South Africa, Oct. 8 -- According to Carmen Brown, general manager of Field IQ, research is often commissioned before the business has clearly defined what it needs to know and the results can be lengthy store audits, fatigued fieldworkers and mountains of data without a clear commercial direction.

A brand or retailer may have a nagging sense that something is wrong for a promotion to underperform, for a competitor's products to appear in more fridges or if a product becomes unavailable. These are familiar commercial frustrations but the instinct is to commission a broad survey covering everything from product availability and pricing to share of shelf, point-of-sale compliance, staff knowledge, shopper demographics and promotional visib...