Get Quality Research Faster and Cheaper with Productized Services

Traditionally, the marketing research industry developed around delivering customized services and there is still a place for this. However, the fact of the matter is that most marketing research projects include a large portion of time and effort put into processes that we can streamline across typical projects. Customer satisfaction, concept, and message testing, brand tracking, value proposition research, ad testing, logo, and name testing – all of these project types and more lend themselves to productization. Despite client demand for faster and less expensive research, productized services have not been widely available in marketing research until recently.

At Zeitgeist Research, we approach market research thoughtfully and find ways to make market research better for our clients. One of those ways is productized market research services.

What are Productized Services?

Think about the differences between a product and a service. Products are tangible– they are physical, you can touch, see, feel, and smell them. Services, on the other hand, are intangible. Part of the challenge of marketing services is creating tangible elements that connect the consumer to the service brand. Products tend to fill a need or want for the customer while marketing services is more often about building relationships and trust. A productized service attempts to take the best from both products and services to craft a better solution for the customer.

" A productized service offers a templated solution with a compelling value proposition, packaged at a set price and scope of work. "

To productize a marketing research service, marketing research tasks that can be standardized will be automated as much as possible. This helps produce results faster and frees up researchers to focus on the parts of the process that cannot (and perhaps should not) be standardized. Productized marketing research services fit in the sweet spot between DIY and customized projects.

Here’s how it works:

• Our Basic level surveys are the most highly productized, and the lowest priced. These Basic surveys were designed for start-ups and small to medium companies with shoe-string budgets looking for simple and basic foundational data. But there are plenty of large companies that can use the Basic level surveys as well.

• Our mid-priced Accelerated surveys offers the ability to test more options (e.g., concepts, names, logos) and also provides additional metrics.

• Finally, our Bespoke Solutions is our highest priced offering, and is typically not productized at all. This approach yields deeper insights for challenging marketing decisions.

Additionally, some productized services include both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The benefit of productization for you is to simplify your decision-making. Without productization, a tremendous amount of time is spent up-front, in framing the project, finding out what should and should not be part of it, then finding out what can be done with the budget available, and then trimming the project to make it work with the budget. This is especially true for purchasers who need marketing research but are not experts in the process. At the end of the day, all this up-front time and effort must be accounted for in the overall project costs. Productization immediately frames the client’s choices and enables faster decision-making, laying the foundation for faster results and lower costs.

What’s In It For You?

Zeitgeist Research’s productized services deliver the insights you need to solve your critical business problems. In addition to that, here are more of the benefits you receive:

• Transparent Pricing. You know exactly what you’re going to pay and exactly what you’re going to get. If you need a little more, additional analysis, for example, we can do that and again, give you a firm price. So, no expensive surprises.

• Lower costs. Because we standardize and automate as many of the research processes as possible, you don’t pay for that work. So, your overall costs are lower, and you spend your money on what you value the most: insights that drive your business’s success. Or on completing more research projects.

• Faster Turn-around Times. Without a doubt, standardized and automated services save time. And that helps you get your projects done faster, in some instances within a week. All without sacrificing quality.

• Best Practices Ensured. When we standardize and automate our practices, we implement them with strict adherence to industry best practices. Further, we keep up with the “research on research” to keep our best practices up to date as the industry changes. In this way, we make sure we are delivering to the highest possible criteria. We don’t get stuck in outmoded methodologies.

• Experienced Researchers. Productized services projects are conducted by Zeitgeist Research’s team of senior researchers (each with 10 or more years of experience). Therefore, you still benefit from their extensive business experience and strategic expertise.

• Customization available. Productized service means that part of the research process is standardized. That still leaves room for some customization of your project to make sure the questions and the deliverable meet your specific needs. For example, if you want a TURF analysis, we can do that. If you don’t need it, you don’t pay for it.

Not all research projects can be standardized. Some projects must be custom, such as segmentation and decision journeys. Using productized services where applicable means you can save money in your budget for those other, more complex projects that must be customized.

Zeitgeist Research’s productized services deliver strong research insights that are a great value and to deliver them faster. Remember that old saying, “Marketing research can be fast, cheap, or good. Pick two.”? With our productized services, you can get all three.