by Lyle Durbin, CEO
ReconMR has conducted thousands of research studies over the past 30 years. They all take up a small piece of our memories, but a few are just more interesting and stand out more than others. For many years, starting in the late 90’s, ReconMR conducted a large annual tracking study for a major hardware store on the west coast.
The tracking data, demonstrating the rise of Home Depot and Lowes to dominate the DIY marketplace, was fascinating to report. Unfortunately, our client was not Home Depot or Lowes, so the reception wasn’t the greatest, but we were able to clearly demonstrate shifts in the marketplace and provide our client with actionable data.
The sampling was very challenging. We were specifically interviewing DIY consumers in the client’s trade area. This required pulling RDD telephone samples around dozens of stores, with very tight geographical criteria to ensure we were reaching just the right respondents. While a much simpler task today, this was more challenging 30 years ago, requiring careful precision and verification to ensure a proper, representative, and accurate sampling.
The surveying itself was also quite challenging. We were calling major markets in California screening for hardware shoppers. While our staff enjoyed staying late to interview a west coast market, cooperation rates and incidence rates made this one of the most difficult and low production studies we had fielded (and we were working on a 35-minute syndicated media study at the time). To motivate our interviewers, we had to pull out all the stops. A quick trip to the local hardware store (staying on theme) yielded the necessary tools for one of our more creative, yet elegantly simple, incentive programs. After each completed survey, interviewers received one swing of the hammer in a race to see who could complete the driving of a nail into a board first.
We managed to turn a difficult, struggling project into a great success story that provided invaluable tracking data across a ten-year span. This required tapping into our staff’s expertise, creativity, and problem solving to develop unique solutions to overcome steep challenges.
Want to learn more about our approach and how we can help you create a successful research campaign? Connect with us here: https://reconmr.com/contact/.