Eye Tracking Revisited

A few years ago, I looked at Tobii's cool eye tracking technology as a possible means of evaluating the effectiveness of paint color merchandisers. I ended up getting a new job before I could complete the project, which was a crying shame given the phenomenally stupid metrics the company was using at the time to determine effectiveness of the display, such as number of color chips pulled per year. Like discrete choice research or any of the other "real life" simulation tools gaining in popularity (has anyone seen the growth of Affinova lately?), eye tracking opened the potential for us to figure out what the consumer really wanted to see rather than what we thought we wanted the consumer to see.

So I was excited to see that one of the Next Gen Market Research 2012 award winners was a company I had never heard about called Eye Track Shop. They claim to have perfected the ability to perform eye tracking using a regular Webcam rather than using expensive equipment like Tobii requires. If market researchers on the client side got the tiniest bit creative with this technology and it really worked, this change in cost could offer a revolution in a huge number of businesses.

Even in our business making industrial hardware, the user interface is critical. We now have the potential to borrow a handful of users for short periods of time over the Web to get reactions to early prototypes before we spend millions on tooling for a product that wouldn't otherwise gain user acceptance. We could also easily test iterations of our asset management console to see what improvements made it more user-friendly. We could even present prospects with versions of our trade show displays to determine what grabbed the most attention.

Imagine the possibilities! What about A/B testing on physical packaging without ever having to ship the package? Store display pre-testing for seasonal merchandising? Improved impact testing of direct mail calls to action? All now possible with inexpensive eye tracking.

Makes me want to start a market research firm. Stay tuned.

Read This Now

I was lucky to attend business school with some really smart folks. One is Kerry Edelstein, who founded Research Narrative a year ago today. She has a great post today about interesting questions in media research. It's worth reading particularly because of the emphasis on the business decisions made based on the research. You all know I'm a huge fan of determining the decision you're going to make before doing the research, so I couldn't agree more.

Attention to all full-service market research firms out there: don't forget the message! I always prefer you to come back with a viewpoint. If I don't like what the research said, I can dispute your interpretation with facts, but I (hopefully, if you have done good research) can't dispute the facts themselves. Now, it's up to you to present a story about the facts and help me understand what to do as a result. Then listen to me and help guide my restatement of the story in a way I can tell management.

If Kerry continues to do that for her clients, Research Narrative should go far.

Poll Watchers Beware

Every presidential election year, I find myself re-addicted to an awesome source of polling data, pollingreport.com. These guys aggregate the raw results of various independent polls and post them in a mostly unexpurgated format. I only wish I could do cross-tabs to break down the results further (e.g., by number of Democrats versus Republicans, age, sex, income, and so forth). Frankly, I find the raw data much more enlightening than much of the terrible commentary. [One notable exception to the usual polling pablum was today's excellent Dianne Rehm show with two experts breaking down the polling into the necessary detail.]

Particularly telling is the number of people who are "unsure" or "refused" as reported in some of these polls. The numbers are as high as 8% in some polls, suggesting that a lot of people are either still undecided, are dedicated to the old-fashioned privacy policy about politics, or are just sick of being asked. Nevertheless, one sees that Obama has quite a lead in a number of these polls when voters are given the option to be unsure.

I often find that business executives want to ignore the "don't know" responses in survey data. I believe they think the results are somehow less meaningful if a lot of respondents don't know the answers. On the contrary, I think executives can learn a lot when people are given the "don't know" option.

For example, when I was on the Paint Consumers Research Program board, we changed the survey to allow respondents to say "don't know" when asked what price they paid for paint. Not only did we get much more accurate results, we discovered that almost half of respondents don't know what they paid, even when the purchase was a month ago or less. From this, I learned that price is a lot less important than I think most paint industry executives think it is. In fact, I believe that price point (low, middle or high in the store's assortment) is probably much more critical in paint buyers' decisions than actual real price. This effect could explain in part why consumers are willing to pay $50 per gallon at Sherwin-Williams when they can get decent paint at $35 per gallon at Lowe's or Home Depot.

