Insights For Innovation And Growth Through Market Research

  📍 Whether you’re developing a new product, trying to expand into new markets or honing your message so it appeals to your audience, you need to understand your target customer, which is easier said than done, which is why I’m so pleased to be joined today by Angela Richmond, founder of Red Fox Research.

Angela, great to see you again, and welcome to the podcast. Hi there, hi. How’s things going? Yeah, pretty good. Thank you. Good. look, Angela, to start things off, could you give a bit of a, an introduction to who you are, your career and what it is that you do? Yeah, I, run a market research agency, as an independent.

I know that you sometimes talk about freelancers. I tend to think of myself as an independent rather than a freelancer. But I do work on my own and I do, market research around B2B and technology mainly. I think the thing that I like about working, independently is that it gives me an opportunity to sometimes be a full service agency.

So sometimes I’m working directly with clients who may be technology companies, FinTechs, and then, the whole of the project falls on me. but sometimes I also have an opportunity to, work for other teams. So I sometimes work with other agencies and that’s really good because it gives me a chance to work on much larger projects and it gives me a chance to collaborate.

And I think that’s really important because if you’re working on your own all the time, there’s always a risk that your skills become stale or, you’re not picking up on new ideas. So I enjoyed both parts of those. I enjoyed the flexibility to go those different directions and have a kind of hybrid career.

Brilliant. Thank you. And before starting Red Fox, can you talk a bit about your career beforehand? Yeah, I worked in, various different research agencies, but the last position that I had, was, in octopus group, which is now, publicist pro. So that gave me a chance to see how research was used.

When it fed into marketing, they’re, a B2B marketing and sales agency. and that gave me a much more rounded view, I think, of how research is used. Great. look, the theme for this episode is how companies, how organizations can gain insights that are going to help them innovate and grow and maybe refine their messaging too.

It’s a broad topic. Where do you start? I think that one of the reasons that I’m interested in this is that when I’m doing research projects directly for clients, quite often they are relatively new tech startups Or, at least in the early years of their business. And they often haven’t done any research before.

And people often come to me and frame their research need in different ways. They may say we’ve got some messaging or they may say we’ve got a website that we want to test, but often they don’t know very much about their customer or their potential customers at all. And I tend to want people then to just step back a little bit and.

almost reframe the question in a different way. what’s the ultimate goal that you have? Because if you’ve never been out there and talked to potential customers, there’s a lot of stuff that you might, you may be making assumptions about. You may have created a website, but do you have you done the steps before that a larger organization might have done, which is to Understand the need, understand what’s driving the potential customer.

And often they haven’t, they’ve had to wing it a little bit to create messaging or create a website. So I always say stand back a bit and don’t make your questions or your survey too narrow. make it pretty open so that you can find out what the pain points are that your potential customer is trying to address or dealing with every day.

It’s an interesting point. If you’re working with a lot of tech startups and often they haven’t spoken with customers to understand their needs. In those instances, are they entirely working on gut feel and some assumptions? how have they launched a business without actually having spoken to a customer?

they will have, they’re generally people that have worked in that industry for a while. Ah, so they’re scratching their own itch a bit. There’s not actually a lot of startups that are started by very young people. so they tend to be people that, that have seen a gap in the market that they can feel from the work that they’ve done before.

But, things move on. The thing with technology is you need to make sure the gap that you’re filling isn’t a gap that’s already been filled. So, they tend to have a good understanding of the types of businesses that they have dealt with in the past, but they don’t necessarily understand.

The potential customers that what they’ve built will work for. Yeah. Okay. that makes more sense. Thank you. I started off, I introduced this episode with, some examples of where market research might help. So around innovating for new products, perhaps expanding into new markets or refining the message.

In all three of those scenarios, would you approach them in the same way, or do they require a different approach? I, think that, you’ve clearly got something to test in, in, in those instances which, which is different. You may have a website to look at, you may have copy to test, you may not have anything to test.

You may just have a product idea to test. so that part of it will be, different, but there are some things at the beginning that I would approach in a very similar way. the first thing is that this kind of research tends to be qualitative. It tends to be exploratory. when we’re talking to B2B buyers, B2B buying.

is quite a complex thing. There’s a lot of different people involved. You’re buying as an individual and you’re buying as a representative for your organization. so you need to tap into both of those things and having a one to one conversation, you will get a lot more out of it than trying to preempt questions so that you have a coded questionnaire.

