SD-5 Market ResearchThe purpose of this document is to provide DoD and other Federal personnel involved in the acquisition process with practical guidance on using market research to ensure the acquisition of products and services that will best serve the government??s needs. Specifically, this document is designed for personnel involved with establishing requirements for products or services, such as engineers, technical specialists, project officers, and customers; personnel involved with purchasing products or services, such as contracting officers, contract specialists, and cost analysts; and personnel who support the acquisition process, such as logisticians, testing and quality assurance specialists, and legal counsel.

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•  Period of performance

•  Value of contract

•  Type of contract (fixed price, cost reimbursement)

•  Accomplishments of effort (products furnished or services provided).

As you start collecting information from potential sources, you should also be thinking about how you are going to capture and organize the information. If you are collecting information from multiple firms, consider setting up a database or spreadsheet with fields to record the key elements. A database or spreadsheet allows you to sort and filter the data in various ways, which aids analysis. If the information you are collecting is mainly qualitative or narrative, a table in a word-processing document may be sufficient. If you plan on gathering data via phone conver- sations, an interview guide or template will help ensure that you cover all the areas you intend- ed and will help you to capture the data.Whatever data collection methods you use, a good system for capturing and organizing the data will help you to analyze and document the results of your research.

Table 2 compares the market research focus areas for products and services.

Collect Information from Product or Service Users

Following up with the references provided by the product or service sources is the next key step. Feedback from the actual users of the product or service allows you to assess how well the product or service performed in the past and to identify any issues. One approach to collecting information from product or service users is to interview them either in person or by phone.

In some cases, e-mail correspondence may be sufficient.

Private-sector users are often willing to discuss good and bad features of products or services. DoD experts can question their private-sector counterparts to get additional technical knowl- edge and to make an informed judgment on whether it meets DoD's need. For example, the logistics representative on the team could interview maintenance personnel who have experi- ence with the product to determine what their maintenance philosophy is, how much mainte- nance is needed, whether parts are easy to replace, and so on.

Because a source is unlikely to knowingly provide you the names of users that are dissatisfied with the product or service, you should also attempt to independently identify users. Informa- tion collected from them may be far more useful for verifying the sources' claims.

You can also review customer satisfaction data from reliable sources like government databas- es, consumer protection organizations, and user groups. Keep in mind that at this point, the goal is not to select or eliminate any potential sources.That will be done during the acquisition process when offers are evaluated.