Some of the most important decisions in new product development fall to market research interpretation, so I believe everyone involved needs to take a closer look at the results. Surprisingly, for example, the products most likely to succeed are often the products with the most positive responses and the most negative responses. When respondents rate new product ideas, the lack of a strong visceral reaction usually indicates disinterest whereas a strong negative reaction can mean that they have a real interest in the product but are not willing to buy it themselves. A number of market research startups have popped up recently to capitalize on this idea by having respondents design products "for other people" instead of making decisions with themselves in mind.

Perhaps this could be good news for Mitt Romney, whose negative ratings have been going through the roof lately. But not if you subscribe to the idea that real money markets can predict presidential elections. If that is true, our next four years will be Obama's second term.

The Globalization Dilemma

My present job includes "Pricing Manager" among the various job descriptions. Facing a challenge in getting IT time to fix our quoting tool (let's face it -- who hasn't had this problem at a company that is not Google?), I turned again as I have in the past to outsourcing. I have successfully used Guru.com in the past to find someone to do the work, but this time I turned to oDesk due to the nature of the work. Within days, I had found a Ukrainian developer with an amazing command of English and 20 years of experience in Java and Visual Basic including extensive work on Excel applications.

As I symbolic analyst, I often find this kind of experience troubling. When it comes down to it, most of my job could be performed anywhere in the world. I often suspect that most of the companies that hire me could find someone in India with my exact qualifications plus a Ph.D. and a background in computer science for 70% of my salary. George, my new Ukranian developer, earns $25 an hour for doing work for which I would probably pay $45 an hour at a minimum in the U.S. His English is so good that he knew the idiomatic phrase, "The devil is in the details." [Funny note of the day: in Ukranian, the literal translation of their equivalent phrase would be, "If your head is stupid on details, your legs go this way and that."]

On the bright side, this kind of internationalization means that local understanding and specialized skills can be in demand anywhere. For the market research expert in me, I find the outsourcing experience liberating because I know that some of my expertise and specialization in the U.S. consumer and B2B research market cannot be matched by someone else. Moreover, the internationalization gives me the opportunity to apply these skills to companies interested in selling into the U.S.

As a sidebar, I am in love with oDesk's awesome contractor time tracking tool called "Work Diary." It takes snapshots of your contractor's work periodically to show what they have been doing with their time. From the client's perspective, this approach gives me confidence that the contractor is working on my job when he says he is working. From the contractor's perspective, Work Diary makes it easy to track billable hours to your client and provides proof that you are billing for legitimate work if the client questions what is taking so long on an hourly project.

I foresee a future in which the percentage of work done on this kind of contract basis goes up dramatically. I can imagine that a number of companies interested in entering the U.S. market would not want to hire a market research professional full-time to do the market entry due diligence and might not have the money (or knowledge or project management abilities) to employ a full-service market research firm. These firms might turn to someone like me for a time-limited engagement that would expand their knowledge as much as they need to take the first steps in the U.S.

Overall, I think I am looking forward to this future, working on varied engaging projects for a range of interesting companies. I just have to get over my natural fear of being replaced by someone less expensive.

Inspiration Versus Perspiration

You've heard that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? Well, I was interested to read a few months ago an insightful article on Wells Fargo and their success in retail and commercial banking. The relatively new CEO John Stumpf states that a good strategy flawlessly executed will always win versus a brilliant strategy poorly executed.

I would personally modify that statement a bit. I believe that a good strategy enables flawless execution but does not ensure it. In other words, a good strategy is necessary but not sufficient to win.  I would say that company success is 20% strategy and 80% execution. But you can't get the 80% right without the 20%.

I advocate the concept of "employee bandwidth" in management. The executive team has only a certain amount of time in the day, so anything that distracts their focus from work critical to the future of the company will ultimately help to sink the company. Having a single strategy, with elements that are mutually reinforcing and move towards a common goal, enables everyone to use their limited bandwidth to drive towards greater customer insight and profitability.

Where does market research come in to this equation? Done properly, the market researcher stands at the vanguard of understanding customer value. When communicated properly to executive management and the company at large, the market researcher has the unique responsibility to explain how to break value compromises that customers have endured in the past.

