One of the most common complaints about both brand and customer experience tracking research is the tendency for findings to become “stale.” While the primary goal of most trackers is to follow a constant set of metrics, over time—it’s important not to fall into a pattern of reporting on the same metrics by rote, wave after wave without thought about how the market landscape or your own business goals have changed since the initial design of the program.
Here are three ways you can improve the value of the tracking findings; and keep them as useful as possible over time.
- Conduct periodic project steering meetings: Immediately after each presentation/read-out sessions with your internal clients, you should schedule a project steering meeting. The purpose of this meeting is to review the previous wave’s findings; discuss various internal stakeholder reactions to these findings; review long-term trends over the past several waves; and then re-visit the questionnaire, sampling plan, and analysis plan to see where to focus going forward. Overall—this process ensures you are getting the most out of your tracking program by allocating resources to the areas that are most important to your organization and addressing any concerns proactively.
- Use analysis meetings to begin crafting a “story:” After fielding of the questionnaire is completed and the data is cleaned/ certified, it is extremely valuable to conduct analysis meetings to review the “story” that should be the focus of the reports. These meetings start with some hypotheses about interesting stories that the data suggest and provide a forum for client and vendor teams to work together to prioritize time and resources in fleshing things out for the report. This helps minimize the subsequent back-and-forth editing of PPT decks (which can add unnecessary time to the schedule) during the reporting phase and ensures everyone is on the same page. And telling a story instead of sharing endless charts makes the research easier to understand and act on for your non-research colleagues.
- Build in flexibility: A colleague of mine once described traditional trackers as “barges that set out across the ocean,” meaning that they are slow and difficult to turn around once they get moving. For many companies this means that they rely on key metrics to be tracked wave over wave and don’t have a way to address emerging topics over time. With the pace of change in today’s business landscape, this doesn’t work very well. Building in a flexible module (different each wave) allows you to deep dive into issues identified in prior waves, so that every quarter or you are also measuring specific, topical issues without having to run a separate project.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
This past week’s episode of the always awesome show Mad Men (episode 2, season 4) highlighted the ongoing disconnect between agency creatives and market research that most everyone in the market research industry has experienced at one point or another in their career.
In the episode, the newly formed agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is visited by a consumer-research company who wants to help the agency go beyond the surface of consumer behaviors and better understand their true motivations. The company's female representative, Dr. Faye Miller, asks senior staffers to complete a questionnaire as an example of what can be learned (the 0:57 mark of the recap below), leading to groans and the head of creative, Don Draper, to simply leave the room. Viewers of the show will recognize that Don’s departure was most likely driven by the first question, "How do you feel about your father?" Still, the faces in the room did point out how agencies tend to regard market research.
So, why do agencies have a problem with market research firms? I think there is shared blame in four primary areas.
Not speaking the same language: Perhaps it is a left brain/right brain thing, or maybe it is because no two groups of professionals that work together are trained in more different ways, but the natural conflict between the analytical, risk reducing market researcher and the free expression and boundary pushing creative executive often makes the dichotomy between the two roles contentious from the start. To work in tandem, both sides need to recognize this difference in approach and find a common ground up front that will help the findings be more useful and give creatives information that helps their process instead of undermining it.
Data Presentation: Market researchers generally present findings in charts and graphs with a heavy focus on the numbers, not the story. Agency folks are focused on creating stories using pictures and video. While creating research reports that fit the intended audience (using a majority of verbatim, imagery, and even video instead of charts and tables) will not solve everything, it will help focus the conversation on things that really matter.
Pride of Authorship: Agencies, and particularly creative teams within agencies have a healthy pride of authorship/confidence level about the work that they do. Don Draper, for one, is the king of thinking he knows better than consumers themselves. This trait helps agencies deliver more than the status quo, and can also lead to the dismissal of research results. Agencies and research firms need to have a healthy conversation about the validity of research findings and do so in a constructive way that is working with, not against the creative pride.
Clarity of Purpose: Agencies and market research firms often come at an engagement from completely different angles that make it hard for those of us on the research side. In many cases, agencies believe that research firms are being brought in to “judge” what they are doing, where as researchers see their role as providing input into the creative process. Again, clear communication at the beginning and throughout the project about the process, objectives, and use of the findings can help smooth this tension so that both sides are working towards a common goal; a happy client (and one that is easier to take than Lee Garner, Jr.).
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Don Draper might not have used it, but you can download our report on Engaging Consumers in the New Normal for free here.
In my blog post about multi-source, multi-method research last week I talked about the explosion in qualitative techniques over the past few years. Tomorrow’s webinar about Innovations in Product and Service Development Research touches on some of the recent improvements in quantitative research as well.
