New Product Promises To Level The Playing Field

Businesses without the in-house expertise to write and design unbiased questionnaires could always turn to third-party research firms – if they had $20,000 or more to pay.

“In today’s economy, businesses cannot succeed if they can’t make data-driven decisions. Lack of research is one of the top five reasons products fail,” says market research industry executive Corrine Sandler, citing a Harvard Business Review report.  

To help businesses make data-driven decisions, Sandler developed an online research platform called ValidateIt (www.validateit.com), which is powered by Google Consumer Surveys and provides methodology at 90 percent less the cost than traditional research.

Sandler says that Google has been a leader in making information widely accessible to the masses. It’s now time to make insights available to the masses.

She discusses how a platform like ValidateIt can change business intelligence.

•  Can today’s David-in-business compete with a Fortune-500 Goliath? With the recent opportunity to gain current, reliable data for business decisions at an affordable price, entrepreneurs no longer must rely on theory. In the spirit of  Google’s original mission statement, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” the price for world-class data doesn’t have to start at $20,000.

•  Is there any merit to the old way of gaining primary data for market research? The “old way” refers to privileged data available to only the top percentile of businesses. Beginning entrepreneurs and small businesses, which constitute the majority of businesses, often ended up relying on unreliable methods such as intuition and gut feelings to make decisions. That lack of research is why 85 percent of products fail, according to a Forbes online report, Sandler says.

“With ValidateIt, decision makers receive 250 respondents, and reports get to those decision makers within 24 hours,”  to facilitate immediate, accurate and actionable decision making.

•  How does the platform help in product development? Your answers are only as good as the questions asked. That can be a big challenge for a small business without research experience. ValidateIt offers scientifically designed questionnaires. Among those is IdeaRank, which tells whether your ideas are strong enough to withstand the competition and break through. The product development series of models can offer small businesses the optimal price for a product, the realistic market demand for a new concept or product and even evaluate the choice of name or tag line.

“As we’ve experienced in recent decades, technology has leveled the playing field in a number of industries,” Sandler says. “Now, we’re at a tipping point for doing the same in market research.”

Corrine Sandler is CEO of Fresh Intelligence, speaker and Advantage best-selling author of “Wake Up or Die.” She’s the developer of ValidateIt. Her mission is to make intelligence accessible to the world.