It enables you to benchmark trends and validate facts, and gives statistical validity. It confirms that you are on track.  Done regularly, it can track trends over time.’

Consulting research, on the other hand, is qualitative and probing. It should be carried out by experts who know the industry. It is good for probing the underlying issues, for proving a hypothesis and for identifying the specific things a company needs to do to deploy a new strategy successfully.

Dent says that people often expect too much from market research.  ‘They expect it to throw up the answers, and it simply is incapable of doing that.’

Research then can be tiered.

At one level, says Weldon, market research can be focused on how well a supplier is meeting a specific need.  ‘We can contact a number of callers to a technical support department and ask them how well their calls were dealt with.’

This very simple research is useful in establishing whether a supplier is carrying out a specific function well. Increasingly, it is being conducted over the Web and by e-mail. Richard Sanders at Burlington Consultants says that this can generate response rates of up to 20% on partner websites.

“Generally, research is bought badly and used badly.”

At a slightly higher level, we have the channel audit. Typically conducted over the phone using a preset questionnaire, it can measure issues such as intermediaries’ general satisfaction levels. Anderson says such surveys can also be done on the Web, but adds:  ‘It has clear-cut limits, but can be useful for taking the temperature once a year.’

Finding out what the channel really thinks of you is an exercise that can take many forms.  Xerox, for instance, came out with a whole series of measurements which enabled it to classify its channel partners into one of half a dozen categories, ranging from honeymooners who loved the company and its products through to deserters (see Measuring how much they trust you, page 9, Routes to Market, Winter 2003).

A lot of research is concerned with understanding views on a specific issue or topic – perhaps how far the channel perceives a supplier as competing with them, for instance. Here Anderson says that telephone research, carried out by skilled practitioners who know how to dig, can work well.  ‘You need people who can attack an issue in a multi-layered way.’

Weldon at HI says there is a growing market for in-depth, face-to-face research with senior managers in large intermediaries.  ‘What you get from this is some very direct, actionable planning on an account-by-account basis.’