The webinar starts at Noon ET and will feature CMB's Rich Schreuer and Amy Modini as they share the latest best practices and case studies from their years of conducting product and service development research across verticals. (Click here to watch).
If you’d like to see how some of these techniques feel from a respondent perspective, click on the link for each to go through our demo questionnaires.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
I spent most of this week at the 2010 Shopper Insights in Action Conference, which is always one of my favorite events of the year because unlike many market research related conferences the attendees are eager to push the edges and try new and different ways to understand consumers. Even though they employ traditional techniques, they are hardly wed to them and epitomize the concept of multi-method, multi-source research (using multiple types of data and data sources to answer a question.)
We’ve been talking about multi-source, multi-method for years at CMB, but it is pretty amazing how much the landscape has changed even in just the last four years. Searching through the article archives I found a 2006 article that laid out many of the available qualitative tools, and it feels (how do I say this nicely?) a bit outdated.
While a quick perusal of today’s list is a bit overwhelming, I am certain there are plenty of options that I failed to include. There is both a challenge and an opportunity in the fact that consumers are smarter than ever and willing to provide more robust and useful insights than ever before. Between technology that simulates real world experiences and improvements in our ability to listen to consumers in their own environment, there is no shortage of ways to give and receive feedback. The hard part is choosing the right technique or set of techniques for a given situation and making sure that information users understand the biases and limitations of each.
With all of the available options, what new tools have you added to the tool box in the last 4 years?
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
As we get ready for this year's Shopper Insights in Action Conference, we are taking a look back at last year's co-presentation by Stephen Day of Electronic Arts and CMB's Brant Cruz on research to help with the launch of EA Active, EA's entree into the fitness gaming market.
Following last year's session Stephen was kind of enough to sit down for a quick interview on the topic.
CMB: What were the big takeaways from your presentation?
This segmentation really helped us define and refine what we are doing on this specific product (EA Active) in the marketplace. For this product in particular, we didn’t have a whole lot of data about who we should market to, who these people are, etc., so it really helped us not only really understand this marketplace and market to them in a way that makes sense.
CMB: One of the things you talked about was using in home ethnography on the front end and the quantitative ethnography on the back end, how did you merge those two information sources together?
The qualitative was really used more to guide the product development and refinement phase, along with some demographic information. We used the data from that to help our product development efforts. With the segmentation we incorporated some product development components but really looked down the line at the product development road map to match key segments with new innovative products once we’re out of the gate with this initial offering.
CMB: Was there anything in particular you think made this segmentation particularly successful or useful?
The segmentation for us, at a holistic level, was exactly what we needed. We didn’t know a lot about the fitness marketplace in general. We had ideas and hypotheses but this helped us clarify the internal thinking about where we need to go and what we need to do. And it really helped us map out the future of this product line.
CMB: Now that you’ve launched EA Active, how will you use this information?
We’re definitely going to use it. Going forward we’ll be looking at some of the specific segments you (CMB) recommended as high priority segments that we can develop products for, and market to effectively. It is definitely going to help us clarify the road map for future product development and product market strategies.
CMB: As we wrap up here at the Shopper Insights in Action Conference, any big takeaways you can use?
The one big takeaway for me and for us as a company is that we really need to do a bit more research that enables us to get into the mind-set of the shopper. We haven’t done a whole lot of work in that area. Our work is primarily focused on product development and product marketing, but given the status of the economy and changing times I think it is more critical now to understand consumer behavior at the point of purchase so we can design the best products and services for them.
CMB: Thanks Stephen!
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
My name is Josh. I am 34 years old and a pretty smart guy. I know almost nothing about insurance. And I am not alone.
For much of my life I was on my parents' insurance plans. When I moved out on my own I adopted their auto insurance carrier as my own and took the recommendation of my employer for my health insurance carrier and plan. And as I move into the next phase of my life with my wife, dog, and baby boy, I know I need Life Insurance but am paralyzed by the process. In February we conducted market research with over 1500 consumers about their knowledge of their insurance coverage and how they educate themselves about their coverage, finding that many young people are like me, admitting they don't have a good understanding of their insurance coverage in general, wishing they knew more.
Of course, this presents a great opportunity for insurance carriers who target Gen Y and even moreso for those targeting Milennials, 30% of which admitted they don't have a good understanding of their insurance coverage in general, with 57% of them wishing they had a better understanding. Sure, everyone knows the duck and the cavemen and all of the other insurance mascots and icons, but which carriers are taking it further to actually help young consumers make smart decisions about their insurance options.
One company that seems to be moving in the right direction is State Farm. Marketing Daily reported today that State Farm is releasing new TV spots this fall and have launched a new micro site, WhyAgent.com featuring comedian Ben Posner with all the reasons (some pretty funny) why you need an agent. This is an aggressive push for this segment of the market, and our recent consumer pulse data indicates that's probably a smart move for State Farm.
