Taking the Pulse

They say that you are supposed to survey your customers to find out what they think about your organization.   You tell yourself, "My customers ARE NOT shy about sharing their complaints opinions, especially when they perceive something is wrong.  Why should I spend time and resources asking for more?"

They say that it is important to understand your customers' motivations, interests and feelings.  You think to yourself, "I know when they make a purchase.  Why do I care about anything else?"

They say they can tell you within one standard deviation how your customers will respond to your new product or ad campaign or store location.  You wonder to yourself, "What the heck is a standard deviation?"

Market research is often the most neglected tool in the marketing tool box.  There are many reasons for that.  First of all, many business people who understand a lot about marketing don't really understand the processes or the terminology of research.  Second, market research often seems to gum up the works and slow things down.  We just want to get started and research seems to delay things with no tangible payoff.  With research, not only do you have to take time for the survey, but you have to analyze the results and hope that the results don't indicate a change in plans.  It seems easier to avoid it.  Kind of like the dentist.

But ultimately, I think the primary reason that market research is so often skipped is that marketers don't see the value. They have a view of the world that they are comfortable with and they don't want to risk disrupting that view with research.  As Nate Silver says in his book The Signal and the Noise, "[w]e focus on the signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.  We ignore the risks that are hardest to measure, even when they pose the greatest threats to our well-being.  We make approximations and assumptions about the world that are much cruder than we realize."  Well-crafted research can help refine those approximations and assumptions.

Marketing is primarily about building and nurturing relationships.  Those relationships are with customers, staff, suppliers, board members, media, the industry, the public, politicians, the local community, the international community, regulators and the competition.  The degree that you develop relationships with any group on that list depends in part on your industry, in part on your product or service and in part on your marketing strategy.

Regardless of your industry, product or strategy, understanding those whom you seek to market to gives you an advantage.  Understanding their views and feelings about your organization and your product can help you take shortcuts to providing a product or service that exceeds their demands and expectations.  A simple, well crafted survey of your customers, prospective customers, or staff can help you break through the myopia that Nate Silver was writing about and see the world, and your product, as your customer sees it.

Ultimately, you do market research because you need to know what "they" say: about your organization, about your product and about their needs.

Related articles

• Small business tips: How to do market research
• Seven marketing sins

A Numbers Game

It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the quantity of data that is increasingly available to organizational and marketing leaders.  It is very easy to find yourself wanting to retreat to a analytic fetal position and ignore the data.

But the reality is that we value what we measure. Similarly, we should measure what we value.  There is a nuance between those statements.

The very act of collecting data on something, imparts value on it.  When my wife and I bought a new hybrid car 10 years ago, one of the things that we were fascinated by was the dashboard graphic that showed us our gas mileage at that instant.  We quickly learned how different ways of driving impacted that all important MPG number.  Our fuel efficiency was important to us in concept prior to that, which is why we bought a hybrid.  But with the graphic in front of us it became much less of an ethereal concept and much more of a focus every time we got behind the wheel.

Similarly, a long time ago, when I worked in an advertising agency, we collected the column inches of newspaper articles that appeared about our clients.  Because we were collecting that data and sharing it internally, it was a frequent topic of conversation.  Eventually, we recognized that as an advertising agency, not a PR firm, we really didn't impact our client's newspaper mentions.  We realized that we were collecting newspaper mentions "because we could," not because it was important.  We discontinued it and the topic of column inches was never discussed again.

With so much of our marketing and communication lives happening online, data collection is no longer the issues it once was. There are metrics galore available to any marketer or communicator who wants them.  The challenge for marketers has shifted from trying to figure out what information to gather to trying to figure out what, of the plentiful data available, is useful data.

Whereas before, marketers measured "what they could," now to a greater extent they can analyze what they should.  It seems to me that easily available data still has that allure of importance.  Like with column inches at the ad agency I worked for, marketers need to be careful about chasing after measures such as Facebook likes or Klout scores simply because they are available.

Just as social media options should be a tool in your marketing toolbox, not your marketing strategy, available metrics should help you measure whats important, not a measure of what is important.

Guts & Numbers

"I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination."                                                                               David Ogilvy

"I don't need somebody behind a desk to tell me what a marketing survey says is funny. I got 3 million miles and 70,000 tickets sold, telling me that I know how to make people laugh."                                                                                                                                   D. L. Hughley

As long as there have been marketing departments and advertising agencies there has been a tension between practitioners who use research to back up their decisions and those who trust their judgement, or their gut.

The problem with this argument is that there seems to be no middle ground.  Believers of research are most comfortable when every decision is backed up with data.  Proponents of "the gut" will often talk about their superior instincts, their understanding of the target audience and their track record of creative, off-the-beaten path solutions.

It seems to me that there is a place for both decision making strategies in developing creative and effective marketing programs.  The history of advertising is full of stories about the maverick adman who bucked the trend and the research department and had a huge success, based on his instincts.  If we relied only on market research, we probably wouldn't have some of our most popular and revered marketing campaigns.  You see, research is really good at measuring the effectiveness of messages and media that the public is already familiar with.  It is not nearly as effective at capturing the effectiveness of new ideas or new platforms.  You may know the Henry Ford quote "If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse."  Likewise, 10 years ago, if you questioned people about whether they would like to get information about a company on a free internet site that is primarily social in nature (Facebook) or on access special offers from a retailer on their telephone, I am pretty sure you would have gotten poor responses and a lot of strange looks.

What those stories don't tell us is that the same maverick geniuses have a lot more strike outs than home runs.  Research can help focus a message or a strategy to help it become more effective with target markets.  Research can also help identify shifts in public perception, both in general, say in their understanding and desire for Model Ts, or about a product in particular, say the Edsel.

So it seems to me that "marketing magic" is not in having great instincts or being able to craft surveys that accurately measure customer intentions but in striking the right balance between guts and numbers.  Using data to help make decisions only makes sense but measurement and analysis have never been as good at measuring the new and innovative as they have been at analyzing the tried and true.  I suppose this is why I consider marketing and communications an art as much as it is a science.