Years ago I worked inside an organization that was facing competition for the first time. The business unit had been performing at a very high level with high margins—there was nobody else offering the service. But rising competitors quickly figured out where the money was and disturbed the equilibrium. Suddenly, this organization had to start marketing.
To the organization’s credit, someone high up asked for a customer profile. There wasn’t one—but there was a pervasive gestalt about who the customers were. To acquire the requested empirical data, my boss initiated and I managed the first survey of this group’s customer base. And this was not just any survey: we collected data from some 8,000 respondents.
Pretty reliable statistically you’d have to say (assuming standard market research controls and practice).
Well, the study came back with a very different picture from the existing worldview. The group-think fallacy kicked and we were sent back out into the field to replicate. Maybe, just maybe, those 8,000 respondents were part of the 1% on the long tail of the curve.
Surprise, surprise. The results of the first survey were solidly confirmed.
Still, group-think overrode the new and conflicting evidence.
So out we went a third time.
Same results; same reaction.
As market researchers, we failed to present the results in ways that would break through the group-think fallacy. Management already had a plan for the customers of this service, where all those users would be migrated from the “low tech” service they were using, with a direct human interface, to a “high tech” service they were not currently using, with an all-automated interface.
When I took an internal transfer to another position within the company, I asked one of the senior managers in this group what had gone on behind the scenes. He told me that in spite of the overwhelming evidence from the three market research studies, management could not break out of the box that characterized these customers as severely downscale and significantly less desirable as a market because they preferred to used the low tech service rather than the high tech one.
This taught me an important lesson: market research must be a voice of the customers, but it must be presented and socialized in ways that gain support of all levels of management. The market researcher must not only be proficient in the skills of market research; the market researcher must also be a marketer. It is up to us to create ways of explaining and persuading management (and colleagues within Marketing) of the bottom line value of market research results.
And that’s the purpose of this blog: to discuss insights into how to effectively market market research inside your company.
Welcome! And hopefully along the way we will have some fun and some laughs as well as some serious discussion about market research as a means of listening to customers and potential customers.
Your comments, thoughts and questions are welcome.
Until next time, Bob
