Believe it or not, the best time to survey your potential audience is before your product goes to the drawing board. This particular situation is a case in point. A client was interested in entering the confocal market with a new "instrument with a twist" and contracted with MME to do primary research. Two weeks after issuing our report, we received a call from the client. Much to our surprise, the client confessed that MME was the third research firm his company had enlisted to do this project. He and his Board suspected that the first two had told them "what we wanted to hear".

"There is good news and bad news", he went on. "The good news is that we consider your findings unbiased and well-founded. The bad news is that the market is just not big enough so we have decided not to commercialize". Our response: the news was not bad after all. It saved our client hundreds of thousands of dollars in production and start-up costs and allowed the company to focus on other, more lucrative endeavors.

ROI: 50:1 within 2 months.