So how will State Farm reach this younger generation? Online seems to be the most likely channel. According to the research mentioned earlier, over half (56%) of 18-24 year olds do their insurance research online, while 28% will call the company directly, 34% will speak with an agent and 37% will ask their friends for recommendations. State Farm's big online push with YouTube videos and the new micro site is a great approach, but with 37% asking their friends for recommendations it seems as though more robust social media strategies would have to be on the radar as well. (See what Allstate is doing.)
Buying insurance can be confusing and daunting regardless of age, but even more so for the younger crowd. Like ING Direct did so well in the financial services space, there is a great opportunity for carriers to engage with Gen Y and Millenials through new messaging and media in an educational way. And with brand awareness extremely high for all of the major carriers it seems time for many to move towards helping people buy with trust and confidence, even if the message is sent through Youtube.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Last week I was riding home on the T (that's our subway here in Boston) and using my iPhone to check in on one of my fantasy baseball teams when I was recruited to take a CBS survey through their mobile app. After starting to participate (but not completing due to length) I came back to a question that is always on my mind when it comes to mobile research, are we as an industry spending too much time developing "mobile" ways of doing research instead of optimizing our online research for mobile devices?
For even the largest research firms, development time is limited and prioritizing resources is extremely important, so where should we be spending our time?
The case for truly mobile surveys: Conducting surveys using a mobile app allows you to recruit people to participate based on their mobile behaviors or enabling them to opt-in based on an activity they are currently participating in. It also ensures that the survey will be formatted correctly for use on the go. If you can keep it very short (a requirement for truly mobile surveys), you can get information at the point of experience that can guide improvements to the customer experience.
The case for mobile friendly surveys: As smartphone adoption continues to swell and the web browsers for even non-smartphones improve at a rapid pace, people are using their mobile devices as a primary, or at least heavily used secondary way to interact with the internet. This means that the people who are most interested in your products, services, etc. are checking and acting on their email from mobile devices. It also means that many of your "web" surveys are actually being completed via mobile devices. Or at least people are attempting to complete them via mobile devices. Researchers and panel companies need to recognize this fact and set parameters for layout and length that work with today's consumers.
So which is more important?
In the short term, I believe it is more important that every quantitative survey launched become mobile friendly and that how people are participating be asked up front. This may impact the ability to use interactive questions and shorten the attention span of the people you want to get feedback from, but failure to do this means that you could be making it impossible (or at least very difficult) for your target audiences to participate. After all, people who participate are a key audience for the market research industry and we all need to act in the way that best suits them and their evolving needs and behaviors.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
There is a very interesting conversation going on right now in the Consumer Insights Group on LinkedIn about the future of the marketing research profession and how researchers and firms must adapt to be successful in the long term. There are new methods, skill sets, and mindsets that will be needed and placing a big bet on something new can be both a great opportunity, or potentially a colossal failure.
Among all of the forward looking talk, one of the comments captured a common, yet very real mindset with the research industry:
"We all talk big..but we have families to raise, mouths to feed, futures to protect, not to mention our backs and our very jobs. So..it's wonderful..really wonderful..to talk about the Brave New World of WHAT'S NEEDED. The problem is...when it's really down to the short hairs, it's REVENUE & SECURITY. And..in our wonderful business...that comes back to:
1. Do you have norms (G-d forbid you offer something new, without 20 years of norms...next candidate please)?
2. Do you have proven statistics that prevent our in-house cynics (or even us) from saying 'Yeah..we know..we're already doing that'?
3. Most important...do you have a prospective buyer IN A NEED STATE?"
Upon reading this I understood right away what the author meant. But I also thought to myself: "We rarely use norms and benchmarks and get on quite well." Certainly benchmarks play an important role in driving improvement for some companies, but they are not always all they are cracked up to be.
Chadwick Martin Bailey's chairman, John Martin, is generally not a believer in using benchmarks, especially when they are used blindly. At this year's MRA (Market Research Association) Annual Conference (June 9 here in Boston) he'll be presenting "The Perils of Benchmarking: 10 things to consider when deciding how you should benchmark against the market."
In this presentation, John lays out some of the challenges facing organizations who benchmark blindly and why benchmarking is bad for market leaders. After the conference we'll share the entire deck, but as you think about whether or not you are using benchmarks for good, as yourself three questions:
- What is the role of market oriented benchmarking and benchmarks in your company?
- Do they accommodate the market and organizational realities of today and tomorrow?
- Are you caught in the myopia of using standardized external sourced competitive benchmarks to diagnose for improvements?