And often I have seen people trying to put. Quantitative questionnaires together, but again, because they haven’t got any of that basic understanding of where the potential customer is, they’re not writing the right questions. So it’s best to start with some qualitative research. And, usually I would encourage people to have some quite open questions.

at the beginning of those conversations. So forget what the problem is that you think you’re trying to solve, but start off by asking them about what are the things that get involved, get in the way of you doing your work on a day to day basis? what are the pain points for you? the, it’s a bit of a cliche, but what keeps you awake at night?

So it’s those very open questions that will help you understand. First of all, what are the big issues for them? What are the big challenges? And secondly, it will help you to understand the language that they talk in. And I think that’s really important when I see a lot of, B2B tech marketing, sometimes it’s couched in Producty terms, and, people aren’t buying products, they’re buying solutions.

So you need to understand what the problem is that they’re going to solve. What is the benefit that they’ll get from your products rather than are they looking for a tick list of these different things that your product does? So start with those really open questions. Yeah, that point you made around the messaging as well, I think it’s so important.

I’ve very recently been working with an organization. We actually ran a test using some ads on Google. And what they do is they provide employee engagement surveys. And effectively they’re in a market where, in theory at least, Anybody could use a free tool, something like SurveyMonkey or Microsoft Forms, where there’s no cost for using the technology, and come up with a whole host of questions that they want to understand about their employees, and do that for nothing.

So they do need to differentiate themselves from that free or very low cost type of solution. The way that they had historically done that is by talking about all of the science behind why they structure their surveys in a particular way, which does differentiate them. But what we found is that by them talking about that sort of messaging too early on in the sales cycle, They were turning pretty much everybody off.

And so when we were running the experiment using Google ads, the click through rate, it was a bit of an assumption to say, the click through rate really aligns with how effective that messaging is. But you would expect it to, the better the messaging, the more it appeals, the higher the click through rate.

There was about a 700 percent difference in the click through rate versus some more simplistic messaging. And then you can start introducing the technology and the science behind it afterwards. So I thought that was a really interesting point. Thank you. I love that actually, because, one of the, certainly people have come to me before and said, we’ve done a survey in Google forms or, survey monkey or whatever, but we can’t seem to analyze it.

Can you help us analyze it? And that’s when, that’s the point at which they discover. That those free generic platforms won’t allow them to slice and dice the data in the ways that they need to. So in the example that you’ve given, I, that’s what I have absolutely tried to say to people. Yes, you can do this for free in Google, Forms.

But will you be able to will you be able to get out of it what you want? And that’s a simpler message, And I can completely get that if you start somebody who wants to do something in quite a simple straightforward way If you start telling them there’s a load of science behind it, it’s just going to turn them off Yeah, I think for me the other thing it demonstrates is perhaps there’s often.

A difference between what people self report in a survey and what they actually do. And I don’t know whether you’ve got, any, guidance. around how to avoid being misled by what people are telling you they prefer or would do, and the reality of it. It is really tricky if you’re, yeah, in those kind of online quantitative, surveys, it is pretty tricky.

And I think that’s one of the big pitfalls that I’ve seen kind of client written questions. They tend to be Very leading questions. They tend to, the question seems to be the objective. So if what they want to find out is, do people think it’s difficult to do this, and this, the question tends to come up as, do you think it’s difficult to do this, and this?

Whereas you should be saying, which of the following are challenges of putting some other things in the list that aren’t what you’re trying to look for so that you can have some confidence. If you’re doing research for some content or some headlines, it’s not the end of the day if it’s leading.

It’s not great research, but it’s not the end of the day. If you’re doing it to, to persuade investors to come into your business or to understand where to invest in different market sectors, it can cost you a lot of money to ask those leading questions and get the wrong answers. Yeah, that’s a great point.

I think you started off that whole section about talking about with B2B clients. Do you have a different approach or would you recommend, treating B2C research differently? Yeah, I think in B2C research, sometimes you have sensitive topics, let’s say for example when I’ve been doing work on, Credit reports where you also would want to have time to talk to somebody in a sensitive way Because you’re potentially getting to talk to somebody who’s worried about death or who’s worried about Identity theft or maybe even as experienced identity theft and I’ve worked with Experian in the past on some of their products So so you take a similar sort of approach there You But if you’re looking at something that is a more, emotional purchase that other people do as well, then a focus group, it can be a better route because if you’re talking about.

