Coherent and precise briefings are, without a question, the best way to ensure that your market research supplier understands your project completely.

The number of people working on a qualitative market research project is usually very high. If you are the end client, you will have your marketing and development team involved, while your supplier agency will have a project manager, and teams covering costing, recruitment, research and the analysis. If your agency is the middleman, it means that there will be even more people involved in the research process. Therefore, having correct and thorough briefings with everyone involved will lower the chances of misunderstandings and make your research project less complicated.

Briefing Your Market Research Partner

We would advise you to share the project materials with the partnering project manager beforehand. As a result, the project manager will have time to get acquainted with the materials and you will be able to answer any questions they might have during the briefing.

The same goes for project managers – prior to the internal team briefings, they should share relevant materials with the team working on the study.

For project managers, briefings are a great opportunity to get better understanding of what it is that you want, and what the best way to approach your objective is. If you have any doubts regarding the study you are conducting, the project manager will be able to help you choose the most suitable option. Even if you do not have any doubts, the project manager can give you insights and suggest changes where they see fit.

During the briefing, your supplying agency will be able to inform you of any challenges they might foresee coming during fieldwork.

Your task is to be as clear and concise as possible during the briefing sessions. Make sure that you have given all the details to the supplying agency, that you established a project timeline. In addition, ensure that the supplier clearly understood what is asked of them.

The Debriefing Session is as Important as The Briefing Session

Debriefings are as beneficial to you as they are to your partners. Over the course of the study, researchers get feedback about the study itself from the participating respondents. Gaining insights about the study concept can help you develop a different system for your future projects. Thanks to these insights, your future projects might include more visual aids, or you could start paying more attention to the subject that was not covered initially.

Furthermore, any insights and feedback you wish to give to your market research partner should be shared during the debriefing session. Are you satisfied with how the challenges were handled? Do you think there was something your supplier should have done better? Debriefing is a time to say all that.

Constructive criticism will be helpful to your supplier since their team can go through your notes and find ways to improve.

On the other hand, everyone enjoys praise and your supplying agency will be happy to hear that they did a good job.

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