Becky Ward is the founder and president of Ward Research Inc., a market research firm.

Q. When the economy slows, do you find that your services are in greater demand?

A. We believe that at times like this they can't afford not to. It is true that our industry, the market research industry, does suffer less than other industries. I would imagine that we're all down somewhat over 2007, but I think that we don't feel it as much as a lot of other industries because people are saying our budget's been cut, but we still need to accomplish these things and we really better make sure that we're making decisions based on solid data and we're spending what money we do have well.

Q. Does business pick up during election years?

A. There's some pick-up, but the 2008 elections there really wasn't a lot of work to be done. There were not a lot of major races. The boom year in political polling is going to be 2010. There are going to be a lot of seats up. They'll be a governor's race and that's probably going to cause a lot of other races, sort of a domino effect. I think all of us in polling will agree that 2010 will be a much more interesting polling year and certainly a more active year than 2008 was. The presidential election doesn't create polling opportunities to speak of in Hawai'i, so it's the local races that we count on. The rail vote generated a fair amount of polling, too.

Q. Are there times when a client disagrees with your results?

A. There's always a risk that the client, whether it's a company or a campaign, doesn't like the data, doesn't like the news that comes out of the data. That's a risk you need to live with. Certainly for political candidates, it's probably more ego involved and it's more difficult to learn that your constituents don't really see you the way that you thought they did. But that risk is always there and that's the important thing about integrity in our business. Regardless of what the news is, you're going to hear it.

Q. How is your surveying done? Is it primarily by phone?

A. Quantitative work can be through telephone surveys, can be through intercept surveys, where we approach someone at a shopping center or the airport. It can be through mail surveys, and these days online surveys. Telephone surveys have always worked really well in Hawai'i. We can get a good geographic distribution and it's relatively cost-effective.

There's an issue these days, however, of the representativeness of the sample. It's getting more and more difficult to get a good representative sample in a telephone survey because of the migration away from land lines, call-screening devices and the fact that we're just really busy these days and not home very much. So there's a move toward mixed methodology, using a telephone survey perhaps in combination with another methodology, maybe an intercept or an online survey. This is changing the way we do our work a little bit.

Q. When did you start Ward Research?

A. It got started in 1980.

Q. Why this field?

A. I was taking marketing classes at UH and the whole field appealed to me. There was an opening that I learned about at a market research firm and while I hadn't really decided on market research, I thought openings don't occur very often and I ought to pursue this. Once I got into it, I loved it.

I'm not one of those who said from the beginning, I want to own my own business. I don't even really think of myself as an entrepreneur. I kind of fell into it. I had worked for another firm in the late '70s, Research Associates, which was the research division of Fawcett McDermott Cavanagh, and through a series of events I left, their research manager left and they asked me if I wanted to come back to run the research division. I really didn't want to do that, but I said I'd take some contract work and I'll help you until I figure out what I want to do with my life. It turns out this is what I wanted to do with my life. In order to do the contract work, I had to have a general excise license and I had to have a company name and once it was created it just had it's own momentum.

Q. How did you build your client list?

A. As you know, Hawai'i is very much a word-of-mouth market and I had some very good friends and good contacts from my first few years in market research. I kept it very small. I worked from home back in 1980, when working from home wasn't quite as popular as it is today. So I kept the overhead very low in the beginning. That way I could grow slowly, add staff slowly. One of the worst mistakes that small businesses make is to try to grow too quickly. Once you start to do good work and people hear about it, the word does spread.

Q. Is marketing research surveying and polling an art, or science?

A. I've always said that it's science and art combined. Certainly there's a science to it and that's what you learn in school. And of course you put it into practice and you find out that what you learned in school is a little different than the reality. The science has to be the basis and then the art is really what makes the difference between competitors. The art is listening to the client, thinking about what they need, going beyond what they think they need, recommending other ways of doing it, recommending different angles and ways of looking at the problem and finding different ways that research can assist them.

Q. What is your client base?

A. Most of our clients can be found on the top 250 list. We do a lot of corporate work, banks, utilities, the visitor industry, developers. They're usually large companies and usually with someone who is managing a market research function. They may not be a market research manager, but someone in the marketing or the public affairs side with some research expertise.

Q. What are they looking for?

A. More than often they're always using it in their planning. So the fourth quarter, for example, is a busy time for most research firms because our clients are doing their planning for the next year. So it's usually information that they need in order to make decisions to move them forward. Sometimes it's a problem, sometimes it's a crisis, something has happened whether it's an image problem or sometimes it's a product problem and they need to know something very quickly to know what their situation really is and how they should respond. Other times it's a longer-term issue. What direction should we take this product or service? What are our customers expecting?

Q. Are you in this business for the long haul?

A. I certainly see myself staying involved in the community. I sit on some nonprofit boards and a state commission and I've always enjoyed being part of our community, even outside of market research. I would imagine that the use of market research is going to increase, that information becomes more and more important. The challenge is to figure out how the way we deliver that stays relevant.