Would you drive your car with a blacked out windscreen and the only way of steering ahead would by by looking in your rear view mirror? Not likely! But this is precisely what happens with most research tracking studies, as we discovered by speaking with several of our clients, including marketing directors of some of Uk's leading retaail, hospitality and technology brands.

We asked them specifically about the challenges they face using information from research tracking studies and here are the top complaints:

1. Backward looking – traditional research trackers, whether customer satisfaction, brand or advertising trackers are great at telling you what happened, but they have little or no predictive power; no way of telling you where you are heading. It’s the best example of driving using your rear view mirror only; it’s rich information but of limited business-planning value.

2. Lack of causality – businesses love targets and KPIs. And trackers deliver these aplenty. How many people are satisfied or dissatisfied with your product or service? How many recognise your brand? How many say they will buy your products? And so on. But, it is often impossible to show a causal relationship between a given KPI and activities done by the business. We’ve seen trackers where moves in the headline KPI cannot not be explained by any measure on the tracker. Consequently the businesses had flat measures with absolutely no clue as to do to change them.

3. Inconsistent metrics – many trackers have grown piecemeal over time, adding new products, services and measures as they go along. Apart from making these surveys really tedious for respondents to complete, it also means that individual elements  are measured using different attributes and often using different scales - defying all attempts to allow for comparisons and contrasts across the company’s portfolio of products, brands or services.

4. Too much data and too little insight – We all recognise hundreds of charts and tables, piling up quarter after quarter, simply because there is so much information that any insights are too hard to find to be worth the time spent searching through the mountains of data.

5. Too accurate – In the quest for ever greater levels of statistical accuracy trackers abound with data to umpteen degrees of significance, but no one really questions the purpose of this accuracy nor gives thought to the vast sample sizes needed to collect this amount of data. Often a much smaller sample will be more than enough to serve as the basis for a decision; few business decisions are made to this level of exactness.

6. No flexibility – most trackers are highly complex with multiple routes through the questionnaire depending on customer type and touch-point. It means that even small changes become difficult and often lead to errors. Making any changes is thus expensive and very time consuming; reasons why many trackers are not adapted to the changing needs of the business.

7. Lacking value – the nature of most trackers means that they are horrendously expensive. The long questionnaires, large sample sizes and often inappropriate data collection methods mean that costs rapidly mount up. Great for the research agency but poor use of resources which could be used more effectively elsewhere. Do you really want to spend so much money when there are much more effective, efficient and insightful ways of collecting customer views and feedback?

So why do companies continue to use tracking studies?  

Most often it’s down to inertia.  They do tracking because they've always done it.  Sometimes it is necessary to show senior management some form of quantitative evidence that marketing is working; another number for the spreadsheet or dashboard. Creative agencies like it because they can ‘prove’ the effectiveness of their campaign by pointing to a spike in data. And managers like it because flat lines mean they probably don’t have to do anything different and can carry on as normal.

We believe it’s time to change. Brands need more effective ways of collecting customer information and smarter ways of understanding what is being said, why it’s being said and what it means for the business. That doesn’t mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and scrap tracking studies altogether. Trackers contain many useful metrics including brand awareness, product consideration and customer satisfaction.

What’s needed is a radically different approach, based on a much more holistic view of the customer and using methods that collect feedback from places visited by, and convenient for, the customer rather than from a questionnaire that intrudes into their life. That’s why online customer communities are ideal for this. Listening to conversations will give your business and instant pulse of how well you are doing. If you need to ask detailed or complex questions you can, because community members are people who are interested in taking part, engaged and who can express considered and thought-through opinions. Once you have your key insights, you can quantitatively validate them using more traditional surveys to ensure they are representative of the wider market. 

The benefits of the community-led approach are many. First, it means that you have immediate access to current information which can be actioned instantly. Second, the depth of information is much greater and can be directly related to your business activities. Third, it means that you can greatly simplify your tracking surveys to include just the core KPIs because of what you already know. Fourth, it means that you can reduce sample sizes because you are only validating insights, not starting from scratch. Fifth, it means that you can reinvest tracker costs in other more productive research. And finally, community members take part over a much longer period of time so you can observe how their attitudes, perceptions, motivations and behaviours change longitudinally in response to your actions.