Market researchers have many options available to them as they explore their target customers and try to understand how they think. Each of these methods involves tradeoffs, so none of them is necessarily better than any of the others. Forums can be a powerful tool for marketing researchers, particularly entrepreneurs who have limited resources. Since most assemblys allow members to view and post for free, they serve as one of the best ways for entrepreneurs to conduct marketing research. In addition to being low cost, assemblys have few other advantages. Unlike most surveys, respondents can give careful descriptions regarding how they feel about a particular product, service or issue. Forum respondents are more patient involved in assembly discussions than in market surveys because they typically are involved on their own volition.
Since they are not being pressured into responding and don't have to give up a single, sizable chunk of their time as they would in a survey, they are willing to reply to more than one rib discussion or post more than once to a thread. Reading all of the posts that a user places on a assembly can give marketing researchers a more thorough understanding of their preferences and opinions. Forum respondents are also often more likely to be honest if they feel that they can respond with anonymity. The biggest challenge that marketing researchers face is not in acquiring data, but rather analyzing it. When people post in assemblys it is typically difficult to authenticate what they are locution or why they are locution it.
Forum users could post too positive information because they have a unconditional interest in promoting a specific type of service or product or post negative feedback because of a grudge they hold. Another problem is that it is difficult to develop a true and accurate assessment of the demographic information of the posters, which is plainly a very important element of any marketing research study. Fortunately, there are ways that marketing researchers can address these shortcomings. With experience, researchers can learn to identify when assembly users seem to be straightforward and when they seem to have ulterior motives for what they are locution. Of course, given the anonymous nature of the Internet, it is ne'er possible to determine sure whether or not they are being whole honest. Many assemblys give users the chance to create visibility pages describing themselves.
Market researchers should try to center on exploitation these assemblys, because they can read these visibility pages to learn more about the assembly users. If such information is not displayed on a visibility page, researchers can scan the posts they have made in the entire assembly to see what demographic information they have said about themselves. Forums can be a tremendous medium for marketing research but has been mostly unperceived by researchers because they feel that it is difficult to authenticate the information being posted. However, there are few approaches that they can use to authenticate this information to open up a new channel for conducting marketing research. On the other hand, social media sites can still be better for niche research because demographic information is more promptly available.