Take Southwest Airlines as an example again. The market researcher should have explained that pleasure travellers are willing to give up many perks of flying to get a better price. They are willing to give up free food, assigned seats, flight attendants in uniform, first class seating, entertainment options, non-stop flights, but not on-time arrival. Southwest Airlines could therefore orient their "value" offering to eliminate most perks as long as turning around the plane quickly (a key to their strategy) did not result in late departures.

Most of Southwest Airlines' approach helps to ensure that they can turn planes around quickly and still achieve one of the best on-time records in the industry. Nevertheless, their strategy has been devilishly difficult to implement. In fact, Herb Kelleher repeatedly has taunted his competitors to try his approach because he knows how difficult it is.

Difficult-to-execute strategies are not bad; in fact, they are excellent. "Difficult to replicate" equals "long-term competitive advantage." The history of companies attempting to copy Southwest Airlines is filled with failures, and I can only think of one partial success (Alaskan Airlines).

The great moment for the market research professional is the moment at which the strategy has been set, and the company is desperate for more information on what the customer is or is not willing to give up to get the benefit your company now offers. If you're offering a complete ecosystem of products that work seamlessly together, is the customer willing to give up in-person service? If you're offering the same product as competitors for half the price, is the customer willing to order direct instead of going through a distributor? If you're offering unparalleled service, is the target customer willing to pay a premium price and still give up ever going into a physical store? Market research can and should be spending money to find out these secrets.

The Research Nobody Hears

I just returned from Gartner's 2012 supply chain conference, one of 63 of these kinds of events they will hold this year alone. It's a three-day slog that extends to five days when I added a Sunday night meeting with the analysts (requiring me to leave Pittsburgh at 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning) and a Thursday return flight to avoid the red-eye. Highlights: I met lots of interesting executives, talked to some potential prospects and danced to the hotel band's excellent renditions of Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas.

As for the meeting content itself... I was less than impressed. I averaged about two insights per hour, which does not nearly meet my goal number. Even the session on results of the "2011 End-User Wants and Needs Survey" underwhelmed me. Come on, Gartner analysts, you have an entire study with enough sample size to do interesting cross-tabs, and all you can produce for me is four data slides? Ultimately, the lack of data, combined with the persistent "talk at me" format of which Vocollect is as guilty as Gartner, got me to thinking about market research.

I have produced many studies with great insights over my ten years in market research and five years in consulting. Sometimes, I couldn't get people together to discuss the results. Other times, I couldn't interest the key decision-makers in implementing the clear recommendations from the research even when those same decision-makers requested the study in the first place. Still other times, someone else presented the results of the research in a way that obscured some significant findings.

In each of these cases, we were almost better off having not done the research at all because market research that does not get communicated or used is essentially just empty spending. The results stay hidden, so the company ends up failing to act based on customer wants and needs as opposed to acting on instinct and experience. Keeping those failures in mind (my own and others'), I humbly offer several suggestions for getting research noticed:

1. Schedule several times to present the research to different audiences. One research presentation is not enough. Finance wants different insight from sales who want different insight from marketing. Cut the data several different ways and show it to each audience with cross-tabs that answer their particular questions.
2. Bring up the research at every opportunity. Schedule meetings. Send out blast e-mails. Write internal white papers. Invite yourself to meetings on the same topic as the research even when you might not be welcome. Talk about the research at staff meetings. Promise custom cuts of the data based on hallway discussions. Be unavoidable until the insights stick.
3. Help to operationalize the findings. Although it will be more difficult to present a case study or working group format, you will see much better implementation. Turn the research into a project in your meeting (e.g., "Let's break into three groups and brainstorm changes we're planning to make based on the findings. In 20 minutes, we'll regroup and discuss which ones we can implement right away and which ones we can change over the long term.")
4. Revisit key questions. Did the research raise additional questions you can answer through informal qualitative work? Go do it yourself, use your staff or salesforce or current customers to do so, or leverage other past research to answer these questions. This strategy has the added benefit of gaining buy-in for future spending if necessary.
5. Pester the senior executives. The division VP missed your briefing? Schedule one with her yourself as a one-on-one. If she's game, I guarantee that 30 minutes will go further to result in operationalizing results than many of the suggestions above.
6. Archive the work in a public place. Make the research easy to refer back to, especially by the people who will be doing the groundwork later. If you can get them to attribute the reasoning by quoting or sourcing your study, it will be even better.

