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Survey design is an important part of doing business and market research. Put simply, it refers to the process of creating surveys that get responses.

This is important because it allows you to better understand the market and your customers, so you can make more data-driven decisions, and fix areas that are falling short. Done right, a good survey can be the driving force for huge positive change.

How to design a survey

Planning

The first stage of survey design is all about planning. This is where you’ll decide what you want to focus on, why you’re running a survey at all, who you want to target, and more.

If you don’t get this stage right, you’ll end up with a survey that doesn’t have any clear goals, or fails to achieve its objectives. To get any meaningful feedback from a survey, you need to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve.

This initial stage is extremely important and is not something to skim over or rush through. In fact, the planning stage should take up a large chunk of the overall process.

1. Figure out your goals

The goal of the survey is what gives it structure and influences every part of the process. Here are some examples of goals for surveys:

  • Find out what customers think about your brand versus the competition 
  • Assess the main challenges faced by customers in your industry
  • Learn what customer like the most and least about a specific product

Goals should typically be narrow enough that there is no risk of confusing your stakeholders or your respondents. Narrow goals also avoid overwhelming your respondents with questions.

A clearly defined goal helps the team draw inspiration and stay united and focused. Once you have decided on a goal, you’ll have a much better idea of what type of  questions to ask, the type of respondents you want to reach , and so on.

In other words, you need to set a goal in order for the rest of the process to click into place.

2. Decide who you want to target with your survey

The next stage of the planning process involves deciding who will actually take part in your survey. 

This is called the target population, and it should reflect the goal. For example, if you’re asking how your product impacts a person’s job it’s probably not a good idea to target people under 16, or people over 70 as they are unlikely to be working.

3. Choose the right sample

The target population you choose will often be too large to effectively survey. This means you’ll have to select a sample — a smaller group that represents the larger demographic. You can then take these results and extrapolate them to the wider population.

Done right, this group will be representative enough to act as a miniature version of the whole. Sampling allows you to achieve your goals with a fraction of the cost, time, and resources required to survey the entire target population, which in most cases, would simply not be possible.

4. Pick the right survey method

This stage of the planning process will be driven by your goal and your target demographic. Some examples of different methods include:

Every method has its pros and cons. Online surveys enable you to reach a large number of people quickly, but they’re less appropriate if you’ve got a physical product you want people to interact with. Instead a central location test might be more appropriate in this instance.

Every survey is different. If your target population is mostly people over the age of 65 or in geographical locations where internet access is not widespread, online  surveys will probably not be the best method. Likewise, a central location test might not work well if your target demographic is very busy.

Once you have decided on a goal, established a target population and a sample, and chosen the method for your survey, it’s time to get down to actually creating it.

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Creating your survey

Creating your survey is all about making it as easy as possible for your respondents to read, understand, and answer. If you overwhelm them with information and confusing formats, they’ll quickly give up and you’ll end up with fewer answers and a smaller pool of data at the end.

Here are some ways to make your survey as effective as possible:

Use questions wisely

The best way to ask questions is sparingly. You need to ask enough to gather a good amount of information, but if you use too many you risk driving your respondents away.

It’s always best to start with a clear introduction that introduces the survey, explains the format, and addresses any initial questions the reader might have. You might then start with some screener questions (about age or job title, for example) to filter out any respondents who don’t match the target demographic.

  • Don’t waste questions — only ask when necessary
  • Ask one question at a time, combining multiple questions into one creates confusion
  • Choose the right question type for your audience, mode of survey, and what you’re asking. Options include multiple-choice, open questions, closed questions, ratings, and so on.
  • Keep your questions short, simple, and clear. Avoid using jargon and including unnecessary information.
  • Design and layout is important — make it clear which questions to answer and how

Executing the survey

Once the survey is planned and created, it’s time to actually carry it out. If you have done the earlier stages correctly, this part should run smoothly. However, in practice, errors and unexpected setbacks are common. Here’s how to execute your survey in the best way possible:

Work with trained researchers

If your survey will be carried out in person or on the telephone, it’s important that your staff know how to ask questions. Make sure you’re working with a team that is trained to ask open-ended questions correctly, in a way that avoids confusion or tempts bias.

Pilot surveys

A common practice is to conduct a smaller pilot survey before the main one, which can help identify any problems with the survey and give you an opportunity to make some tweaks before sending it to the full sample group.

Avoiding bias

One of the main challenges when conducting surveys is bias. It’s easy to accidentally lead your respondents down a certain path and encourage them to answer in a certain way, which you must avoid in order to get accurate and valuable results. To minimize bias:

  • Avoid leading questions like comparisons with other companies or products
  • Keep questions as precise and simple as possible to eliminate the risk of misunderstanding
  • Try to predict inherent biases in your target group and work to mitigate them

Analyzing and sharing results

After the survey is complete, the final steps are to analyze and share the results. This is an extremely important step, as this is where you put into practice what you learned and draw value from the survey.

It’s important to categorize and analyze the results properly. This process might be as simple as collecting the results in an excel spreadsheet, or it might be much more detailed, using a range of advanced analysis techniques..

Think about how the survey relates to your overall business and marketing, and how you can act on the insights you gained and use them to achieve your goals.

Create a summary report

A summary report is a great way to share your results with your stakeholders in the business. It’s a document that breaks down what your survey set out to achieve and what the key findings were. We regularly create summary reports, as well longer, more detailed reports for our clients. 

