Since I started in marketing, I’ve often been asked “Why market research?” There’s PR, there’s digital, there’s grassroots, there’s direct, and there’s a few dozen other ways that you can make it in this business. So, why market research?
Let me tell you a story
A group of four customers walk into a restaurant – it’s their first time there. But unlike most restaurants with menus, this one goes a different route. At this restaurant, the waiter sizes you up, compares what he thinks he knows about your tastes, and brings you the best dish he can think of, tailored just to you.
So, our four customers sit down, the waiter sizes them up, and brings out two steaks, a chicken, and a fish. The first steak and the fish are absolute hits! These customers are so impressed with the restaurant and praise the waiter. The second steak is ok – the customer likes the steak, sure, but he’s had better and kind of wishes he got the fish.
The fourth customer, though, hates the chicken. The steak looked better, the fish looked better, and for a million reasons that the customer will never outright say to the waiter, the customer is not happy. This encounter was an absolute failure for the waiter.
So, let’s recap. A waiter went in blind, using just gut instinct and probably some experience, and managed to blow-away 50% of the audience, and still capture a portion of praise from an additional 25% as well. And sure, 25% was a drastic failure, but we can’t expect them all to be homeruns now, can we?
This is marketing
The story of the waiter is marketing as we know it. We’re all waiters using all the knowledge we can muster to make an educated decision about how to reach our audiences. The better a waiter you are, the higher you’ll go in this industry. And if you’re only nailing it one out of every eight customers, you’re probably going to want to sit back and reexamine how you’re going about your guessing game.
But I think what we can all really agree on, in this analogy, is that the whole thing would sure be a hell-of-a-lot more efficient if we could just put a menu in front of the customer and let them tell us what they wanted instead.
Enter market research
Fortunately for us, market research is that menu. The process of understanding who our customers are and what motivates them to buy is the legwork that this arm of marketing provides for the rest of the engine.
Now, don’t get me wrong, audiences aren’t just giving this information away freely – not, at least, in a way that is usable to marketers. Not now, at least.
What we have is a wealth of dots, and market researchers working to connect those dots to create a bigger picture. Data is being pumped out at an incredible rate, and everything from online habits to shopping habits to eating and drinking habits to travel habits and beyond, all of it is available now. Data providers in every industry are publishing or selling the information you need to learn what it is about your market that makes it viable, and can make it more viable in the future.
But you still need more.
Look just little to get the big picture
Anyone who knows about market research knows about surveys, because it’s the backbone of what we do. The quantitative side (read that: the numbers side) of this discipline most often works by going to your audience and asking them the important questions.
Fortunately for you, you don’t need to talk to everyone. Thanks to the magic of statistics, we know that if you talk to a few, but enough, members of your audience, you can use their information to make more educated decisions about the whole audience at large.
And this is where the beauty of it all comes in. No matter how large your audience, in today’s modern world of technology and service providers, we have access to almost any audience you can want to market toward. And we have access to enough that we can ask them the important questions to build a marketing campaign that is backed by research – a meal that’s backed by what the customer has said they want.
You just need to ask the right questions
The challenge, now, is to take that accessibility to the next level. We can ask any questions we want, gauge any factors we want, but our understanding of these capabilities is often rooted in traditional market research practices.
The field of learning about people and motivation, however, has grown immensely in our time, and will continue to grow further in the near term as well. Our understanding of social sciences, organizational psychology and leadership have taught us how to lead groups of people toward any goal we seek. The fields of behavioral economics has led to nudge marketing, an interesting field that shows us that how we think we make decisions isn’t always as rational as we think.
And all of these disciplines have applicable practices in the design of surveys in marketing and market research.
Learn more with S2 Research
So what do you want to accomplish with your marketing that you don’t know how to do? Does your audience behave how you predict they will? Do your promotions or strategies fall flat on a portion of your customers, and you don’t know why? Simply put, could you do more with your marketing if you knew more about who you were marketing toward?
I started S2 Research to help marketers solve those challenges, and to learn more about what they don’t know they don’t know. If you want to learn more about what S2’s approach can do for you, give me a call. Let’s talk about the unknown.