The results can be shocking.  INSEAD professor Erin Anderson says that they particularly surprise corporate management.  ‘Sitting in their ivory towers, corporate managers know what is supposed to be going on, but they almost never know what is really happening. Yet whatever happens in channels happens in the field. You have to know what is going on out there to be at all effective. That is why research is so vital.’

But, all too often, research results are read, put away and never acted on.

Here we look at the kind of research that suppliers commission. What works and what doesn’t?  And how can you avoid commissioning stuff for the bookshelf? 

The amount of research that is carried out on channels varies massively.  On the one hand, companies such as Norwich Union, the UK’s largest insurer, are constantly commissioning qualitative and quantitative studies.  It uses them for everything from planning new products to working out how to boost loyalty and market share (see side panel).

On the other hand, pharmaceutical company Pharmacia relies on occasional, unsophisticated surveys carried out by its own staff.  Such surveys typically focus on customer-service levels. They are also seen as a way of communicating what Pharmacia itself is doing.  Others, such as server vendor SGI, carry out major channel audits every few years.
 
Jinty Weldon, director at HI Europe, which specialises in researching channel partners’ opinions, says:  ‘Many suppliers do nothing at all. In the IT industry, for instance, the top ten suppliers commission most of the work . These tend to be the companies that employ in-house market-research specialists, whose job is to commission these studies.’

Weldon and Radan Payget, head of customer insight at insurer Norwich Union, both maintain that in practice there is little difference between researching the views and opinions of end-customers and those of intermediaries. The same techniques apply.  Indeed, Payget says:  ‘We treat intermediaries as our most important customer set. They are independent from us, and they have product choice, so, in that sense, yes, they are customers.’