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TURF analysis is a very powerful technique to estimate market potential for a particular product or service. Lets use an example of an ice cream company that only has the resources to create two new flavors of ice cream. It would have to choose which flavor would satisfy the greatest quantity of its customers.  There are thousands of different ice cream flavor combinations – how will the company decide which ones to produce?

The simple solution is to run an online survey, asking  respondents for their favorite ice cream flavors. Most people would pick the two flavors with the highest frequency in the survey data and start mixing up ice cream. However, this approach doesn’t always lead to the most customers. Why? Consider the following data from respondents who are asked, “Chose three of your favorite ice cream flavors from the list below.”

If you apply a simple frequency analysis to this data set, (essentially choosing the two ice cream flavors that were most popular) you’ll see that vanilla and strawberry were chosen most often. You might think that since these are the most selected, these must be the customer’s favorite ice cream flavors.

However, a simple TURF analysis will make you think twice about vanilla and strawberry. Lets look at the data in Figure 8-9 again. Per our frequency analysis above, we would make John, Sue, and Trey quite happy (they choose vanilla and strawberry). Bob, on the other hand, would be bummed: we decided not to produce chocolate or mint – two of his favorite flavors. Our reach would be 75% of the population or three people (John, Sue, and Trey).

Eliminating duplicate choices

The goal of TURF analysis, in the case of the example above, attempts to answer this question: “What two combinations of flavors would satisfy the largest number of customers”. This is what is known as maximizing your reach. Taking a look at our data set once more, we see that choosing to produce any of these ice cream flavor combinations would give us a 100% reach: mint and strawberry, mint and vanilla,  strawberry and chocolate, vanilla and chocolate. In other words, choosing to produce any of these combinations would satisfy the desires of John, Sue, Trey, and even Bob. Don’t you want to satisfy all of your customers?

Back to the example above, you can use the QuestionPro TURF Simulator to find the optimal  choices that give you the maximum unduplicated reach. The tool runs through every possible configuration of  choices at a time and gives you a sorted order of reach percentage.

Review the following steps using QuestionPro as an example

1. Log in to your account. Use your user name and password to log in to your QuestionPro account.

2. Click on “My Surveys.” Click the “Reports” link next to the survey you’d like to analyze with the TURF simulator.

3. Click “TURF Analysis”. Choose the link in the left navigation bar titled,  “TURF Analysis”.

4. Choose “Run Analysis”. Click the “Run Analysis” link next to the question you’d like to analyze. This will load up the data set.

5. Click the “Simulator” tab. This will take you into the TURF simulator

6. Choose the simulation count. Here you’ll pick the number of combinations you’d like to test. In the example above, we are looking for a combination of two flavors of ice cream, so we’ll choose “2” from the drop down menu.

7. Click “Simulate Choices”. This will provide you with a report with every combination of ice cream flavor, sorted by reach percentage.

More info:

• QuestionPro TURF analysis: http://questionpro.com/help/106.html
• TURF Analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TURF_Analysis

After-sales customer support is the frontline for companies, and some of the strongest, most active communities in the social media world are found in these customer support relationships. The use of twitter to lodge customer complaints in the blogosphere is becoming well known, yet how many companies have updated their customer contact centers to incorporate these new channels?  Heck, “call centers” are still commonplace. What should a company do?

First, look at how your customers want to communicate with you. Don’t assume you know.

Second, don’t force fit all customers into one model. Just as there are different customer segments for your products, so to there are different segments for your service interactions. Some people want to chat. Some want to twitter. Some want to talk on the phone with a real person without having to navigate an onerous logic tree.

Third, remember that when you offload work onto the customer when they interact with you, you may be saving money, but you’re costing your customers time and perhaps driving a wedge between you and them. I fume as companies waste my time with needless, moronic messages.

Fourth, don’t create islands of interaction. The different interaction channels need to be integrated in the background data base and all of these contacts need to be tracked. When we capture the Voice of the Customer, we must also capture the Voice of the Process. Without that data, improvement efforts are seriously shortchanged and blindspots result in our customer records.