Speaking of which, I think I owe our new SVP and General Manager a call. I don't think he's seen my past year of work yet.

Confusing Questionnaires

The new Disney movie Chimpanzee is out in theaters, and it got raves from CinemaScore, a market research firm that rates films based on feedback from opening night viewers. This approach ostensibly helps the studio decide how much additional money to put into advertising.

I saw a funny quote in a news article recently about the film:

On a curious note, 5 percent of CinemaScore participants said a main reason for attending the film was its "lead actor." Were they referring to the film's two lead apes? Or narrator Tim Allen? Even stranger, 1 percent listed "lead actress" as their reason for buying a ticket -- and that 1 percent gave the movie a harsh "B-" grade. Clearly those individuals were upset by the documentary's lack of actresses.

My take is this: this is a questionnaire problem, not a viewer confusion problem. Take a look at the CinemaScore questionnaire card as shown at Wikipedia. It reveals a very simple, paper-based form, the major features of which is a grade from "A" to "F" a la a student report card. From this card, I conclude the following things:

• The focus of the card is on the overall rating, suggesting that the other data will be less than perfect. This approach is appropriate for the purpose of the card but also subject to misinterpretation by uneducated interpreters. Conclusion: always be wary of the potential misinterpretation of your data once it gets out of your hands.
• The form of questionnaire and sampling technique (paper-based intercept survey) does not allow much flexibility for the interview, resulting in some strange question choices--hence the problem in the quote above about "lead actor." Conclusion: take survey results through the lens of how well the survey actually matches the customer behavior.
• The CinemaScore system purportedly does a good job of its primary purpose: predicting the box office success of films. Conclusion: don't necessarily change your market research approach because the data look skewed.

I learned this last lesson in spades when I helped to revise the Paint Consumers Research Program questionnaire a few years ago. The previous questionnaire had asked "brand purchased" as an open-ended question, resulting in some people saying they purchased Behr paint at Lowe's, where the brand is not currently available. We tried to fix this problem by prompting respondents to answer the store first and then showing only brands that were available through that store.

The new approach helped, but I only realized after we launched the survey that we failed to add a "don't know" option to both the store list and the brand list. Thus, if you chose "Lowe's" when you really shopped at Home Depot, you would not see "Behr" and potentially have some of the same confusion the original survey had. My take-away was to take care in the future not to dismiss automatically the results of a survey just because some of the results were skewed. Because sometimes the "fix" can cause new problems as well.

Employment Branding

Fortune magazine's most admired companies list for 2012 is out. Ever wonder why Disney is #13 on "most admired" but does not even appear on Fortune's list of best companies to work for in the United States? The reason is a gap between the corporate brand and the "employment brand."

Just as a brand helps make positive associations for the product for potential consumers and a corporate brand helps make positive associations for a company's products under the corporate umbrella, an employment brand makes positive associations for the consumers of the company's jobs. In this case, the "consumers" are potential employees, and the "product" is the jobs they are advertising at the time.

Just like a regular brand, your employment brand helps you with the four P's of marketing, in this case the product being the job itself and company culture, the price being pay and benefits, the place being the realms through which you promote jobs such as LinkedIn Jobs and Monster.com, and the promotion being the materials you use to talk about the company (e.g., Website) and even ways you talk about the company during the interview process itself. Each item has a potentially significant impact on the talent you can attract.

Changes to these four areas don't just happen by accident. At Vocollect, for example, we have an innovative way to interview prospective candidates on the "visit day" that makes the process smoother and faster for applicants. This process helped me understand our collaborative and innovative culture and helped attract me to the company. Other elements of the "product" such as the game room with pinball and ping-pong tables helped position the company as still a cool tech company despite our relative maturity.

Employment branding is a critical consideration for HR in an era of competition for some of the most skilled positions. If you disagree with me, someday try hiring a skilled product manager with a degree in computer science and experience in a full cycle product development process from concept to launch. You'll find it's not as simple as just paying more than the competition. In fact, I know some engineers who just ignore the recruiter calls these days because, despite the potentially better pay, they just "can't be bothered" given how well-paid and happy they are right now.

