Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

Start Your Research Project With a Sense of Discovery and You’ll Come Out With More Knowledge

Posted on July 12, 2011 by | Leave a comment

One of the most common things I’d hear upon completion of a market research project was “I already knew that?!”

There is this idea that at the conclusion of some market research endeavor the heavens would open up and we would somehow know something amazingly new and different that had never occurred to us before.  Yet, when you think about it — that is the last thing that should happen.

After all, you know your business, and you are doing the research to make better decisions.  You aren’t doing it to KNOW something — you’re doing it to learn something.  I heard a quote yesterday that struck me “Knowledge is in the speaking and wisdom is in the listening.”   And when we’re talking about market research, it helps to be in the mode of discovery and listening.  That is a very different way of being than gathering information for the sake of knowing it.

Match the Tone of Your Invite to The Audience of Your Survey

You may not think it matters, but the spirit with which you enter into your research is more transparent than you might think.  It starts with the tone of your survey invitation.

These days you don’t get much real estate in which to invite your respondent.  Even if you are lucky enough to use an email invitation to an existing customer, attention spans are short and time to take surveys is even shorter.  The tone of your invitation can make all the difference to your response rate.

If your tone is too academic and rigid, respondents may already know that this will be long and painful.  If your tone is too casual for the audience, they may not take you seriously enough and skip over the survey.

Take the time to match the tone of your invite to the audience.  It also helps to create survey invitations via Twitter (if your survey is open to the public) or Facebook and schedule those throughout several days.

How Would a Spirit of Discovery Change the Questions in Your Survey?

First what is the difference between discovery and knowledge?  When you are in “discovery” mode, anything can happen.  The possibilities are wide open.  And more importantly — YOU are wide open.  You don’t know and you are open to what shows up in the process.

When you “KNOW” something.  You know it.  There is nothing to discuss, nothing to learn.  It just is.  We now know that California lies beyond Ohio there is no discovery there — there is knowledge.  But a couple of hundred years ago, as Europeans were trekking across the country, they didn’t really KNOW what lay ahead.  They had a sense of discovery around their journey.

How would your survey look if you created questions from a mindset of discovery rather than proving something or someone right or wrong?

More importantly, how would your results be reported if you looked at them as components of discovery rather than fact?

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Is Product Proliferation Killing Your Profitability?

Posted on June 22, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Product proliferation is often a function of improving customer service and experience.  A customer says they love product A and would buy millions of them — if only you could change the color from black to green.

From that point on, it’s a slippery slope to where if one customer can make a special request, then another makes a special request.  The next thing you know, you’re managing an ever increasing number of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) and the amount of paperwork and quality system management has gone up exponentially.

What you may NOT notice is that product proliferation creates a quiet profitability leak .  Over time, that customer that said they would buy millions of units, only ends up buying a couple hundred thousand.  And in a couple of years, the number of units starts decreasing and before you know it, your profit margin is as thin as a human hair.  Even worse, you may not even notice how many products you have that fall into this category.  All you see is a steadily shrinking margin.

In the past, companies had two choices; discontinue the products that don’t meet margin levels and risk losing customers or keep unprofitable products and risk losing their business to bleeding profits.  This often found the sales and marketing folks in conflict with manufacturing or finance departments.

But there is a way to to reach a compromise between these two sides — you can actually get your customers to choose which products they want to keep and which products they want to ditch.

Get Your Customers to Choose the Product Offerings They are Willing to Pay For

Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique used in market research to determine how people value different features that make up an individual product or service.  It’s a great methodology for product rationalization because it gives customers the ability to choose what features they want at what price.  Is having their widget available in blue worth a 50% price increase?

Set up your conjoint questions by describing the different product choices in terms of features and the different levels for each feature.  For example, if you’re trying to determine what TV’s to sell, you would identify the different features that are available i.e. screen size, format,  and price. Then list all the levels or options for each feature such as LCD, LED formats and price levels.

The Survey Analytics Conjoint Analysis module will then create options for your respondents to choose from.  Respondents will choose their favorite offering mix or rate the available offering mixes.  The results will tell you exactly which product offering they value most and the price they are willing to pay for each offering.

Ultimately, you may find yourself retaining products you might have eliminated because customers are willing to pay a higher price for specific features.

Conjoint analysis used to be a time intensive, error-prone and expensive research method.  But today’s technology has made it much easier to create, run and analyze the data.

