Cross Tabs and other marketing research techniques

Business is tough. And a company needs everything it can get in order to get a leg up on the competition. As a result, businesses are relying more and more on market research to better determine the direction their company will go in. The task of market research analysis, then, is to provide these companies with relevant, accurate, reliable, valid, and current information, often in the form of graphs, charts, or tables. Thankfully there is a wide variety of analysis techniques and formats that can be used to glean this information. Below is a list of a few market research techniques that help analysts compile information.

‍Frequency Distribution tells you how many people chose a particular response to any single question.Survey Cross-Tab Analysis allows you to see how responses to one question work in conjunction and/or comparison to another. For example, you might want to know what percentage of purchasers of your product also purchased a competing product. This is a powerful method giving a maximum amount of flexibility to the analyst.

‍Average by Category lets you compare the average value response for different, specifically defined groups. For example, you could compare the average age for men and women, or for full time employees and part time employees.

‍Crosstab Means combines the two methods above creating a more complex measurement. For example, you could see how overall satisfaction is rated by men who own a Toyota.

‍Segmentation lets you create groups of customers who share similar traits or behaviors. This allows marketers to zero in on specific customer groups and market directly to them.

‍Gap Analysis allows a business to see how large a gap there is between what it is currently offering and what its customers want. For example, a survey might ask customers of an auto repair chain to rate four different things: service, quality, value, and reliability. Survey results show that “service” is consistently rated lower than the other factors, so this is the area that offers the greatest opportunity for improvement.

From simple frequency distributions to the more complex gap analysis to the extraordinarily powerful cross tabulation, these methods allow analysts to glean important information about their products and customers that can help them guide the company to create new and better products and serve their customers’ needs better.