5 things to avoid to do better consumer research

5 things to avoid to do better consumer research

Jun 24, 2016 | Customers, Marketing, Strategy

I sat through a qualitative research (focus) group a few weeks ago, recruited over the phone against a specific demographic list.

On the odd occasion I receive these calls, my stated occupation is never associated in any way with marketing, as that always disqualifies you, the excuse being you might learn something, which in my experience is pretty unusual.

Anyway, are we not consumers?

The moderator was a nice woman, probably had a psychology degree or something similarly disassociated from the tough task of creating value for money, and proceeded to make every research mistake in the book.

Taking ideas as gospel. Instead of digging around to understand why we said the things being tested would work, she just took the blanket statements as fact. The reality is that nobody knows for sure if something will work or not, so gathering opinions without the supporting attitudes and reasons why is dumb.

 Asking questions we could not answer. This often happens, I have seen it and fired researchers for doing it. Why waste time asking a question, then debating the silly answers when there is no way the group could know  the answer, as it requires some specific knowledge which was not in the filtering questionnaire.

Is it better? Collecting quasi quantitative data with questions like this can lead to gross misjudgements. Just ask Coke if they had the research assuring them that ‘New Coke” was better than ‘old Coke’.

Crystal balling. Asking a group to rub their crystal balls and tell you the future is dumb, dumb unless corralled by a statement such as “if A and B were to happen, what do you think would happen next?”

Defining behaviour by Demographics.  This is a general mistake in recruiting groups. Defining your target markers, which is what this is, by demographics alone went out with the turn of the century when we recognised and were able to track the impacts of the drivers of behaviour beyond simple demographics. Just because you might live in Blacktown and do not have a degree does not mean you cannot own a BMW, purchase expensive wine and go on holidays. Our cultural and social life is far more fragmented and eclectic than in past decades that demographics are now only a small part of the picture of who we are, what we want, and how we behave.

When you spend the money on consumer research, it pays to really consider the problems to be solved and how the answers might be used. If the answer to those is: ‘what problem’ and ‘To convince the boss’   or ‘because I do not what else to do’ it is better to save the research money and do something useful with it.

Do we still need books?

Jun 22, 2016 | Marketing, Personal Rant, Strategy

In a world of abundance, we are desperately in need of depth.

Skating across the surface of the ice is fine for a while, but at some point you need to be able to recognise the weak spots, and figure out how to avoid them before you drop through and drown, just after you freeze.

A book does that for me in a way that an e-book does not, neither does a blog post, or a tweet, they are not physical, they have no intellectual or physical weight somehow. A ‘real’ book still does it.

The other thing is that when you find a book that ‘speaks’ to you, it is easy to walk into someone’s home or office, and plonk it on the desk, and say, ‘read this, it will change your life’ or even be just interesting.

A mate of mine who makes his living researching and writing complicated tenders for large projects, also writes a blog on words, their use and misuse, origins, and various meanings. One day he will assemble it all into a book, as he has done with an collection of illustrated verse he wrote for his kids, personal stuff that he has shared with them, now in a tattered book they have all loved.

It is hard to love an e-book in the same way.

I love books, perhaps scarcity is just making me realise how much.

 

The 2 faces of a brand

The 2 faces of a brand

Jun 15, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

Marketing and management generally, regularly find themselves actively promoting their branding credentials.

Often they would appear to have no idea beyond the mouthing of clichés why they are bothering.

The costs of building, maintaining and updating a brand is often a major item on the  P&L, and there is much written about the techniques and strategies that deliver a return. However, the core question of ‘Why bother” rarely gets a mention.

Until now.

A brand has two faces:

  1. For the brand owner, a successful brand delivers to its owner a stream of revenue and margin. There is no other reason for the investment necessary for building and maintaining a brand to be made.
  2.  To the customer, a brand offers some level of assurance about the performance, integrity, longevity,  and many other characteristics which to them are important. In other words, the value delivered by the brand, weather that be one defined by the physical performance and characteristics, or the emotional  dimensions of the brand.

“Branding” seems pretty simple, and in principal it is, but the optimisation of the investments made over the long term is the tricky part. This requires expertise and experence pretty hard to find in these days of instant digital gratification.

 

How to make a workshop work for you.

How to make a workshop work for you.

Jun 13, 2016 | Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy

Last week I ran a workshop that was designed to wrinkle out the options facing a community organisation. It has been successful for many years, but now faces the challenge of significantly changed competitive and social environments since its formation,  and the loss of a key person whose mission in life had become intimately tied up with the organisations success.

How was that volunteer passion to be replaced?

What did the future hold for this organisation?

How are they going to continue to win?

