Module 5: Identifying a decision problem

Organizations and businesses tend to want to jump quickly to a solution, or number of solutions, to solve a problem. This makes sense, as problem solving is typically a key part of success in any sector. The challenge with this approach is that, quite often, the person who sees issues or opportunities in their work has unconscious bias towards the work, and sometimes ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’, as the saying goes.

Unconscious, or implicit bias, is bias that we all have as a result of our life experiences, and involves assumptions that can happen without one’s knowledge. Employees who are working to solve issues or look for new opportunities in their work, may have a hard time looking critically at the situation due to being so close to the work. This is where market research comes in. A marketer or market research consultant can offer a process to support the identification of a decision problem or hypothesis, and use market research to test and ultimately prove or disprove the decision problem. If a decision problem is not identified correctly, the research design will not be constructed accurately and that will affect every step of the market research project. It cannot be stated enough times that identifying the decision problem is the most important part of doing market research… so take the time to go through these steps.

Unconscious bias is not explored in depth in this resource, but this chapter on the topic as part of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) open educational resource clearly explains a number of biases.

There are four steps to identifying a market research decision problem that will be explored in this module.

References