Any company or organisation involved with market research has to have a good understanding of statistical market research sampling in order to be able to claim an accurate representation of any given population. Typically, the larger your sample size, the more likely it will be that your respondents’ answers will reflect the whole population.
Usually the population size (the total number of people who may potentially need your new product or service) of any given clinical specialty or academic research area is large and therefore it is impossible to ascertain the opinion of the entire group. Therefore it is necessary to obtain the opinion of a proportion (sample) of the population in order to provide a statistically reliable result. Selecting an appropriate market research sampling method will deliver results that can be considered as representative of the whole market.
Often it may not be possible to know the exact population which is not a problem when looking at the maths of probability as the size of the population is irrelevant i.e. a sample of 500 people is as equally useful as examining the opinions of 100,000. Population size only becomes a factor when you work with a relatively small, known respondent population.
In 2016, Accelerate Associates were tasked with completing an exercise to research the global commercial bumblebee production market. The market is small and, although truly global, there are only a small number of companies operating in this area. This made the possibility of gathering the opinion of the entire market much simpler.
Katherine Bourne qualified with a BSc (Hons) from Nottingham University specialising in Nutritional Biochemistry. CIM qualified with more than ten years commercial marketing experience, Katherine has worked in a number of areas including the food, pharmaceutical, laboratory and science sectors.
