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Delphi sampling is the best for supply chain research.
Everyone knows consumer and industrial markets are different, but too often these differences are forgotten when it comes to designing the market research. The tendency is to fall back on familiar consumer research methods, which often do not fit the job. Industrial marketing research should be based on Delphi samples-panels of decision makers who constitute a universe of knowledge. The authors illustrate the Delphi sampling method in an industrial chain and offer some general guidelines.
Business decision makers are not the same as household shoppers. Therefore, measuring the size of an industrial market based on the consumer sampling paradigm can be a big mistake. Random sampling, for example, is inappropriate and can result in a small, misleading response to a large random sample of business units in multiple SIC codes.
Another critical difference is the complexity of business compared with household buying behavior. We can telephone a household and ask to speak to the "grocery shopper" with reasonable assurance of talking with a key decision maker. We cannot telephone a business and ask for "the buyer" with the same assurance. What's needed in sampling industrial decision makers is expert knowledge of the business-to-business supply chain. To emphasize the need for expert industry knowledge, we call the process "Delphi sampling."
Classical Delphi studies gave little attention to the sampling process. Instead, the focus was on the feedback mechanism and final consensus of expert judgments. The selection processes used in early studies ranged from simple description of professional titles to polling entire departments and classes. Most of these applications were based on convenience samples and address reproducibility of the results. Contemporary forms of Delphi sampling might be familiar to readers. Trade association studies of industry output are based implicitly on Delphi samples. All test markets are based on Delphi (rather than random) samples of geographic and organizational market segments. The panels of judges who score the performance of athletes in the Olympic games are the most visible of all contemporary Delphi samples.
We make a sharp distinction between selection of a Delphi sample in a supply chain and classical Delphi anonymous re-interviewing methods. Delphi sampling is the process of selecting a panel of decision makers...