If you’ve got too many products to maintain that have increased complexity and decreased your bottom line – running a conjoint analysis on your products will not only get your customers engaged in the process – you’ll feel good about cutting products that your customers don’t value and keeping the ones they do at an increased price.

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How to Use Research to Develop an Offer Your Ideal Customers Can’t Resist

Posted on June 20, 2011 by | 1 Comment

One of the terrific benefits of DIY market research is that you can reach out to more of your audience more often and get to know them better.  As you profile your audience and learn more about them, you can use their feedback to develop new product and service offers that will blow the competition away — simply because they didn’t take the time to get to know their customer.

Use your subscription list to begin the profile

Many companies have “subscription” lists that they’ve collected from their blogs.  People subscribe to newsletters or download a free e-Book or white paper and then they often just sit there.  Take the time to get a profile of these folks that starts the process to see if they are your ideal customer.

  • Use the MicroPoll feature to build an advisory panel of people.
  • Send them a profiling survey that includes all the standard demographic info and some psychographic questions.
Find out what they want
If you have an existing panel – you can start sending them short surveys either via email or maybe even using their mobile device and the SurveySwipe app.  If you already have a list of customer wants that you’d like to prioritize, then these apps are a dream – you can literally have an answer to a quick question in less than an hour!
If you aren’t sure if what your customers want – try using IdeaScale to start that discussion.  Get your audience to register and start contributing ideas.  IdeaScale is a great way to use crowd sourcing to collect voice of the customer phrases that you can use in your surveys later.
Sometimes your customers will give you “features” and sometimes they will give you “capabilities” and sometimes they will give you “benefits”, your job will be to scrutinize their answers and be sure to classify them accordingly.  Here is my cheat sheet:
  • Features are actual “objects” such as a button or a software function. 
  • Capabilities are what the feature allow you to do
  • Benefits are the value they offer
Here is an example:
The RX 100 has a 30 second saving function (feature) that saves your work as you write (capability) so that you never lose hours of your creative work (benefit).
Your goal is to separate their “wants” from the “features” and the “benefits” — you will use this in developing a great offer, so you want to make sure that you’ve classified their feedback correctly.
Match the WANTS – FEATURES and BENEFITS
The next step in developing your irresistible offer is to match up your customers’ wants to the features that you offer and the benefits.  I like to use this handy template that you can download here:  Irresistible Offering Template
The “What if…” Column is your secret competitive weapon
The template I’ve provided has one last column called “What if…” .  This is a very powerful component of the offering development worksheet.
Here’s how the “what if” column works.  As you go through each customer want, features, capability and benefit your brain will get very engaged into the customer’s world.  Suddenly you’ll find yourself asking questions like “what if we were able to let our customers  _______”
Here is a real example – a local lawyer had clients that were over 65.  The work they did required these clients to drive downtown to get papers signed as well as drive to various banks and offices to sign documents.  Left to their own devices, they often put this off too long and often their legal work didn’t get done in time.  This was a problem for them and the lawyer.
As a part of this exercise, the lawyer asked himself “What if I hired a limo to drive them downtown and to all the other offices?”  This option was actually cheaper than letting them wait too long and miss out on the legal timelines.
So what will you come up with for an irresistible offer?
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5 Short and Sweet Reasons to Target a Specific Audience

Posted on June 14, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Today’s guest post comes from Michael DiFrisco (a.k.a. The Affordable Branding Guy”  He’s decided not to overwhelm us with too much information and instead, just layout the benefits of focusing on and targeting a specific audience.

Choosing a specific audience for your business is a powerful form of focus. Targeting means you reject the idea of believing the best way to build your business is by hitting every living person in your area. It allows you to focus on the specific customer or client types that are most desirable.

Here are some of the other benefits of targeting a specific core market:

  1. You’ll eliminate the bottom-feeders and those people who will simply not value what you offer
  2. You’ll have more effective marketing spending
  3. You can better focus your messaging—tailored to focus on their needs, not the needs of the entire universe
  4. It’s a better use of your time—more spent serving your best customers and less time spent pursuing low-value prospects
  5. You’ll build a stronger referral base—once you penetrate a target market and educate them on the value of working with you
Now — get out there and start targeting!

 

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Are Market Research Tools an Alternative for Social Media Haters?

