Respondents are protected, in writing
Every instrument here depends on somebody saying a thing they would not say in a meeting. That only happens under conditions, and the conditions are set before anybody is contacted rather than negotiated afterward.
Responses are anonymized by role. A report is not issued for any group below 3 respondents, and the shortfall is reported rather than filled in with thin data. Verbatim quotes are cleared individually before they are attributed. The client never learns who said what, and every respondent is told all of this at recruitment.
For an assessment of a client's own employees, the terms are stricter. Individual results are never attributed back to the employer, the rollup is the deliverable rather than a ranked list of names, and the non-punitive frame is agreed in writing before fielding.
Conflicts
We do not score both sides of the same relationship. Measuring a distributor on behalf of a manufacturer while also measuring that manufacturer on behalf of the distributor is a conflict that no disclosure statement repairs, so it is declined rather than managed.
Every client is told, before a contract is signed, where the principal works and what else he does. That has never cost an engagement worth having.
Working with marketing firms
A good deal of this work arrives through agencies who have industrial clients and no way to run this kind of research internally. That arrangement works, under 3 terms.
We keep the right to publish de-identified aggregate findings. Without that there is no benchmark, and a benchmark is the only thing that makes the second year of any of these instruments more useful than the first.
A Gunslinger day is referred rather than resold, and the charter is held directly with the end client. The day works because of conditions that an intermediary with a relationship at stake will soften, and softening them produces an expensive lunch.
Pricing is the same whether an agency or a manufacturer is signing.
What we do not sell
This list exists because the alternative is spending a first call explaining it.
- Website design and build
- Search or content retainers
- Demand generation and paid media
- Social media management
- Brand awareness campaigns
- Logo and identity work
- Marketing automation implementation
- Trade show booth design
- Annual insights subscriptions
- Satisfaction score dashboards
- Advisory boards run as dinners
- Any engagement with no end date
Several of those are good work and there are firms that do them well. None of them are this, and a research practice that also sells the remedy has an interest in what the research finds.
What a study will not be
It will not be a live dashboard. It will not be a 200 page document. It will not arrive after the decision it was meant to inform, and if the timing cannot be met the engagement is turned down rather than delivered late.