Market research or user research? (part I)

Happy 2009! I am back in Sydney after a couple of weeks off, ready to start blogging once again. For this post I will step away from the subject of economics, and instead I will share some personal thoughts about market research.

When I first joined the MBA program at Loyola University Chicago my objective was to specialize in Marketing. Back then I figured that a combined education in Marketing and User-centered design would give me the ability to leverage both the breadth of market research and the depth of user research in my professional development.

I had a great Marketing professor at Loyola, and I quite enjoyed taking my introduction to "Marketing Management" course. However, soon thereafter I felt that market research and user research were mutually exclusive practices in nature. My MBA experience with market research is reminiscent of a conversation I had with a friend of my sister back in 1999.

I talked to my sister's friend about an article which highlighted the fact that a large percentage of elderly people in America did not have enough money in their savings accounts to support themselves during retirement. He pointed out that the article failed to mention that many elderly people have their money invested in real estate, stocks, bonds, and retirement funds which may explain why they do not keep much cash in their savings accounts. This is a simple example of a familiar flaw: statistical data is open to interpretation by the person(s) analyzing it, and often it is used to fit the agenda of the analyst or the client.

Over my years as a corporate employee I had to change my perspective on market research. I have come to accept market research as necessary to create a case for change. Business people are taught to accept research only if it talks about thousands of people being surveyed and billions of dollars in revenue opportunities. However, the methods for the collection and analysis of this type of data are inadequate when it comes to innovation. This is the design space, where a deep understanding of the world of a few users is more meaningful. Today I believe that market research and user-centered research are complimentary, the former to be used to wet the appetite of investors and executives, and the latter to understand users and develop products and services that truly fit their needs.

In the next posting I will illustrate the symbiosis between market research and user research with more specific examples from an article that I read recently.