In fact, those are the questions you should be asking about all of your measurement programs. Are they adapting to the realities of today and tomorrow or just rehashing old questions and techniques. The world of marketing is changing and both supplier and client side researchers can't afford to be left behind.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, his family, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Today's eMarketer email features an article about the relatively slow adoption of social media by B2B marketers. While some companies have jumped in quickly - and often without a plan - those that are slow to engage may lack executive support or have concerns about privacy, legal issues, or staffing.
And even for those who are ready to engage, while the venue selection is obvious for many consumer focused companies, B2B marketers often need to look beyond the mainstream social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn to find the best opportunities to make an impact.
Our clients at AMD faced a similar situation. They knew they wanted to be active, but weren't sure how to prioritize. So after jumping into social media they took a step back to examine who their key audiences were and where they were active, which venues they needed to engage in, and what people were willing to accept from their brand.
Want to learn more about social media research? Watch our webinar featuring Georgeanna Liu and Chris James from AMD as they present a case study of how CMB conducted market research to support key social media strategy decisions and how AMD is using it today. Watch here.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Recently I have been playing around with Foursquare, the geo-targeting based social media application that allows me to "check in" at certain locations, share my "check in" with friends via Twitter and Facebook, and earn "badges" based on how much I use it. I'll be honest, as a consumer I don't fully get it (yet). But as a marketer in 2010 I want to understand where things are going and be able to speak to them as they relate to our clients. And with today's eMarketer report that 53% of mobile app users are willing to share their locations, there is no question that there is a huge opportunity for brands to utilize this technology.
Certainly geo-targeting is not for everyone, but some major brands are going beyond mobile ads and jumping in to help increase the impact of their loyalty programs and reward their best customers in real-time. And as many companies seek to evolve their loyalty programs in the "new economy," it's key to understand if your target customers are interested in being marketed to and rewarded in this way and where there is an opportunity to serve them.
Here are three examples of companies who have made significant steps to engage via mobile, geo-based applications and go beyond just geo-based ads.
1. Pepsi's Pepsi Loot program
PepsiCo is in the process of launching Pepsi Loot, an iPhone app that utilizes geo-targeting for consumers to find nearby restaurants that serve their beverages. The app and Pepsi Loot program is designed to engage customers at key partners like national chains including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Arby's and Panda Express as well as at individual restaurants with Pepsi contracts, Schelling says.
"It's all about how you engage with consumers, and it's all about how consumers are living their lives," Margery Schelling, chief marketing officer for PepsiCo Foodservice, told Marketing Daily. "I don't know any consumers who aren't traveling around with their phones." "It's a big equalizer," she says. "It's bringing a lot of awareness to some of our smaller partners." (Read more at MediaPost)
2. Starbucks discounts for Foursquare Mayors
Earlier this week Starbucks announced that they will be giving discounts to Foursquare "mayors" at their locations. (For the uninitiated, Every time you check-in to a location, foursquare keeps track of your activity if you are the most frequent visitor to a location, you will become the mayor of that location. As mayor, you may be entitled to a variety of freebies.) While Starbucks was already giving away "badges" to their mayors, this new promotion takes the testing of foursquare as a marketing tool to another level with real rewards by identifying and rewarding their most loyal customers with a discount. In turn, it could spark increased visits by those seeking the discount and the "mayor" status. (Read more at Mashable.)
3. Tasti-Lite's TastiRewards
A few months ago, Tasti D-Lite, the frozen dessert chain popular in New York, took a huge step forward with its social media rewards program, TastiRewards. The program is pretty simple and incentivizes customers to associate their Twitter and Foursquare accounts with their Tasti D-Lite membership cards.
Customers could already use their TreatCards to earn rewards points based on their purchases, but those that opt in to the social media bonuses earn additional points automatically. And as a promotional vehicle, Tasti D-Lite updates the customers' Twitter and Foursquare accounts each time their card is swiped and points are earned or redeemed. (Read more at Mashable)
More than ever brands need to understand how to take advantage of social media, including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, customer forums, and newer geo-based options like Foursquare and Gowalla. The opportunities to enhance traditional marketing/customer engagement strategies are growing by the day but the landscape for each brand and segment is different. This requires constant learning and testing, but market research is a key component as well.
So while most "social media research" is focused on counting and sentiment analysis, conducting primary research about social media is also becoming a must. Whether it's the sole purpose of the project or you are just building modules about social media into future segmentation, brand, and customer experience research, you need to understand how your customers are engaging and to what extent they are willing to engage with you and what they want or expect in return.
Posted by Josh Mendelsohn. Josh is our VP of Marketing and loves live music, tv, great food, market research, New Orleans, marketing, Boston and sports. You can follow him on Twitter @mendelj2.
Want to learn more about social media research? Watch our webinar featuring Georgeanna Liu and Chris James from AMD as they present a case study of how CMB conducted market research to support key social media strategy decisions and how AMD is using it today. Watch here.