Market Research: some thoughts

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says that 95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind. (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-subconscious-mind-of-the-consumer-and-how-to-reach-it) With that in mind (ha! geddit?) it makes me question what's really going on with a lot of market research especially in terms of when we wish to test marketing based concepts such as creative, new websites etc.

If most people have no idea why they are doing something surely the last thing we should do is ask them!

But it's not all bad,here's a list of market research that I think is incredibly useful:

1. Product research based on actual behavioral data. For instance it is entirely possible to determine the size of say the labor market for physiotherapists in this country thanks to census data. Once you have this, you can look at other published data around how many universities offer physiotherapist degrees and make an assessment as to whether your University should start up a degree like this.
2. Digital Research based on real life testing. Back in the old days of direct mail smart operators used to AB test their messages and offers, send out two different offers to a small cohort and then implement the best one for the full list. Digital marketing is like this BUT FOR EVERYTHING! Seriously you can roll out small changes to your website, monitor success and keep or chuck depending on result, you can do this daily if you want.
   
   The University of Canberra has an enquiry form, it used to convert at 4%, one change (the removal of the side menu bar) and it now sometimes converts at 40%! This was a small change, that cost nothing to implement and we were able to make the change base don people's actions.

Zaltman says you should always compare what people say with what the DO, and he's right. People SAY they watch Insight on SBS last night but they actually watched Gogglebox.

Now given that this is an Arts marketing blog, ticketed arts companies have access to one of the best forms of market research, the various nuances of people ticketing behavior, speed with which they buy different genres, cross-genre purchasing patterns, do people buy on star power or on company reputation, all of these things are empirically provable without needing to conduct market research.

Generally subjective market research is conducted for the wrong reasons, you have managers that lack knowledge or confidence in the insights they and their team have of the market, you exist in a culture of blame where mistakes are punished and so you seek to minimize or deflect that blame with research to support your decisions, or it could be that your organisation simply cannot afford for X initiative to be a costly failure. Or its a mandated KPI for board reports (urgh the WORST!)

I would say that none of these reasons is a good reason to conduct subjective market research, and by subjective I mean "which feature is more important to you", "Which designs is more attractive to you" type research. I WOULD say that in circumstances where empirical data is contradictory then research is a good way to seek to understand that contradiction.

At the leading edge of this form of research is brainwave responses. Some research says that when people see their favourite brands the same receptors go off in their brains that are triggered when they see family and friends. This sort of research, stuff that seeks to understand the subconscious has value for marketers as it becomes more established.

As always when thinking about market research I remember Henry Ford when asked about it... he said "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!"

He's right, research is great but nothing without vision, insight and leadership.

POST SCRIPT
I actually found some notes I made on this topic and whilst I covered most of it above some extra thoughts include; 

1. Be careful of those in the research and data industry - many have a self-interest in talking up the value of data and research, but without providing tools to give genuine insight.
2. Qualitative research around marketing and digital is good for reaffirming common sense where simply re-stating the common sense view is not enough to sway the decision.
3. research can be valuable as a circuit breaker when two views are dominant and their is a stale mate re the best way forward.
4. Trialing on your live market - note all the tech giants do this FB, Google etc they often roll out a feature to select users before rolling it out to all.
5. Maybe rather than invest in research perhaps invest in leadership and empower your leaders to to take 'leading' ideas to the market. Basically back your judgement.
6. One benefit of research is the process of conducting research itself, the process of defining the problem so it can be breifed into a research firm, teh process of getting everyone in the room to see a research presentation, these things are of value in and of itself.