OUR
research
METHODS
Key Research specialises in bespoke research solutions designed to deliver meaningful insights for clients who want to make strategic decisions focused on adding value to their business.
No matter the issue you’re grappling with, our team will work with you to clarify the problem and tailor a research solution to fit any scale, timetable, or budget.
We use best-practice market research methods to gather qualitative and quantitative data within our range of proprietary industry-leading models to meet any of your research needs. Our evidence-based research provides insights our clients can trust to get results.
CX AND UX RESEARCH
CX (customer experience) and UX (user experience) research and analysis are vital for businesses interested in achieving successful outcomes and positive long-term relationships with clients.
Both areas involve distinct processes but can work together to produce an overview of the end-to-end customer journey. For example, evaluating customer experience may include measuring how clients perceive their relationships with a brand or organisation over time, and tracking user experience may entail gathering data on customers’ thoughts, feelings and impressions during one or more business interactions.
Key Research has developed a client portal with a range of measurement tools for evaluating both the transactional and holistic aspects of customer interactions. Our objective is to provide businesses with crucial insights into customer perceptions of their brand and services, enabling the growth of mutually beneficial relationships between companies and clients, leading to sustainable business development.
COMMUNITY RESEARCH
Our Community Perceptions Index (CPI), an innovative and holistic methodology, has been developed explicitly for understanding the influence of policies or social issues within a community.
We use a partnership approach to engage community members, organisational representatives, and researchers to measure the community’s perceptions of progress towards public outcomes and help organisations prioritise their social goals.
Our team can apply the highly adaptable CPI model to a diverse range of situations, including assessing levels of service and environmental issues.
BRAND MONITORING
Our proprietary MOSTER and METRIQUITY research models offer a choice of customer satisfaction tracking programmes for the strategic analysis of your brand’s growth, reputation, and market position.
Our research team members work with you to identify the most critical features of your customer relationships and staff KPIs (key performance indicators) before recommending the best match of methodology for gaining insights into your overall brand performance.
MOSTER (Monitoring Satisfaction to Ensure Retention) analyses customers’ current perceptions and the level of change required to impact overall satisfaction.
METRIQUITY measures the inherent value stored in your brand to generate action points to secure market advantage and grow your business.
ADVERTISING EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH
The effectiveness of advertising is measured by how well marketing strategies achieve the intended business outcomes.
Our team works with your marketing strategy’s specific communication objectives to pre-test marketing concepts and provide probabilities of expected campaign performance.
Post-campaign, our metric measures offer valuable insights into audience engagement and reach levels and identify opportunities and directions for continuous advertising effectiveness.
Clients can contribute one or more research questions for surveys distributed regionally in the Western Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay, or nationally, throughout New Zealand.
Clients may choose to share the costs with other organisations or pay per question.
INSIGHT OMNIBUS SURVEY
You can contribute a research question (or questions)to our bi-monthly syndicated omnibus surveys in the Western Bay of Plenty, Hawke’s Bay region and/or the general population of New Zealand.
You can access valuable market information cost-effectively by sharing the costs with other organisations, as you just pay per question.
EMPLOYEE RESEARCH
In today’s workplaces, employee satisfaction and engagement are essential factors in ensuring higher performance and revenues for all organisations. Best practice human resources management recognises the close links between employees’ experience, a positive company culture, retention rates and an improving bottom line.
We then identify the level of change required to improve overall satisfaction and engagement and pinpoint those areas where the most significant impacts on employee satisfaction can be achieved with the least resources.
INDUSTRY RESEARCH
Before launching a new product, service, or growth strategy, market research is critical for business success. Continuous monitoring of the local and global economic trading environments is also crucially important for maintaining a competitive edge.
Our team has extensive experience in gathering industry intelligence, evaluating emerging technologies, and researching potential markets.
We tailor research outcomes to meet your specific business goals and objectives. These may include business planning, identifying new business opportunities, risk evaluation, securing investments and funding, competitive market positioning, demographics, customer journey mapping, and strategic and tactical decision-making.
Our focus is on uncovering insights, not just information, to help businesses deliver better products and services to make more money.
PRECEPTION STUDIES
Key Research perception studies are expertly designed to check how customers perceive your organisation relative to competitors and identify discrepancies between the brand qualities you want to emphasise and how key stakeholders perceive your business.
Our research process gathers accurate, reliable, and trustworthy data to gain high-quality insights and optimise perception analysis of acompany’s products, service pipeline, strategy, leadership, financial performance, and marketing communications.
