Before I start this post, I must confess I’m a research geek. I’m the one who scours the footnotes for references and bibliographies when giving students feedback on assignments. But there’s a reason... what’s the point of making bold statements about your company’s current situation and strategic direction when it’s based on blasé statements in your audit analysis that are sourced to, well, nothing. Did the insight come from a government report, a market study, statistically valid research studies or did they just make it up?! It horrifies me that marketers may be producing audits in the workplace with no referencing at all.
So why should you have a list of all the references used within your audit? It’s important to know who produced the data in the first place – was their viewpoint biased in some way? How old is the data and is it still relevant? What was the methodology behind the research and the sample size – how confident can we be that it represented our target market?
Producing a well-crafted audit with clearly referenced research sources against each model means we can make bold statements about strategic direction with confidence... and you’ll make one research geek very happy.
This post is written by our guest blogger, Cheryl Greyson.
Marketing Consultant & Lecturer
Greyson Marketing