Market research is as accurate as a coin flip (at best!)

Market research is important in order to know what people want, desire or believe needing.
Market research can be done in many ways like: questionnaires, surveys with multiple choice answers.

The famous 80/20 rule fails for Market Research:
- Your survey or poll covers 80% of your market:
   Covering all segments of your market is almost impossible?
   Thus addressing 80% of your market is already an achievement.
   People who define the questions and multiple choice answers can be biased.

- Your customers express 80% of their thinking in the survey:
   Your questions are wrongly interpreted thus wrong answer.
   Your multiple choice answers aren’t matching completely with the idea of the customer.

- Your conclusions are converted into actions for 80%.
   Your Product Manager needs to interpret the received answers and data: error is possible.
   Your Product Manager can be biased towards a certain solution.

A coin flip has an accuracy of 50%
The total conclusion is only:
80% times 80% times 80% = 51% correct of what your market wants!

This means your new product will only cover 51% of the market needs.
Your new product will only respond to 51% of the market requirements.
The result makes you wonder why you have done the survey or poll in the first place.
Any lucky draw has a 50% chance too.

If you want to do better than a coin flip, you need to obtain higher values.
That seems impossible, even how much care you take as we deal with:
- People defining the questions
- People answering the questions
- People interpreting the answers and making the conclusions

Still the percentages used in the example are already on the high side.
Suppose:
75% times 75% times 75% = 42%
70% times 70% times 70% = 34%
Gambling has an even better outcome.

People with market experience and knowledge will score better – without doubt.

How good was your last product defined by market research?

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