Understanding where HR falls short requires some serious market research among the target hire population. To my amazement given this talent shortage, in my experience there are only a few research companies thinking seriously about this topic.  One is Gallup, the polling-organization-turned-consulting-firm, which has devoted an entire practice to employment branding. Another is Kenexa, a consulting firm that specializes in the topic. Global firms such as Ipsos seem to have pockets of interest in employment branding worldwide, most notably in the UK office.  Maritz Research has clearly done work in this area but doesn't highlight it very well.

So here's my challenge to some of the "big guns" out there: trumpet your employment branding market research better on the Web, in articles and even in the comments below. There is a latent market out there waiting to improve companies' hiring processes. And improving the interview processes and the jobs themselves for all of us who are occasionally in the job market.

Nobody Knows Your Product Exists

Periodically, I am asked to find out how much prospective customers of the companies for which I'm working know about the company's products. I'm always amazed at how little they typically know. I am also typically astounded how much the executive team thinks our customers and prospects know about us.

After so many years, however, this knowledge chasm no longer surprises me. It's natural for us to imagine our market knows about us and follows our every move--after all, we spend all of our time thinking about our company. Why shouldn't the prospect or customer do so too?

Put yourself in the customer's shoes for a moment. If you're reading this blog, you probably work at a company and perhaps have a say in some of the things that company buys. How much do you really know about any of your vendors? Does it come near to the amount you know about your own product or service?

Years ago, I worked at Dollar Bank, a regional bank with a fairly large customer base among small businesses. My boss talked about a particular small business owner who was also a private banking customer. He called his Relationship Manager one way to rail against us for not being available by phone on the weekends. He hadn't realized that we had phone banking, despite the fact that we had implemented weekend hours in the telephone banking center fifteen years earlier. And touted those hours on marketing materials. And on the website. And in every single bank statement. And in mailing inserts. And in TV commercials.

I believe that many companies think that if they have a great product, it will eventually sell itself the way Google and Facebook have done. I disagree. Google and Facebook are the exceptions that prove the rule: almost nobody knows your product exists. Proving the rule are companies like my current company Vocollect, which has a proven product that has saved money at almost every single one of the thousands of user sites where we have implemented and yet continues to face prospect skepticism. It's a proven solution that will boost productivity at any distribution center at least 10% and usually more like 20-30%, and yet I hear every day from prospects and even some current customers about objections to sale that are just plain wrong, as proven at the >80% of the top 75 US/Canada grocery retailers who are Vocollect customers.

I thought about this lack of prospect knowledge recently when I heard about Asana, the company former Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz started. By all accounts, when I go to the Website, it looks like a pretty cool company. Whether it will be successful, I think, depends at least partly on whether anybody ever learns that it exists. Based on a cursory look at their staffing in the marketing area and from their apparent marketing efforts, I think they believe in the Google/Facebook non-model for marketing.

Good luck, Dustin.

Don't Forget the Benefits

I'm weighing in with my favorite Super Bowl spot. I liked the Cars.com commercial featuring the car buyer with an extra head sprouted out of his back. "Sorry, that's my confidence. It's been coming out a lot lately ever since I compared prices on Cars.com."

There's not a lot of mumbo-jumbo here. Ability to compare cars and prices = greater confidence in the buying decision. The funny and catchy imagery (not to mention the singing head) get our attention, and the setup delivers the product benefit.

I can barely name the benefits in some of the other ads. Dependable Chevy trucks and... now I'm coming up short. It seems that many of the companies forgot either to make the ads memorable or to remind us of the chief product benefit.

I have seen lots of criticism of the Cars.com ad, which leads me to my main point: once you have an ad that delivers some audience attention and the product benefit, you're about halfway done. It may be tempting in the research to eliminate ads that score very high on positives but also very high on negatives, but these polarizing ideas in the market research are often the best in delivering outcomes. A salute to Cars.com for ignoring the potential detractors and delivering a commercial that makes me want to use Cars.com to shop for cars.

A last note: one key measure of an advertisement's success is its repeatability. Judging how much that annoying singing head's music got into my brain, the repeatability measure may be a problem here. I'll tell you in a few weeks whenever I stop hearing , "I wanna buy that car!" over and over in my head.

