Lately I’ve been struck by how we marketers may be losing our way, overlooking our core mission. Preoccupied with wrenching changes in how we launch products, retool the marketing mix, and engage influencers and stakeholders, it’s easy to overlook our core mission: understanding customers. How we apply what we understand about customers is what drives the marketing (and sales) engine.
Although we may be landing new projects based on the latest new thing, like social media or yesterday’s Web 2.0, that’s not the point. Here’s the deal:
The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer
If you believe Peter Drucker’s maxim, surely you accept its corollary: the role of marketing is understanding what it takes to create and keep customers.
Our quest for understanding should encompass the entire lifecycle of customer engagement. We need to listen to and learn about customers, putting ourselves in their shoes at every step along the way. Listen, and then respond appropriately. The question is, how do we do that without falling back into company- or product-centric habits and biases.
Where Do We Start?
These days, it’s hard to know which methods or technologies offer the most effective, actionable, timely, accurate and affordable ways to capture, share and refine customer insights so they lead to understanding. All the hype around social media may cloud the issue, and get us focused prematurely on platforms or technologies before we understand the reasons why. (What people call the lure of the “shiny new object.”)
What’s a marketer to do?
Should we mine twitter streams or troll the blogosphere? Subscribe to a “listening platform” so we can listen in on customer conversations wherever they occur online? Develop and manage a private online community? Outsource community management to a specialist firm? Hire ethnographers to observe customers where they work, play or go about the business of their daily lives? Run some focus groups? Send out an online survey? Do some phone interviews? Get some insights from an online consumer or executive panel? Buy some reports from Forrester or Gartner? Run some web analytics reports?
There’s no easy answer to these questions, given the siloed nature of marketing services, the fragmentation across market research and analytics providers. It’s hard to find objective advisors with a broad perspective across the full spectrum of customer insight sources, from the tried-and-true to the new online options. It’s all too likely that whoever you consult will tell you that their way, their proprietary methods, or their technology/service is the best.
Here’s a good starting point, a wise reminder from a research maven’s blog:
The purpose of market research is to understand people so we can answer business questions.
— Paraphrased from Steve August’s blog post
Step 1: Define Your Questions
So, start with your questions. What is it your business needs to understand? What do you need to do as a result? What can you afford (or afford not) to do? Given that as your business context, then start asking the marketing questions that will lead to understanding.
How customers buy (or make buying decisions)? Why do they buy? When do they buy? Where do they buy? What motivates them to choose your brand over others (or vice versa)? Where do they look for information or help?
How do customers segment, based on their particular usage occasions for your product? What causes them to stop using your product, or to use it less frequently? What other ways could they get this job done?
What do they think about you? What are they telling their friends about you? Who is influencing their thinking, or setting constraints on how they go about satisfying their needs? Whose opinions do they trust?
How else could you satisfy their needs? Do they have latent needs that you are uniquely equipped to satisfy?
Etc., etc.
How much are you willing to invest to get answers to these questions?
Step 2: Define and Prioritize Your Objectives
Define the questions that will have the most impact on your business. Eliminate those that can’t be linked to actions or decisions you might take in the future. While the answers to some questions might be nice to know, if you can’t identify how they will guide future business decisions, you probably can’t afford to waste money getting answers you can’t use.
Setting your objectives is a key step in any marketing project; smart marketers set objectives that are measurable. As a best practice, you should apply the SMART framework to articulate your objectives — and get consensus from your key stakeholders (and budget approvers) that these are the most important objectives and metrics.
Step 3: Do Your Homework or Consult an Advisor
Before getting caught up in the courtship dance with a technology or specialty research provider, make sure you’ve framed your business goals and marketing objectives; defined how you plan to apply the customer understanding you’ll obtain as a result.
Then assess your options for discovering or capturing customer insights, and how effective each option is for its intended purpose.
Be mindful of the implications from cognitive science about how people think, the low correlations between consumers’ stated intentions and actual behaviors — the gap between the conscious mind and what drives behavior. Narrow your list to the research methods (including listening) that are most likely to deliver the kinds of actionable insights you seek.
If you’re feeling over-whelmed by all these considerations, you might want to engage an advisor to help you think through your best course of action.
Be aware that the market research industry itself is in flux, undergoing transformation, so it may be difficult to find well-informed and objective advisors who can advise you across the full spectrum of options. If you consult a technology or service provider for guidance, watch out for unintended biases. As Abraham Maslow said,
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
