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.

Playing with your brand: a quick DO's and DON'T's list

We've all been there, the temptation is irresistible. 

St Patrick's Day is approaching and the Boss thinks we should 'Do something'. Maybe something on social media perhaps?

Before anyone goes any further your mind flashes forward to changing the colour of your logo to a bright emerald green, perhaps it gets a jaunty Leprechaun's hat, tipped just so, maybe there's some clip art of the tipsy little fella that you can lean up against your logo like a drunk against a lamp post.

 To a traditional trained marketer these ideas sound TERRIBLE. And by and large they are.

I mean look at this.



But when you try and explain the Marketing 101 reasons why this is terrible - brands require consistency etc you just come off like a wet blanket.

Also the days when you could say "Well Coke or Telstra don't change their colours?" doesn't work as more and more big brands are willing to play with their brands and logos albeit in structured methodical ways.

So when should you change your logo for St Pats, Day, Gay Pride week or whatever?

Here are my tips:

• Does the event/situation fit with your brand personality or values? I currently work at a Uni, I would say a big NO to St Pats day, linking oneself to public drunkenness is a bad look for concerned parents. But a big yes to Gay Pride week. It fits our values and personality.
  
• Is there something in your brand armory that you alter without it looking terrible/unprofessional? For instance my Uni's logo is simply too fine to carry off being made gay-pride rainbow (which would also look terrible), but there is a lot of real estate on our website and social media pages that we could professionally and tastefully use to show our support. We could find a same sex couple kissing and use that in keeping with our current photography driven house style.
  
• Is there a way to connect yourself to this event etc without looking like a dodgy corporate? My Uni has an Indigenous Action Plan among other things, we can totally align ourselves with Sorry Day or NAIDOC Week with this a proof point of our support. However we don't really have much of a connection with Rugby League so we can't really do anything to leverage State of Origin. It's all about behaving authentically. 

And that's really it. I don't think it should be a blanket or a wet-blanket NO to ideas to modify one's brand to fit an event, but it needs to be done tastefully, authentically and be in keeping with your brand personality.

Tertiary Education Marketing: Know the fight

Back in my time in the Arts I wrote a blog about how simply thinking about the true terms of your product can be instructive as to how to market yourself and in setting priorities.

The same is true for Universities too although with some distinctions.

'Know the fight', its a phrase learnt from Captain America of all things but its so true, when you re in the middle of a battle it helps to now what kind of battle you are in, is this the main game? Is this a distraction? What is the purpose of this fight?

Back in the days when University places were capped there wasn't really much pressure at all to market yourself, demand outstripped supply for many courses so those that didn't get into Nursing at University A flowed into University B. 

The effect of this seemed to lead a lot of Universities into focusing n the rand, it was enough that you got your brand out there and you didn't need to focus on Return on Investment much (ROI).

In an uncapped environment all of a sudden you needed to actually attract students, they had choices finally.

So 'know the fight'. Firstly and most obviously Universities provide a service not a product and we know that the customer experience is everything when it comes to providing a service, having  quality call centre, having smooth application processes, having online learning tools that work and your class schedules don't clash too much and finally the experience is fruitful and positive. When you are a service, word of mouth is king and you fail to invest in these things at your peril. 

But what other kinds of 'fight' is tertiary marketing? Well most of the sector markets itself like a premium product. For the post part I disagree, in fact I would argue universities actually sit at the other end of the scale, its a mandatory purchase for many, like insurance, whilst for others its a commodity, people just want a degree where that degree comes from and how its delivered is of little concern.

Luckily the process of selling a premium product is similar to that of a mandatory purchase, you need a constant market presence so that when people reach the time of their or their children's life that Uni is needed, your brand is on the shopping list and is well thought of, it sounds crazy but this is how funeral homes market themselves.

Fighting against commodification is harder, commodities such as flour and salt really sell on price and pricing is not a factor in a Uni under the current system. Th fight here is to convince people that they can't just do their degree anywhere but you NEED to do it with us. Which means you have to look for things that you can do better, do those things better and then adequately communicate this.

What's great about both of these above challenges is that content marketing and market automation are ideally suited to these tasks. The Uni I work for is smaller and therefore is not betraying trade secrets to say that our marketing budgets are therefore smaller than many competitors too. So the idea of maintaining a constant market presence in the old mainstream advertising manner is just not feasible. But with marketing automation we can target our markets precisely and ensure that we are engaging with them regularly to maintain a brand presence and via content marketing you can engage those people with exactly the sort of 'stories' that reduce the commodity effect.

We are only at the beginning of these processes, so it is too early to tell what the results will be but the theory is incredibly sound and it will be exciting to find out if it works.