A purchase that people don’t think a lot about in everyday life, so let’s say for example milk, just comes into my head. yeah, we, buy it automatically. we don’t think about it very carefully when we’re doing It, it helps then to have people in a room together where they can bounce off what others are saying, so if they’re looking at advertising or they’re.

looking at a new packaging. Some people will be able to articulate what they think about that very easily. Other people won’t, but if they hear somebody else articulate their thoughts, they’ll be able to say, I don’t see, I don’t see it that way at all. Or yeah, actually you’re right. why have they put a red label on semi skimmed milk?

That’s going to confuse me because I see red labels on skimmed milk. Yeah, and I suppose in those situations as well, the person conducting the research should also be able to pick up on the amount of passion that’s being presented when those points are being raised. Yeah, not, everything that’s said in the focus group is equal and, I think being aware as well of what people aren’t saying is important.

So there’s so much to be gained I think with that face to face of, just watching somebody look quizzically at something. you actually see it as well when we’re doing web testing, where you just see the mouse starting to just hover on something and move randomly around it. And there’s something going on there.

They don’t quite know where to click, Yeah. Yeah, and it’s trying to get them to verbalize whilst that’s happening, what’s going through their head at that moment in time. Yeah, it’s not jumping in too quickly as well. Some people just need a little bit of space to talk. Yeah, and when we’re talking about qualitative research, who is it?

I guess it might, it will depend whether it’s B2B or B2C, but let’s assume it’s a B2B product. you’ve already mentioned the B2B purchases. are more complex. They involve more people. Who within a business should you be trying to speak to as part of your research? Is it the end user? Is it the person who’s making the purchasing decision?

is it a whole mix of different people? I think that, I think it is a mix, but I think that there’s sometimes a danger that people want to talk to somebody too senior. Because they think that all decision making happens at a very high level. Yes, those people have to sign things off, but often it’s a lot of that research at the early stages and that filtering goes on a, somebody who is more, who’s going to be more hands on in the use of a new product.

So the, choices that are put in front of the board, Have already been decided by the background research that those people have done. And we know that in, in this day and age in B2B buying so much research gets done on the part of the buyer before the, product companies. Are ever involved in a conversation so that they have to work really hard to make sure that the information that’s out there on their website on their social and everything is preempting some of the questions that buyers will have but you do need to understand how the decision making works and sometimes we spend quite a lot of the survey talking about, and not a hypothetical decision making process, but tell me about the last time you bought a product in this area.

What happened? How long did it take? Who instigated the process? Who were the blockers? Because there’s always people who squash ideas and squash purchases. Who are the people that you had to really negotiate with to to get this done? And by asking people about a real example, a recent example that they’ve gone through, it should remove some of that self reporting bias.

Cause if you say to somebody, are you a decision maker? It’s just a social status benefit of saying, yes, I make the decisions in this business. The reality is it’s probably unlikely to be just down to one person and getting them to focus on the real situation that happened in the past. That should remove some of that bias.

Yeah, and, everybody has a sort of a view of hypothetically how something should happen. but the reality is often very different, and that’s what you need to understand. You need to get away from the hypothetical and understand the reality. how do you get people to actually take part in the research that you’re conducting?

So we do use, specialist recruiters actually. it’s a very skilled job getting the right people to, to a research project. And the there’s various different, recruitment agencies out there that, that will specialize in different areas actually. So we would use different people for consumer recruitment to those that we would use for, for B2B or, or technology.

and I think that’s, something that is. Often quite challenging for clients to realize that there’s quite an investment to be made in recruiting the right people. So we need to approach a lot of people often until we find the right people who will take part. sometimes people say to us, I’ve got a, you want 10 people?

I’ve got a list of 10 people. Are they, the right people? Do they qualify? Are they available in the field work period? Do they want to take part? you, can end up, oftentimes you need at least 10 times the amount of contacts to fill a focus group. it is a lot of hard work and a lot of screening.

And the second thing is you need to think about what the screening questions are. I always remember working with a client who was looking at a quite a high end multifunction printer when they were first first coming out and they wrote a screening question that was So, specific and narrow that when they saw these people in the room, they went, hooray, everybody loves it.