Make sure to clearly show what your aims were and what you learned, and present this in a way that anyone – regardless of market research literacy – can get to grips with. It’s worth working with a good designer to present the findings in the best way possible. At Kadence we have our own design team who help us to create impactful reports that make data easy to understand and act upon.

Survey design can seem like a challenging process, and it does require input and collaboration from many parts of the company.

However, the rewards are worth it. A well-designed survey can provide a much more intimate understanding of your customer base and how your products and services are received. It can yield incredibly valuable feedback and prompt much-needed change.

To find out how Kadence can help your organisation plan more effective surveys and harness data for maximum effect, reach out to request a proposal.

What is conjoint analysis? It’s often lauded as an extremely effective way to gain detailed insights and conduct market research, but how does it work?

Essentially, conjoint analysis is a way of measuring the value that customers place on a product’s features. It typically works via a survey, which looks something like this:

  • Participants are shown a combination of features (called attributes) for a product. If the product is a smartphone, for example, they might be shown the price, memory size, screen resolution, and camera quality.
  • They’re then asked to compare different attributes. For example, what would they choose out of a $150 phone and a $250 phone? Do they prefer 32GB of memory or 64GB? There are several different ways to structure this, as we’ll find out.
  • After the answers have been collected, it’s up to us to analyze the results to inform the right marketing decisions.

In this article, we’ll look at this process in more detail and dig deeper into the different types of conjoint analysis and the various benefits it can deliver. 

Why do conjoint analysis?

There are several reasons to conduct a conjoint analysis. These include:

  • To measure and understand customer preference for certain product features
  • To assess or predict how well a product will do if brought to market
  • To gain an understanding of how changes to price affect demand
  • To predict future trends, for example around the adoption of certain features

How to do conjoint analysis

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Choose the right survey type

The first stage is to decide on the correct survey type. There are several ways to do a conjoint analysis — here are the main methods.

  • Ratings-based conjoint analysis. This is where participants give each attribute a rating, for example on a scale of 1-100.
  • Ranking-based conjoint analysis. This is where participants rank the attributes in order from best to worst. There is also best vs worst analysis, where participants simply pick their favourite and least favourite attributes out of the selection.
  • Choice-based conjoint analysis (CBC). This is the most commonly used model and the one this guide will focus on. It presents combinations of attributes to participants and asks them to choose which they prefer.

One of the most powerful advantages of choice-based conjoint analysis is that it can allow you to use modelling to predict how customers will feel about combinations they didn’t even assess.

In other words, in an extremely efficient way of predicting responses to features without having to spend a huge amount of time testing each combination.

Identify the relevant attributes (features)

Next, it’s time to decide which product attributes you want to have your respondents compare and assess. The key is to not use too many. We typically avoid using more than 5 or 6 attributes e.g. for a car colour, engine size. We do this to reduce the cognitive load on respondents to ensure they really engage with the choices presented to them. 

For each attribute, you need to add levels. For example, if your participants are assessing a smartphone, one attribute might be ‘price’, and the levels might be $200, $350, and $700.

The levels will usually reflect the different tiers of the product you’re considering selling. For the smartphone, you might be releasing a basic model, a higher-end model, and a deluxe model. The levels for attributes such as price, camera size, and memory will align with those tiers.

Levels should be chosen based on factors like:

  • How interesting and valuable they are for management — will they inform useful decisions?
  • How well they avoid bias
  • How realistic they are

In the CBC method, there are two commonly used models for making choices:

  • Single choice with none. This requires the participant to make one choice out of the selection. There is also the possibility to select none of the options.
  • Single choice. This is the same as above, but there is no ‘none’ option — the participant has to pick one. 

Design the questionnaire

Screener questions

Most Surveys start with some screener questions. These are general questions around demographics like the respondent’s age, job title, or purchase habits. The goal is to filter out those who won’t be a good fit for the survey based on the people you’re trying to target.

Introduce and explain

It’s important to take some time at the beginning of the survey and in your questions to clearly explain  what the respondents need to do to answer the question. Surveys should be as clear and easy to follow as possible.

Create the right questions

The questions you choose, and how you structure them, will make or break your survey. Here are some guidelines to follow:

  • Questions should follow on from one another logically and be grouped together intuitively. It’s best not to confuse your participants by ordering your questions in a confusing way.
  • People often give more accurate and useful answers when you use situational questions g. For example, instead of asking, “Which phone would you buy”, ask something like, “Thinking back to the last time you purchased a phone — if you had the following options instead, which would you have picked?”
  • Finish with some demographic questions so that you can further understand your customer base and analyse the results by demographic to understand any meaningful differences.

Analyze and take action

Once the survey has been written, scripted , sent out, and completed by your target group, it’s time to analyze the results and take action on them. This is perhaps the most important part of the process, as it’s where your research can really make a tangible impact.

There are several ways to analyze your results, based on how you designed the survey. The most important thing is to collect and analyse your data in a way that makes it easy to draw useful conclusions and share them.

This will allow you to gain real value from the survey and present those findings to others in the company. This:

  • Helps justify your decisions and actions
  • Informs future plans and inspires new features
  • Identifies areas that need to change or improve

At Kadence, it’s our job to ensure you create and conduct the most effective surveys and market research possible, giving your brand the edge. To find out more about how we can help with conjoint analysis and more, get in touch to request a proposal.