Why Bad News is Really Good

By Judson Luke, Director of Research

When it comes to conducting market research, uncovering bad news can provide a huge amount of value for your organization. I will always remember the time I was presenting findings from a qualitative interview project to a room of 15 client contacts. As part of the report, I needed to deliver some rather negative news about a poor service experience, as described by one of their customers. This customer was so annoyed that he made sure I knew he would never deal with this company again. It’s not rare for us to uncover something negative through our research, but in this particular case the findings were met with defensiveness.

As it turns out, a meeting attendee was actually the person who dealt with this customer — and customer in question may not have been the innocent victim he made himself out to be. Our client contact said it would have been nice to pre-screen the customers that we intended to call. Why? So we can avoid anything that might make us look bad? With a cool and open mind, analyzing this ex-customer’s comments actually provided a great deal of actionable insight into avoiding similarly poor experiences — in turn, helping to keep more satisfied, paying customers.

Of course, I understand our client’s reaction. I might have felt defensive too, but this example should put up the red flag for any organization that wants to do market research, especially if you plan to do the research in-house. It’s important to not be afraid of bad news, because this fear can influence the process. It’s easy to craft questions or direct an interview in a way that doesn’t allow a respondent to provide a whole lot of criticism. Even worse, it’s also easy (albeit unethical) to simply discard results that don’t paint a rosy picture.

Market research is not about providing good or bad information, but rather obtaining an objective and accurate view of the market. It’s critical to recognize that understanding the truth about our situation (the positive and the negative) provides us with the actionable information we need to make the best possible strategic decisions. So don’t be afraid of bad news. In fact, celebrate it. Now that you know, you’re in a position to do something about it.

Tips for conducting objective market research:

• Establish among all the stakeholders going into a project that the acquisition of unbiased, objective, and accurate information is what the research is intended to obtain — and that no one will “shoot the messenger.”
• Where some sort of impression, opinion or feeling is needed, ensure your questions actually allow for positive and negative responses.
• Ideally, you shouldn’t have your sales people or other customer-facing personnel select or interview their own customers. It’s unlikely that the customer will be as honest as they might be with someone they don’t regularly deal with.
• Consider working with an outside research firm. It continues to be our experience that customers will tell an independent third party more than they’ll tell our client directly, even when they know all the feedback is going straight back to them.