There was limited time available, certainly no time for chasing rabbits,  so the structure had to be pretty simple and lead to useful outcomes.  In reality is was bog standard ‘workshopping’

  • What is the current situation?
  • Assuming success for the next five years, what would the organisation look like? (I call this hindsight planning)
  • What had been the strategies, both  successful and unsuccessful that had been tried over the 5 years, leading to the success?
  • What resources and capabilities were now evidently required for the ‘success’ to be replicated in real time?

In starting to write up the workshop over the weekend, and necessarily reviewing my own performance as the exercise leader, I thought about the factors that in the past have made for a successful  workshop beyond the necessary structural elements.

Domain knowledge.

Workshops and so called ‘brainstorm’ efforts commonly fail because there is insufficient  domain knowledge and  expertise available that addresses the key questions central to the purpose of the workshop. Success in any activity requires the presence of some sort of plan, with objectives and metrics, combined with a factual assessment of the circumstances that led to the discussion. Without this level of immersion, the workshop will just be a conversation. ‘Think outside the box’ is often the instruction, but if that leads to random thoughts outside the relevant postcode, it will not add any value, and will be enormously distracting. Domain knowledge, and knowledge related to the domain in some relevant manner is essential.

Roadmap.

As the Mad hatter said to Alice ‘If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there’  you need a map of some sort that includes your starting point and an end point. Without these, you  will go around in aimless, unconnected circles. No workshop of any kind ever works without some sort of map or guidelines understood by everybody involved.

Inspiration.

Inspiration and ideas come from the friction created by differing and often opposing views presented by intelligent and informed people. Rarely is an idea complete at first blush, rarely can an idea not be improved by some level of refinement, and rarely does informed and creative debate not lead to creative solutions and ideas. It takes people prepared to accept that their idea is merely a contributor to a more complete picture, that it is a point in the road that contributes to a better outcome that leads to true inspiration.

Action plan

As with a workshop roadmap, any plan that evolves out of the workshop needs to have a plan, no different to the one that drove the workshop in its structure. As George Patton said on his drive towards berlin in 1945, ‘without a plan you are just a tourist‘.

Implementation.

An imperfect plan today, well implemented is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. Anther of the wise sayings of my old dad, ‘you get 1/10 for a plan, the other 9/10 are kept for the implementation’.

I have seen many workshops that come up with very useful stuff that is just lost or put aside once the participants get back to what they see as their ‘real jobs’ facing the urgency if the daily grind. It takes a good dose of leadership, and often outside  coaching to make the implementation part of a workshop actually part of the daily business of the enterprise.

Required understanding if you are to succeed

Required understanding if you are to succeed

Jun 6, 2016 | Change, Governance, Strategy

Mary Meeker has again produced a report that should be required reading for all who seek to engage with an audience, with the 2016 update of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Internet trends report.

Disregard the previous statement.

It should not be required reading, it should be required understanding.

The 213 slides are filled with data driven insights, some with scary implications for the laggards, and offering some ideas for what is about to come. Ms. Meeker delivers the 213 slides in 20 minutes, no time to dig the detail, she is delivering a series of trends, and leaving the deck for you to ponder the implications and dig where you wish.

  • At some point, Google will set about increasing the returns on the investments so far in the Android operating system, now it has +80% share of mobile systems. Astonishing numbers as Apple is still making all the money.
  • Digital advertising is exploding, but the share of legacy media is way greater than it should be. Mobile advertising is particularly underweighted. However, the use of ad blockers is also exploding, so the creative challenge is a huge one. While it is not in this report, I have seen others that estimate the amount of digital advertising fraud at over 30%, and I suspect that is on the light side. Add in the fact that many advertisers just translate their TV ads into something digital and you will find billions more being wasted.
  • Hyper-targeting of advertising is a fact of life now, privacy be dammed. Strange thing is that our kids, and grandkids are way less sensitive to this that we digital geriatrics who make many of the decisions.
  • Video is exploding, in all its forms, particularly live streaming, and all on mobile. We always knew we are a visual species, but digital is opening an entirely new door to communication, and we have barely had time as yet to make a rudimentary exploration.
  • There is a whole section on China in the report, and the numbers are astonishing. Uber is extolled as one of the poster boys of the exponential growth enabled by the double sided platforms emerging, so look at slide 181 to see how the growth in China dwarfs the growth in other markets. This is just emblematic of  the digital growth occurring in China and across the Asia Pacific generally, with the exception of Australia, that struggles to deliver upload speeds that would embarrass Nigeria. (In the middle of an election campaign, perhaps this is something that should get an airing? Perhaps not, a bit embarrassing for both sides)
  • The last 20 or so slides concentrate on the implications for business. Read and understand, then take some positive action. The only thing you know for sure is that staying still  is not good enough.

Thanks Mary, and crew!