“Doing strategic market research that produces customer insights and competitive advantage and improving the information flow process. I’ve raised that issue before. Marketing must assign a single source to acquire, vet and disseminate all syndicated research reports.”
“Senior leaders don’t have time to spend learning technical research issues. They need to be focused on pertinent, high quality results for decision-making. And if they’re not, as today, chaos reigns. No one wins when competitive intelligence becomes the wild west.”
“Well it’s all total BS!,” the list manager whined. “What kind of a fool would believe a number like that and what kind of a charlatan operation would report that as valid?!”
“Okay,” the product manager said. “So obviously something else must be going on here. I doubt Scott believes it either. Then why the fire drill? Maybe the anger and frustration could have been handled better, but clearly Scott’s rear is getting chewed from higher up and something’s obviously got to change. And it appears that that is our problem. How do we respond in ways that satisfy the thirst for blood and also up our game. Maybe we can do better than we’re doing………………”
“Well,” I picked up, “we’ve been talking about doing a segmentation study of our potential customers so that we can align the offers more tightly with actual perceived needs.”
“We’ve been over that ground,” the product manager interjected. “It’s much cheaper to send out the mail to do the tests than to take six months to do segmentation.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “Segmentation research is long and laborious…..but in a highly competitive environment, it can give us a real edge. Consider this: if we identify the main drivers that cause response—what offers appeal most to which potential customers, we can up the response rates by better targeting. And we’ll have a much better understanding of how to position the offers.”
“The products were so hot for a while and we were so far ahead of our competitors that we didn’t really need to understand them more than we did. But now, competition is closing the gap; maybe we need to think in that direction.”
“Maybe so,” mused the product manager.
Comments welcome!
Dr. Bob
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The level of panic to things that should be self-explanatory can be mind boggling.
Vincent Hanna
syndicated research
Research Consultant