Operationalizing Research

I just finished a project interviewing some of our leading Vocollect customers who have implemented voice in a workflow other than selection. (For those of you who don't know the distribution center space, selection or "picking" is the most labor-intensive operation in the DC with the most product touchpoints and therefore the most common place to implement voice-directed picking.) The next task: operationalizing these results with the salesforce.

I suddenly realized at the end of the project that I didn't know enough about what our salespeople are doing on sales calls today, so I spent some time on the phone with the team members. I learned some important things that will help me create a sales tool that the salesperson might actually use. In the process, I also collected some best practices that I can consolidate and share along with my market research.

In my experience, marketing departments all too often create products, programs or promotions without enough input from sales. I recently described this to my friend Prakash, one of our product managers, as "projectile vomiting over a wall." After a short while, the salesperson is more likely to put up an umbrella to avoid the vomit rather than putting up a bucket to try to catch your marketing spew. Just getting input from the sales guy does not mean you have to listen to everything he says, but you might get a better result in the implementation.

Market research and customer intelligence both improve the effectiveness of the sales team but only if sales actually believes and uses the information.

The Value of Market Research

My old market research professor Anand Bodapati at UCLA Anderson School of Management used to spend a lot of time warning against doing market research without understanding the goals of the project and the business decision that the research will help to answer. This emphasis counts as one of the reasons that I consider my time in Professor Bodapati's class some of the best spent hours of my academic career.

When should a company do market research? The answer to this question ought to depend on the value of the research versus the potential profitability. Many business schools teach a traditional method of evaluating this value based on Bayes' Rule, a technique that has some support and lots of criticism, some of the criticism going back thirty years or more.

What's a marketing manager to do? I say, apply a few rules of thumb if you don't have time to do the full analysis: Do market research when...

1. ...the outcome of your business decision is truly in doubt. This rule implies avoiding market research both when the outcome is almost certain success and when the outcome is almost certain failure. See more on the "expected value of perfect information" for the reasoning behind this rule.
2. ...the magnitude of expenditure (or the cost of failure) is at least several times that of the market research (I often use a 10x multiple). This guesstimate ensures that you spend money where you can expect the greatest return from learning. The method also preserves focus on the projects that are most important, a critical factor when you need to communicate results to the wider organization. Wide communication of market research results is, in my opinion, too often shortchanged in large companies.
3. ...you have the possibility of really upsetting your customers by messing up. See my recent post for more on this one.
4. ...senior executives, salespeople, or other individuals with a lot of influence start making questionable statements that could contradict reality in strategically important ways.

And why am I thinking about this topic today? My boss reminded me about #2 today...proving that even the best of Data Geeks sometimes forget their own rules in the excitement of gaining new customer intelligence.

Netflix Did the Wrong Thing

The flood of articles alternately condemning the stupidity of Qwikster and praising the Netflix reversal missed the point entirely. Comparing Qwikster to New Coke would be like comparing eBay to garage sales circa 1985. Reed Hastings had an entirely different set of tools with which to make decisions than The Coca-Cola Company did twenty-five years ago. And he missed them. Entirely.

The first tool is online research. Netflix has some 25 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, which means that the marketing team could have used an Internet omnibus panel survey to complete their market research in about a week and still expect to get in the range of 300 responses (20 million estimated U.S. subscribers divided by 112 million households times 2000 respondents per panel fielding).  They would have spent perhaps $8000 for a short set of questions.

Ones I would have asked:

1. Do you currently subscribe to Netflix?
2. Do you get your movies or shows from Netflix by mail, by downloading or streaming movies from the Internet, or both?
3. If Netflix were to separate the DVDs-by-mail Website and service from the download/streaming Website and service, how much would you like or dislike this change?
4. If Netflix were to separate the DVDs-by-mail Website and service from the download/streaming Website and service, would you:
1. Subscribe to the DVDs-by-mail service
2. Subscribe to the download/streaming service
3. Subscribe to both
4. Cancel your subscription to Netflix

I'm guessing by the flood of criticism and defections that this research would have easily identified this idea as a big, fat loser.

The second tool is online media monitoring. Many of the Honomichl 50 offer this kind of analysis, such as Synovate's BlogBase. It would have been pretty straightforward to comb the Web for information on why people like Netflix these days as opposed to why they hate it. And Netflix would have found (duh) that a major reason people like the service is the one Website for both mailed DVDs and streaming.

