Is Market Research Worth Doing If It Confirms What You Already Knew?

March 15th, 2013
Rich Raquet | Chairman, TRC
Hero Image: Is Market Research Worth Doing If It Confirms What You Already Knew?

I read an article about the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. This is the so called “God Particle” which explains why matter has mass. While the science generally is beyond me, I was intrigued by something one of the physicists said:

Scientists always want to be wrong in their theories. They always want to be surprised.

He went on to explain that surprise is what leads to new discoveries whereas simply confirming a theory does not. I can certainly understand the sentiment, but it is not unusual for Market Research to confirm what a client already guessed at. Should the client be disappointed in such results?

I think not for several reasons.

First, certainty allows for bolder action. Sure there are examples of confident business people going all out with their gut and succeeding spectacularly, but I suspect there are far more examples of people failing to take bold action due to lingering uncertainty. I also suspect that far too often overconfident entrepreneurs make rash decisions that lead to failure.

Second, while we might confirm the big question (for example, in product development pricing research we might confirm the price that will drive success), we always gather other data that help us understand the issue in a more nuanced way. For example, we might find that the expected price point is driven by a different feature than we thought (in research speak, that one feature in the discrete choice conjoint had a much higher utility score than the one we thought was most critical).

Third, the cost of this confirmation is tiny compared to the potential cost of being wrong. I should point out that confirming Higgs Boson cost over $10 Billion so by that standard market research is a bargain.

So, validating your hypothesis might not be as exciting as finding out something new, but it is well worth doing.