Posted on June 3, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Social Media has been around for well over five years, yet many CEOs just don’t see the point.  Most of them leave the social media activities to the marketing folks in their organization.

In a post on DIYMarketers, we explore the idea the some of today’s newest, coolest market research methods can actually be a great alternative for CEOs who hate all the hassle of social media, but want all the results.

Here is a summary of the alternatives:

  • If you hate the idea of losing control of your message, then create your own customer community.  You can create a customer or user panel with whom you are in regular conversation.  Ask the panel questions, via survey, they will give you answers.
  • Still question the ROI of social media?  Create a crowdsourcing space on your site where your customers can tell you their ideas for improvements and new products and you can respond.  Create a real-live brain trust and conversation that gets your customer involved in creating a product they will love and talk about.
  • Sick of people’s stupid updates?  Run surveys and polls on the SurveySwipe mobile platform.  You can blast out a question to our existing community or upload a list of your own.  You’ll get feedback in less than 2 hours!
I was one of the first people in line to criticize CEOs who weren’t taking advantage of the power of social media.  But as I got to really listening to their complaints — I really GOT IT.
The alternatives I’ve described here use the social media platforms, technologies and elements of fun and then target them toward ROI rich, time saving and customer engaging results.
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Learn to Design Killer Surveys From our friends at Research Rockstar

Posted on May 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment
Want to take a crash course on survey design?

Our friends at Research Rockstar are hosting an in-person survey design class on June 9th in Waltham Massachusetts.
This is a fast, practical class that answers key questions about planning and writing online surveys.
The fee is $89 per person, but we have a discount code for our readers: enter code 10FFL to get $10 off.

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How to Use Market Research Techniques to Drive Sales

Posted on May 16, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Traditional market research functions used to live on the more analytical side of most big companies.  The product and marketing managers come to them as technical advisors to ask questions.  They would create and structure scientifically valid focus groups and surveys and weeks or months into the project and much analysis, a marketing campaign would come together and sales would start coming in.  This process didn’t happen EVERY time — but it did happen quite a bit.  Even in the industrial bare bones marketing companies I worked with.

But with the onset of social media and DIYMarketing tools, the time lag between marketing research to sales has shrunk significantly.  I’m struck by how many traditionally “marketing research” functions have migrated to other areas of the business.

Take design testing for web sites.  This used to be a marketing research function, but with Google Analytics and Google Optimizer Landing Page Oprimization and the testing of message effectiveness has earned a new name and a new place in the marketing function.  In my opinion it’s still “research” of sorts, just called by a different name.

Net Promoter Score as also moved into a more active role in business.  Of course companies still ask if you’re “Likely to refer” but in addition to that, they also give you the opportunity to put your money where your mouth is and refer right then and there – by giving you the option to tell a friend.  Another twist on this is to give your site visitors the option to give you feedback on the spot.  I saw this example in the Marketing Technology Blog:

Of course, you can also use tools like IdeaScale and MicroPoll to create other customer engagement opportunities on your web sites and blogs.    Then use the information that customers provide to create an offer that they are more likely to buy more quickly.

The idea isn’t that market research is smaller or less.  The need for customer information hasn’t gone away, in fact, it’s become more important than ever.  What’s missing is the creative applications and strategies that market research provides to help shorten the information to closed sale .

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Opportunities to Push the Envelope of Market Research

Posted on April 11, 2011 by | 1 Comment

In a couple of weeks, Vivek Bhaskaran will be speaking at the IIR Technology Driven Market Research event in Chicago.   The Technology Driven Market Research Conference is all about the breakthrough technologies that will be used in market research.   If you’re interested in learning more about this conference, take a look at their site and register.

In the meantime, get a preview of what you’re likely to hear from Vivek and other thought leaders in the market research technology realm.  In this interview with Leaonard Murphy from the Green Book Marketing Research Blog, Vivek blows the roof off the conventional market research and then gently leads us back to really pushing the envelope as we look for new ways to really listen to what our customers and our markets are trying to tell us,

Using Analysis and Listening as Psychic Tools

OK, sorry, I pushed that headline a little to get your attention.  Let me explain.

A few months ago, I read this book SHiFT Selling by Craig Elias and it literally blew my mind.  Craig was talking about using simple analysis of sales you’d already won to literally predict and place yourself right in front of your ideal customer just when they are ready, willing and able to buy.  So it actually LOOKS like you’re being psychic — when you’re actually being smart.