The third tool is customer advisory panels. Many new and exciting vendors (I'll mention CrowdScience and Vovici as just two) allow discrete and relatively unobtrusive research into a company's own customer base, often the best source on which to try these ideas. It helps to have an active website with lots of customers visiting this site for this approach to be extremely successful...

Hello, Reed! You have a website Use it!

Thank you, Advertising Age, for pointing out how critical it is to listen to your customer and for reminding us why tech companies don't listen very often.  R.I.P. Steve Jobs indeed.

Ask the Customer, #@%$!#*%!

I am continually amazed by how many decisions get made at major companies without asking the customer. Part of being a data geek is realizing A) the limitations of qualitative research, and B) the more severe limitations of making decisions in a complete vaccuum from customer input.

Years ago, we were simplifying the instructions on a retail display to help customers use the display to select exterior stain colors. The head of sales wanted one set of instructions and the head of marketing wanted another. The product manager wanted a third. Using Harris Interactive's omnibus panel (a twice per week survey of 2000 people), we answered the question in about a week and a half for $6,000.  We also found out one or two other critical things for the money.

The research showed clearly that the product manager's language was preferred. Given that this was going to be a $280,000 modification to the display, I would say less than 3% of the cost was a justified investment.

Of course, in this case the head of sales overruled everyone and had his way anyway. Proving that asking the customer is important, but communicating the results effectively is paramount... and working with smart people is critical. A lesson I learned well that day.

So this week I'll be starting a project to ask a small group of our customers about a new project that Product Management is considering. I'll be careful to communicate the insights AND the limitations of the data. And I will be happy having any information at all rather than some pigheaded sales guy's gut feeling.

You Know Your Marketing Is Good When...

Yesterday, I was running in the gym at work. I generally hate running indoors. I get bored, and I haven't yet found earphones that stay in while I run while retaining comfort and non-sweatiness. Consequently, I turned on the TV.

We don't have much in the way of daytime TV at work, so Montel was one of my best options. They had a segment about LifeLock, an identity theft prevention company. An ad came on after the segment, not surprisingly for LifeLock. Then another segment about LifeLock, with a different executive from the company. It was only after that segment, when I was beginning to get suspicious, that I realized it was a paid advertorial, AKA infomercial.

In the meantime, I learned a whole bunch about protecting yourself against identity theft, and I began to remember my accountant saying something about getting identity theft protection. Realizing it was an advertisement made me think about advertising's value to the customer.

This value is particular important in business-to-business marketing.  Some of the all-time best B2B advertising I have seen provided excellent insights to which I have returned time and time again, such as the simple but elegant paper from Sawtooth Software on choosing a conjoint methodology. The next time you start to create a whitepaper or seminar series, I say to stick to the LifeLock standard: would someone spend time on this information just for the value you are providing?

New Product Benefits Exposed!

I work for Vocollect, Inc., a subsidiary of Intermec Corporation.  Today, I'm excited about finding real evidence of a customer benefit we have had for years but never promoted. Why have we never promoted this benefit to customers?  Simply, until last year we never asked them what they cared about in purchasing a new technology solution. Market research revealed what problems are highest on the list of concerns in managing a warehouse. Therefore, we never asked ourselves whether our product provided any benefits in this area, preferring to focus our marketing on cost reductions and productivity increases. We missed millions of dollars in benefits to our own product because we did not understand the customer's concerns.

Data Geekitude is fundamentally about finding out what matters to your customers and your business so that you can re-orient your efforts towards those critical areas. Asking customers what matters to them is the first step.

Random Marketing Thoughts Nobody Reads

Welcome to my new place where I plan to record random thoughts from my reading, work, and observations.  Perhaps nobody will read, but I may benefit from my own navel gazing anyway.

The Corporate Executive Board has just published their "Executive Guidance 2011" on "Overcoming the Insight Deficit." It's unfortunately a bit light on data, but as a data geek I particularly appreciated the exhortation to focus on training people to use data and to turn it into actionable innovation rather than simply on gathering the data itself.  Something for all of us market research types to think about before delivering our massive tomes of customer spew back to the executive team.