Fifth, recognize no one research method is “best” for learning about customers’ issues, needs, and wishes. Each method has strengths; each has weaknesses. Companies need to consider a portfolio of listening – as well as response – mechanisms, for example, user groups, online forums, advisory boards, expert networks, survey panels. This growing number of “voice of the customer” channels now provide a rich dialog between companies and their customers.

Fred is a co-producer of the First Wednesday Group’s third annual Voice of the Customer conference, which will take place Nov. 3-4 at The International’s
conference center outside of Boston. The focal topic this year is the impact of social media on the customer support industry.

This is a boutique event–highly interactive, small in scale, with an impressive lineup of expert speakers and an audience of managers with a good deal of hands-on experience with social media in a customer support environment. Registration is $385/day.

More info:

• http://www.first-wednesday.com/support_conference.html

[Romi Mahajan is Chief Marketing Officer of Ascentium Corporation]

This article first appeared on Microsoft TechNet.

The famous communications theorist and professor of English literature Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message,” meaning that the form in which communications are relayed is more important than the content of the message itself. McLuhan also invented the term “global village,” and with these two intellectual strokes, established his importance in the field of intellectual thought. I wonder what McLuhan would think of Unified Communications or books written for Amazon Kindle. I wonder, too, what he would view as the relationship between new technologies and the cultural change that accompanies them.

I bring up the concept of Unified Communications with some humor. Indeed, if the same message is to be transferred over different media, or in other words, if the cost of transferring from medium to medium (for the same message) is trivial, then what becomes of McLuhan’s homily? If we are to believe McLuhan, do we then believe that the promise of technology to radically simplify meaning simply isn’t true? Or have the proponents of said technologies only really promised the speedy and plentiful transmission of messages with nary a view towards creating meaning?

I believe that technologies do both, but that on the whole they are intellectually neutral. They both facilitate communications of some varieties and open the possibilities of new meanings being created at the juxtaposition of form, content, and context. (They actually reduce communications of some varieties as well—witness the demise of the handwritten letter.)

Consider for a moment e-book readers and their users. Although I don’t use e-book readers, I know many people who swear by them—and not just for the convenience. Some people feel that they can absorb content in-depth if they can surround their reading experience with context (such as being able to find online dictionaries or Wikipedia references just a click away). Some authors write books specifically for distribution to the Web and will soon do so for e-books.

In the very near future, books will become rich Internet experiences through which one will be able to both see and hear what is happening in the text. Imagine a story about the havoc created by an explosion if one could both see and hear the explosion on the page. Some readers might be enthralled, while others will bemoan the atrophying of the imagination when literature must appeal to the senses of both sight and sound.

Many people have called for the demise of printed books. There are still others who continue to stock their library shelves and for whom the smell and feel of newly printed books evokes strong emotions. The market for first editions and autographed books remains quite strong, even in our challenging economy. Neither point of view is right or wrong—the specific technology in this case is neutral.

Similarly, look at the current debate around the future of print magazines and newspapers. Whereas there are numerous valid arguments about the deleterious environmental impact of these mediums, most of the debates consist of platitudes about the world moving to digital. That said, I (an IT pro) love printed magazines—they serve a specific need for me. For others, the burden of authorship inherent in print confers a sense of legitimacy to content rendered in that form, whereas the lack thereof (or perceived lack) on the Web creates the opposite effect. On some subjects, people enjoy short, clipped, unedited content (such as blogs), while for other subjects, they prefer longer, edited communication.

Both types have good reason to exist. Technology allows for the distribution of this content, but does not dictate expression; it can magnify it, offer a forum for it, but not enable it.

Ultimately, the future of written content is complex—it can take many forms and involve many types of media. Meaning and form do matter. Technology in this case plays a significant though not essential role in the making of meaning.

Romi Mahajan is Chief Marketing Officer of Ascentium Corporation. Before joining Ascentium, he spent more than seven years at Microsoft, where his last role was as Director of Technical Audience and Platform Marketing. Romi is widely published in the areas of technology, politics, economics, and sociology.