The Craig Elias used these same techniques to connect with me (after I was doing research on HIM) and we came up with this eye-popping webinar that you can participate in NEXT Tuesday April 12.  REGISTER RIGHT HERE.

How to Use Social Media to WOW Your Customers

Now we have a slightly understated headline to communicate a really interesting and important trend — that’s related to TRIGGER EVENTS (the webinar I was talking about in the previous section).

The latest issue of Trendwatching is out and you’ll never believe what they are talking about “Random Acts of Kindness“.   You know — random acts of kindness — like paying the toll for the person behind you, just doing something nice for someone you don’t know — BECAUSE it’s the nice thing to do.

Well – it’s a HOT HOT HOT trend in business right now.  There are tons of examples – I’ll just give you a few right here :

  • In October 2010, flower delivery service Interflora launched a social media campaign in the UK designed to brighten up the lives of Twitter users by sending them flowers. Interflora monitored Twitter looking for users that needed cheering up. Once found, the users were contacted and sent a bouquet of flowers as a surprise.
  • In November 2010, Dutch airline KLM ran an experimental campaign called How Happiness Spreads, where it employed a “Surprise Team” to give passengers tailored, unexpected gifts at the airport.
    Combining with location-based game Foursquare, as soon as someone checked-in at a KLM Foursquare location within its network of airports the Surprise Team went online to find more background information about the person, decided upon a suitable gift and gave it them before they flew.
    For instance, one traveler tweeted he would miss a PSV Eindhoven football game while he was in New York. The Surprise Team, accordingly, gave him a Lonely Planet guidebook of NYC with all the football bars highlighted in blue.

If you haven’t already noticed – this super trend is being DRIVEN by using social media technology to LISTEN to its audience and then take action because it’s NICE.

Have the big corporations gone Buddhist – creating waywardly great karmic impressions?  It may seem like it, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they are being savvy marketers.

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Survey Analytics Featured as DIY Marketing Research Tool for Manufacturers

Posted on March 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

In a recent article on Thomas Net Industry Market Trends, Michael Keating,  senior editor for Government Product News and a contributing editor for American City and County, mentioned Survey Analytics as a terrific tool for DIY Market Research that’s available to manufacturers.

Manufacturing companies invest heavily in engineering and operations.  But when it comes to market research and all things sales and marketing, they get a little skittish.  And that means that a lot of times, the customer satisfaction surveys that they ran got low response rates and even worse useful information that the manufacturer could use to make good decisions.

This is unfortunate because many manufacturers have to be ISO 9001 certified and that means having good customer satisfaction data that can be tracked and implemented as well as show improvements in the quality system as evidenced by customer satisfaction scores.

Here is just a short snippet of this well written article -

“Yes, some manufacturing execs do rely on DIY research in an effort to save money; and this method of acquiring critical information can produce disastrous results,” according to Cathy Williams-Owen, president and CFO of Port Washington, N.Y.-based Dri Mark Products, Inc., a manufacturer of writing instruments, security marking systems and inks. “It is somewhat like working in a vortex. The information obtained may not produce the valuable insight that, say, a well-formulated focus group can provide. The conclusions that are reached can skew results with the potential for a disastrous outcome.”

Manfred Bluemel, Ph.D., at Seattle-based Zeitgeist Research, is a proponent of DIY research tools like Survey Monkey,Survey Analytics and Zoomerang, with a caveat: “They work as long as you have a skilled market researcher who knows what to do with those tools.”

“To use DIY market research most effectively, you need to talk to a marketing expert or consultant that understands research or product management and can help you design a good survey — then use the online survey tools that are available to help,” Ivana Taylor, publisher of the online resource DIY Marketers, says.

New tools and technology are speeding up the acceptance of DIY research. More customized survey apps are being developed for both Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android-based tablets that will enable small manufacturers to do their own market research. (For examples, see SurveyAnalytics.com, iSurveySoft.com and SurveyGizmo.com.)

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Will Video Make Focus Groups Obsolete?

Posted on March 21, 2011 by | 2 Comments

What if you could actually watch consumers interacting with your brand in their natural habitat?  That is what a new application, Qualvu is offering brand managers and marketers.  In the video explanation on their home page, they show how their platform allows you to target consumers all over the world and get video from them as they interact with your brand.

What do you think?  How would you use this new tool?

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