Using surveys with focused sets of questions to generate anonymous feedback from representative respondent samples, we uncover critical issues and identify strategic opportunities to increase your business effectiveness and profitability.
POLLS
Key Research conducts rapid, accurate, statistically reliable opinion polling suited to a range of client requirements in any industry sector, measuring attitudes to current developments and events, political preferences, and consumer opinions.
Polling surveys are an essential element in the commercial manager or public administrator’s toolbox to understand how specific issues resound with internal and external stakeholders and provide balanced and objective data for media release or marketing collateral.
Our high-quality scientific methodology involves expert questionnaire design and accurate sample selection to generate high response rates and valid, reliable data.
We have immediate capability to conduct opinion polls by telephone, face-to-face or online, to measure the strength of opinion in real-time or track changes over time in respondents’ attitudes, views, and behaviours.
Key Research adheres to the RANZ Political Polling Code 2020 that includes best practice guidelines for the conducting and reporting of political polls in New Zealand.
PRICE SENSITIVITY RESEARCH
Key Research has specialised expertise and customer-value focused tools for businesses who need to set their pricing to maximise demand, increase customer retention, and ensure business profitability.
Our research provides insights into consumer behaviour, how people make buying decisions, and the positive links between perceived value, re-purchasing, and customer price-threshold tolerance.
Perception value measurement establishes the importance of brand awareness, brand association, and brand loyalty factors in your customers’ buying decisions.
Price sensitivity measurement helps to understand the main factors influencing customers’ buying decisions and what they are willing to pay for products and services.
As well as identifying what price would make shoppers switch brands, we help manufacturers and retailers adapt their pricing plans to match shopper behaviour in-store and ultimately increase sales and profitability.
PUBLIC SECTOR RESEARCH
Key Research provides best practice research services for public sector clients in government and non-profit institutions, associations, and foundations.
We understand the challenges facing publicly-funded organisations to manage expectations of increased customer-focused services and fiscal pressures to deliver improved services for less cost.
When you need to focus on ROI for your research, we add value to your organisation’s outputs through our recommendations for improving policy and programme effectiveness, delivering outstanding service, and identifying the right approaches to get the job done.
We specialise in satisfaction and perceptions research, as well as monitoring across services and facilities such as:
- customer services
- pools, libraries, community halls
- sports and recreation facilities
- council departmental performance
- environmental quality
- safety perceptions
- roading / infrastructure.
Our purpose-built tools and methodologies support public sector organisations to assess the quality of customer-focused delivery of services and community perceptions of overall agency performance and value for money.
Our Community Perceptions Index gathers and analyses feedback from key stakeholder groups on their interactions with staff and services, then provides insights and opportunities to improve overall customer experience.
Our Road Services Monitor gathers and analyses feedback from key stakeholder groups on important roading assets and networks to identify issues and inform future strategic infrastructure provision.
SPONSORSHIP RETURN ON INVESTMENT ANALYSIS
Corporate sponsorship is gaining traction as an essential way to connect with new audiences and add strategic value to brands. Before investing significant resources, good business practice requires an accurate assessment of the value of sponsorship to your brand, product, or corporate image.
Our Sponsorship ROI research model defines sponsorship goals, identifies suitable sponsorship categories, and evaluates their alignment with your overall communication strategy and business objectives.
Our model also provides calculations of sponsorship value and valuation formulas related to qualitative and quantitative elements such as audience size, customer acquisition, brand perceptions reach, and conversion strategies.
This model is a new development for Key Research. We believe it will change the way businesses approach sponsorship to ensure focused investment for maximum tangible gain.
ECONOMIC IMPACT ASSESSMENT
Economic impact analysis investigate show communities, markets, and the general economy react at the micro-and macro-levels to changes in public policies and private investments.
Using various proprietary Key Research input-output modelling tools, we use our expertise to objectively predict economic outcomes that can be used for strategic planning or educating key stakeholders.
We examine how changes to regulations, demographic shifts, policy changes, and new programmes, projects, and events can impact on local government and public organisations.
We also assess the potential impact of new investments, projects, planning changes, and variations in supply and demand, and their effects on different industries and markets.
SHOPPER RESEARCH
Shopper research empowers both manufacturers and retailers to gain a competitive edge and gives invaluable insight into the influences affecting product selection, packaging, promotions, price and much more.
Our expert consultants have vast experience in analysing human behaviour in the FMCG industry and partner with many clients to provide clear, actionable recommendations to increase sales and profitability.