And I said, that’s because we’ve virtually screened out anybody that, that wouldn’t love it. so you’ve got a room here of people that are pretty much already said they’ll buy this thing without even seeing it. Okay. That makes sense. what’s your thoughts on whether people should be compensated or paid for their time taking part in these things?

does it introduce bias in the results or I think people do expect to be compensated, and I think that, I don’t think it’s the reason they take part. I think they do sometimes, but I think often people, take part because they are interested in the topic and it helps them to have a conversation about how these things work.

they put in a reasonable amount of effort and, and we do tend to compensate them. Sometimes we might make an offer to give some money to charity. Often people will say, that’s fine, I’ll take the money and give to charity myself. Sure, that comes back into the self reported bias, I think.

Yeah. thank you for that. Look, you’ve spoken, really well about the role of qualitative research. Where does quantitative research fit in? I think that, yes, I think that’s a really good question because we shouldn’t give, the impression that everything can be solved with qualitative research because it can’t be.

If you are trying to, size an opportunity, you need hard numbers. You need to have gone out to, Broad spectrum of the market, a representative, sample of the market. And you need to be able to find out how many of those people are either interested in your product or tick the right boxes to be interested in your product.

So, as an example, I was working with, a client who had a bolt on for teams that allows you to use teams as a call distributor. so using it for, so they needed to understand how many of, different types of organization were using teams and had a requirement to work as, groups of agents.

Both of those pieces of information were available separately, but not within the, not interlocked. So by going out to actually hundreds of businesses of different sizes, different industries, we could identify where the opportunity, where the addressable market was. we didn’t go to them with a proposition, but we under, we could understand where the addressable market lay.

So they were able to create their strategy, And understand whether they should be going for, do you go for a large businesses who might buy a lot from you? Or do you go for small businesses where there’s a lot of businesses to target, so they could actually have the hard numbers to come up with.

So, that’s an area you definitely need quality quantitative research. I think if you’re trying to track something, if you’re trying to track your brand, you need quantitative research, but also if you are looking for. Eye catching numbers for the press or content or thought leadership. Much as that qualitative information is very useful and very interesting.

People trust numbers, people trust statistics, and they want to see those stats. So I think if you’re looking for media attention, I would always go for the eye catching stats. You raised a really interesting point with the example of the Teams add on, example that you gave, where there was existing research.

I don’t know whether it was first party research or third party research that had some of the information there, but it wasn’t all married up together. What are your views on using other, sources of research, other sources of insights, and trying to combine them with, Your own research or the company’s own research.

Should it all be done from a starting point of right? We’re going to start from scratch and try and build out an answer to these questions Or is it appropriate sometimes to bring in other data as well? I think if other data is there you should use it and I but I would always recommend Triangulating data.

So so not relying on one data source So a phenomenon that we see You Occasionally is that the same numbers just go round and round. So you ask somebody how big’s the market for X and you know that they’re just feeding back the numbers that they’ve read in the press. So it helps to be able to get more than one data source, but sometimes you can look at adjacent markets to understand, the likely potential for your product, So if you’re looking at, I don’t know you want to sell, fire safety reports. You can look at the market for fire extinguishers. you, don’t have to have the exact numbers. You might want to extrapolate from those numbers, but yeah, always good to bring some data in it.

And I think in, in thought leadership, especially we often embed Some stats that are out there in the market from some of the big analyst companies because they you know they’ve spent a lot of money doing some of this research and it’s good to you know Pull some of those numbers if they’re in the public domain But I guess you shouldn’t rely solely on the third party research that’s available in the public domain, whether it’s paid or freely available, because then ultimately you’re only getting the same insights as everybody else’s anyway.

And then at that point you’re hard pushed to actually come up with anything particularly innovative. Yeah, they’re, a start, but they, often won’t be the market that you specifically want to target. they will generally be quite generic numbers. Yeah. No, that all makes sense. Thank you.

what would be really useful, you’ve already given, an example of the team’s add on, but to crystallise the sort of whole process, have you got an example or a case study that you could walk through and just talk about where you started from and actually where you ended up? yeah, I think an example would be, a client that I was working with, who was involved in the telephony market, a different client actually to the one that I just mentioned.

