Better at data than our suppliers?

A bold title for a blog quite possibly, but stay with me and I shall explain further. Sample Answers works with leading suppliers of consumer and business information, but with the expressed purpose of adding value to market research stakeholders, e.g. CATI centres, researchers and users of market research and the like. We are fortunate enough to hold in-house, records of 17 million UK households, 2 million UK businesses and 88 million businesses worldwide.

This brings benefits in a few ways. Firstly, rather than simply passing over enquiries to our suppliers, effectively sitting in the middle and not really adding to the process, we are able to run counts and process orders ourselves, keeping control over sampling and delivery. Further to this, we are also able to adjust pricing to suit the market research business far better. To that end, we offer much reduced minimum spend requirements and are more responsive generally when it comes to counts.

We could also add that we have (well) over 100 combined years of market research at our company, covering many disciplines: qual & quant fieldwork, statistical analysis & sampling theory and more. But these are quite soft as benefits go and one would expect much if not all of the above from a supplier who has been in business for 25 years.

Where else can we be better than our suppliers?

We can on occasion make the difference between a project being commissioned or not. Consider the following example where our experience bespoke tools made a real difference. A regular client of ours – a German market research agency – was pitching for an international project, requiring interviews in a niche, industry sector. Basing their industry classification on “WorldBase” and primarily USSIC87, which can have category gaps or miscoded/misclassified businesses, sometimes a project fails to get off the ground unnecessarily.

With initial counts on SIC directly from D&B, the selection was too generic and volumes insufficient for a viable project. But via combination of a bespoke de-duplication tool combined with our expertise & creativity in using extensive multi-language text search in other available variables, we located precisely the right kind of audience for the job.

Although a very niche sample, the volumes that we provided counts for & delivered, meant that an otherwise unfeasible project became viable. Not only was the research buyer given insight into a group that would have been excluded from the research, our client was also able to undertake & invoice a previously undeliverable job.

If you would like us to provide you with some counts, please contact us by clicking here.