The Marketing Dialog: The Best from the Best

  

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Welcome to the April 2010 edition of The Marketing Dialog.

Well, it finally happened. In spite of the best of plans, rigorous nagging, and trying to make it as easy as possible, life intervened and our guest marketing leader for April was not able to complete her assignment.

However – we have had such stellar guest marketing leaders since we began this blog, it wouldn’t hurt to recap some of the best from the best. This month, we’re going into our archives and bringing back some of the best quotes from our previous guest marketing leaders.

As you know, to thank our guests for their participation, Polaris makes a donation to the charity of their choice. Because there isn’t just one guest marketing leader this month, we are featuring two of the organizations that we support: Families First and Literacy Action, Inc.

Since its inception, Families First has continually strived to provide solutions for children and families faces life's greatest challenges. Their long history of service that has established Families First as the leading non-profit family service agency in Georgia. Each year, Polaris works with Families First to sponsor two families for the holidays. “We collect money, shop for gifts, wrap them and deliver to Families First. This has become a Polaris holiday tradition that means a lot to all of us,” said President Jan Carlson.

“Literacy is the key to breaking the inter-generational cycle of poverty, and Literacy Action leads our community in that effort,” said Senior Vice President Debra Semans, who serves as a Trustee for Literacy Action, Inc, a 42-year-old organization dedicated to improving the life skills of Atlanta’s low-literacy adults.

We invite you to make a contribution of your own or to learn more about Families First by clicking this link: Families First : For Children's Sake : About Us : Who We Are. You can learn more about Literacy Action, Inc and make donations here: Literacy Action, Inc. - Home.

One of the best things about the guest marketing leaders on The Marketing Dialog is their unstinting generosity toward their profession and those of us who labor in Marketing every day. Where else can you get senior, experienced marketers to tell you their keys for success? Their tips for today’s marketing research professionals make great reading:

TMD: What are your recommendations for today’s marketing research professionals?

Ken Bernhardt: Get solid training and understanding of marketing strategy so that the research you design and conduct is relevant for the senior decision makers who will be using the research. Always obtain a clear understand of the problem that the research is addressing and invest the time and mental energy to develop the strategic implications of the research.

Ron Strauss: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ You cannot spend too much on good recruiting. Make sure that the people recruited are not only knowledgeable, but, if you are looking for insight into new products and/or services, make sure the people you are recruiting are visionary in their outlook. If you’re looking for unconventional or new solutions or thinking, then you must recruit unconventional respondents.

‘Marks on the wall.’ In many product/service categories, the context of the market has grown comfortable to the players in the market. They no longer notice ‘marks on the wall’ as they’ve become acclimated to them. It’s the job of smart research professionals to see those marks on the wall, and to explore them for potential ways to create competitive advantage. This is the part of marketing research that’s more art than science.

‘Outside the box.’ Clients often define the scope of a research project before the MR folks are consulted. Always find out what the client’s assumptions are and question them. This will often lead to a redefinition of the scope of the research -– and a much more useful outcome.

Ann Wilson: Probably the biggest “watch-out” for marketing research professionals are the clients who already know how they want the research results to turn out. These are the folks who just want the research to confirm what they think they already know. Often, if the results don’t bear this out, they twist the interpretation or pounce on selective statistics to support what they want to do. Then when their marketing efforts don’t produce the desired results, they often blame the marketing research and/or use it to avoid blame: “Hey—how was I to know it would be a disaster? The research said it would work.”

TMD: First, a perennial MR challenge: How do you get a buy-in for marketing research from other executives?

Ron Strauss: Executives are paid to make decisions that either support a program or kill it. Either way, they can make the wrong decision in the form of higher costs or missed opportunities. I explore with them the cost of a wrong decision, and help them see the cost of research in perspective to the overall cost and risk involved with the decision. If the research can be done in a timely fashion, it’s usually a ‘no-brainer.’

Ann Wilson: Depending on the size and “newness” of the project (as opposed to a fresh effort in an ongoing initiative), most executives I work with expect marketing research to be a part of the plan and budget. They’ve almost all had experiences where research saved both money and brand equity by helping avoid a bad decision or enhanced marketing efforts by revealing a potential new direction that hadn’t been thought of. In these challenging economic times, however, sometimes company leaders want to squeeze the budget for marketing research. In those cases, I remind them of the volatility of today’s marketplace and the complexity of product and service decisions facing consumers. How can we possibly make sense of this environment for our marketing effort without research? That, plus a couple of reminders about the wisdom of using marketing research on past occasions usually convinces them.

Vicki Gordon: Typically the executives I’ve worked with are receptive to the proven point that timely and well-designed market research can often prevent costly mistakes and provide the valuable insights necessary to ensure long-term business success.

The biggest single objection that I seem to encounter is the additional amount of time added to a project to layer in appropriate market research. Therefore, it seems to me that as marketers we need to build that into project plans from the very beginning and secure buy-in up front to avoid getting stalled mid-project.

TMD: What were the most important lessons you learned about marketing research in the early days of your career?

Ron Strauss: I’ve come to see that MR is a conversation between parties that serves to share and transfer knowledge. And, today, with the advent of social media, it’s a conversation that the market research professional increasingly does not control. The challenge for the future of MR will be to continue its function of knowledge sharing and transfer while ensuring the quality (reliability and validity) of the knowledge and, therefore, a solid understanding of the risk/reward ratio of the decisions being made based on that knowledge.

Vicki Gordon: Don’t be wedded to an idea because it’s your idea. Too often I’ve found that products/services that make absolute sense to me just don’t resonate with a broad enough audience to warrant taking to market. Same is true for advertising concepts, logos, taglines. Consumers see things in visuals and hear things in words that often quite different from the author/artist’s intent and vision.

Ann Wilson: I was fortunate, when I was a marketing cub in the 80s, to work with three of the smartest, most insightful and patient marketing research professionals I’ve encountered in my career. I had been put in charge of national advertising for my company, and my experience with research at that point was zilch. These great guys took me under their wing and taught me what marketing research was and what it wasn’t, how to be a client who worked as a partner with the marketing research team and how to effectively interpret and use the results. The basics they taught still serve me well—such as getting crystal clear about what you are trying to learn, investing adequate time to develop the right questions and being objective about the outcomes.