There’s a lot to be said for requiring questions – gathering a good sample for your survey can be difficult and expensive, and it’s frustrating if you think you’ve got the required number of responses, only to find that some have not answered all your questions.

Also, in many cases, a questionnaire will be checking the suitability or otherwise of the respondent – for example, it may be working to quotas, or it may be necessary to screen out people for certain parameters (e.g. age, gender, occupation, etc). In these cases, then obviously the relevant questions should be mandatory, otherwise your survey might be skewed.

However, there are downsides to making questions compulsory. There are many, many instances of surveys we have seen...

There are two types of businesses –those that succeed and those that don’t.

All businesses have to make decisions continuously – on such things as pricing, their routes to market, their websites, their marketing, their products and the services they provide.

Getting these decisions wrong is often what makes the difference between success and failure.

So businesses – new and established – should be making well-informed decisions about these all-important issues, but many just guess. If you’re guilty of doing just that you should be considering low-cost, effective market research so that you really understand these issues.

Of course, enterprises can fail for all sorts of reasons, but regardless of the industry...