Editor's note: Gwyn Gibbs is senior project director of Integrated Marketing Associates LLC, a Bryn Mawr, Pa., research company. She can be reached at 610-527-5500 or at ggibbs@imalink.com. This article appeared in the July 11, 2011, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

Because of today's busy research pipelines and already-crowded shelves, research departments are challenged to generate and strengthen their products at a breakneck pace.  In addition, limited budgets and collapsed timelines are squeezing them tighter than ever before. Even for the seasoned market research veterans who know all too well how important market research is, creating and testing hypotheses becomes a sprint to uncover insights and forge ahead.

Being quicker and more cost-effective is often the only way that any research can get the go-ahead. As a result, a common low-cost and fast solution is conducting research locally or even in-house. As expected, the ability to recruit nearby or captive participants at a low cost with minimal incentives has become enticing. Recruits can be secured in little time and cancellation rates are minimal. Understandably, conducting research in a client company's home city or even at the corporate location means less time out of the office and no travel expenses for the market research folks. And with materials being changed on the spot, conducting research locally provides seamless updates and changes to stimuli. With all that said, why wouldn't you conduct research in your own backyard?

Bias

The answer is simple: bias. Respondents recruited from the area near a client company's corporate location likely have a geographic bias. Often it is a positive company bias but it may also be negative. Nonetheless, it is a bias. Alternately, securing participants from within the company, despite asking them to forget that they are in their employer's conference room, is riddled with bias - bias that the company's products are great, bias that they are being observed by their employer, bias that their employer may see their responses in a negative light and retaliate, bias from a disgruntled respondent that the company's products are not useful. The list goes on and on.

Good market research cannot exist where such bias thrives. Market research in its true nature is called upon to be as objective as possible, masking participant names, blinding stimuli, accessing a geographic cross-section and eliciting responses from a diverse set of respondents. Limiting the geography of the research will limit the insights.

A broader research strategy

All is not lost with backyard research, as it can provide quick and cost-effective information for some preliminary hypotheses in order to help a team fine-tune the stimuli. But backyard research must be followed up by a broader research strategy to be of any meaningful value in guiding strategic next steps for a brand. So go ahead, throw a backyard barbeque but be prepared to conduct standard research for your domestic and global markets.