And they had a solution for small businesses to use. who, were interested in buying phone systems, who were interested in buying their broadband, so anything from internet and telephony. and the reason I keep saying telephony is that they, built this little microsite for these, for the, for these small businesses where they could self-serve, where they could buy these products themselves.

But they described the products. Much like the client you were talking about earlier, they described the products in such technical terms that no small business was ever going to buy these products and when we sat people down and Showed them the site They didn’t even understand what the word telephony meant because it’s not a word that people they’d say What’s this thing about telephony?

Because it’s only a word that’s used in the industry. Nobody says that word in real life or in business so by sitting there with people and showing them the site They could start to understand that they needed to actually rethink the entire way that they described this product.

Because they could see, and indeed the business model, because small businesses were so overwhelmed by the information they saw, they would never have the confidence to self serve and buy products. And by these systems without having some kind of support, somebody I could phone and chat to. So it really informed that whole strategy around the channels that they went through, the support that was needed, how they talked about it in messaging and, ultimately what this microsite was going to look like.

But the original intention was just how do we tweak this microsite. Yeah, that’s a great example. It’s prompted a question in my mind as to whether you actually involve the client in those conversations, even if they’re just sitting in the same room so they can hear the feedback from the users themselves.

I’m always happy to involve the client, but at the end, So what we don’t, what we don’t want if a client’s sitting in the room is for them to start chipping in. Telling them they’re wrong. Absolutely, and that is what happens. They’ll start explaining why they, why the respondents have misunderstood the product, which isn’t what we need because they won’t be there to hold their hand.

But I think when you get to the end of, a focus group or an interview. I would always want to involve the client because I might have explained something wrong. I might have missed something really important. I’m, you’re trying to think of the questions to ask as well as listening, having another set of ears is always useful.

So I’d always involve the client. And I think it’s really important then at the end of an interview, To get the client’s feedback because that gives you something to feed into future interviews because research really should be an iterative Thing especially qualitative research. You don’t want to wait till you’ve gathered all your data And then start looking at it at the end and go we really should have asked about this you want to start thinking about what you’re learning and even if the client’s not present going back after a few interviews and saying this is what we’re hearing.

Is this sparking any more thoughts or any more questions we should be feeding in? Do you want to actually tweak the materials even, do you, want to take this word out if it’s really jarring with people, we’ve heard five people say it, honestly, it’s gonna, it needs to come out.

it gives them an opportunity to do that. Yeah. Great. No, I love that example. Thank you very much. before I let you go, Angela, I am asking everybody for a book recommendation. And we spoke beforehand and you said you’re not a massive reader, but you’ve got something that you’d recommend as some content that you love to consume anyway.

Yeah, I, buy very few marketing books and I read even fewer of them. They just sit on my shelf. I’m, really interested in, how people understand numbers. and I have worked with enough marketing people to know that some marketing people are really good at numbers, some are great at the creative stuff, and are really, flawed by numbers.

There is, my, my son would describe it as that podcast you listen to in the car, I would describe it as Radio 4. There is a program called More or Less. which examines the numbers that have been in the media that week. And that could be the numbers that the politicians are talking about, or it could be the numbers in the news.

And by the time the numbers hit the headlines, they’ve of, they’ve often got quite mangled, they can be misrepresented. And this program examines that. Interestingly, quite recently, they have re released, a few episodes that they did where they were interviewing. Daniel Kahneman, who died recently.

if I was going to recommend a marketing book, that would be the book. Thinking fast and slow is the only marketing book I’ve probably got to the end of. And it did actually make me think I’d like to reread it because I, I think he’s contributed so much towards behavioral economics, but he also is very good at understanding how people interpret numbers.

that brings me back to my, more or less recommendation. The Thinking Fast and Slow book is an excellent read, and it’s definitely one that I need to reread, cause it’s packed full of data, and examples that none of them spring to mind at the moment, but I know that it’s all in there and I found it absolutely a fascinating read.

Angela, so much for that. It’s been a wonderful interview. You’ve been a brilliant guest. How can people connect with you afterwards? Thanks. they can get me at, Angela@redfoxres.com or they can just Google Angela Richmond and I’m sure they’ll find me on LinkedIn. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Angela.

Great to see you. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Enjoyed it. Bye bye.