

The growing interest in DIY surveys proves there’s demand out there for low-cost research. Given the state of the economy and the pressure on marketing budgets its natural that research agencies would perceive this as a threat. But surely there’s an opportunity here also.

Big corporates are unlikely to embrace tools such as AskYourTargetMarket – customers of such services are more likely to be the small and medium-sized business who can’t afford to pay professional agency fees for research. Of course, a bad experience with DIY surveys could put them off using research for life. The flipside, though, is that SMEs who use DIY tools to help them build a successful business could eventually become customers of professional survey firms.

A final thought: if agencies are concerned about the quality of existing DIY tools, is there not a call for them to develop their own entry-level, affordable research option? Or should the industry continue to extol the virtues of using research to inform business decisions, but with an added caveat: only if you can afford to do it?