Rationale for selecting research locations?
Thursday January 10, 2013 by Doug Cooke
I'm looking for a guide to making decisions about how to select research locations/regions. Other tha general rules of thumb (Bay Area is tech friendly, South East is conservative) are their a good set of guidelines in order to rationalize where research should take place?
Thanks
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Monday January 21, 2013 by Elizabeth Lamberts
This is a reply to: Rationale for selecting research locations?
Good question, Doug.
Although we don't have an official checklist, there are a few questions we ask ourselves, and more importantly, our clients, when picking locations.
You've mentioned one of the first things to consider - the reputations of different regions (conservative vs. tech-friendly.)
We often ask our clients to help identify the most important characteristics to include - or try to minimize - and use those to choose regions. For example, for a hair conditioner product, is it important to exclude or include highly humid areas (Texas, Georgia) or very dry climates (Denver)?
We also ask our clients to reveiw their sales numbers - do we want to incldue or exclude their most successful or challenging regions, in terms of sales?
And finally, we often try to avoid doing research in major competitors' "backyard".
I suggest outlining the most important recruiting criteria, and working together with the client to identify the best markets to include (or exclude)!
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