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By Mitch Glasser, August 31, 2010 11:58 AM

Social media offers unprecedented capabilities to communicate and connect with prospects and customers.  However, it will only benefit your company if you first decide where it is your current communications activities need assistance to meet your mar-com goals.

Clearly, this last statement is true for all communications tools: print advertising, direct mail, e-mail newsletters, TV and radio advertising, event sponsorships, trade show attendance, speaking engagements, etc.  What makes answering this question for social media so acute today is the massive hard-sell going on among the ever growing list of social media vendors.

People buy using the same model they have always used.  What was important to buyers 30 or 50 years ago is still important.  What has changed is the variety of information and communication sources that exist and the ease with which they can be accessed.

For my money, social media can make major contributions to answering a number of buyer questions.  Specifically, which vendors:

• Have the offerings and capabilities that meet my specific needs?
• Are credible?
  • Have a track record?
  • Have customers?
  • Are experts about the industry issues and problems they purport to solve?
  • Can be trusted to deliver on their promises and stand behind their products?
  • Have a vision for and commitment to future product improvements?
  • Have customers who are happy to be their customers?

Social media affords you the potential of getting your answers to these questions in front of your prospects.  I say ‘potential’ because what has to be true is that your prospective buyers have to first be engaged in using social media for this to happen.  If you’re talking in places where they’re not listening, you’re wasting your money.

So the first step in your social media activities is to first uncover if and how your customers are using social media to stay informed about the industry in which you operate and the solutions and capabilities you offer.  How do you do that?  Well, as simple as it sounds, you ask them.  This will provide you with the information you need to direct your social media efforts and bear fruit from your investment of time and money.  Once found, then you need to decide what combination of awareness, credibility, trust, etc. needs form the majority of your social media content.

If collecting information from your customers and prospects about their use of social media is not the first step proposed by a prospective social media supplier, be very suspicious.  And if they don’t ask what communication goals YOU want to accomplish with social media, start looking for a new vendor.

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By Mitch Glasser, April 13, 2010 12:20 PM

[Note: This story was told to me by John Coe, President of The Sales and Marketing Institute (http://www.b2bmarketing.com/) about a client he had when he ran a full-service direct marketing agency in Chicago.  He currently provides consulting and training in B2B lead generation and sales productivity improvement to firms throughout the US.]

An interior architectural design firm hired John’s DM agency to help market their company’s office design services to commercial real estate developers and brokers in the Chicago area.  John first collected the brochures of competitive firms to see how they were going about attracting new clients.  All the brochures looked the same, talking about the education and experience of their architects, showing images of their most impressive projects (marble foyers, etc.) and generally bragging about just what wonderful companies they were.

John decided to take a different approach (smart guy that he is).  He asked the question, “Why is one architectural firm chosen for a project over all others?” That is, what are the compelling differentiators among design firms?

Instead of holding a brainstorming session with his client to conjecture and pontificate on what those attributes were, John reasoned that the most credible source of this information would be the customers themselves (you know, the people who actually choose the design firm and sign the deal).

So he held face-to-face meetings with a sample of this group and discussed their use of interior design firms, their experiences, what worked well, what didn’t, etc. using standard market research interviewing techniques.

So what did John find to be the most important characteristic?  Skills?  Experience?  Previous projects?

No, no and no.  It was much more fundamental, much more ‘down and dirty’ than that.

Real estate developers and brokers viewed architectural skills to be a commodity—all firms with any depth of experience provided essentially the same high quality work.  No meaningful differentiation here.

What these firms did seek out, quoting from the interviewees themselves, was “a company that would not screw up the deals” they were putting together for prospective buyers.  Not a very sophisticated or technical need, but it was a compelling business consideration in their selection processes.

There were two ways ‘screwing up’ typically happened:

1. The design firm got far too ‘artsy’ and created a concept that went way over the buyer’s budget, causing them to look for another developer (who used a different design firm), or
2. In a side conversation, the design firm would tell the prospective buyer, “this building won’t work as well for you as another one I know of that’s nearby”.  And that building was NOT in the portfolio of the presenting developer or broker

The people John spoke with were both adamant and uniformly consistent about this costly issue.  It was not what design firms did that was most attractively differentiating, it was what they didn’t do.

How did John use what he learned from his research?  He mailed a three-paragraph letter, personalized to each of the 600+ targeted recipients that began with this sentence:

“If you want to work with an interior design firm that won’t screw up your deals, then you should call [his client].”

He went on to elaborate about how his client is keenly aware of the threat of these deal-killing actions and that they were savvy and experienced enough to never create such situations.

Before he executed his campaign, John was told by people who had marketed to developers and brokers that they were a ‘hard core’ crowd (described as ‘land sharks’ by those in the know) who didn’t go for being marketed to and would never open any ‘advertising’ that fell on their desks.  That was not John’s experience.

Instead of an anticipated low, single-digit response rate from the mailing, John’s client received responses from 22% of the recipients!  That is nothing short of miraculous (and awe inspiring).  In the subsequent 3 years, this kind of insight helped John’s client to go from 2-5 employees to a professional staff of 25 architects.  When you know what’s really important to your current and future customers, it’s amazing what you can do. Growth anyone?

The insight that drove this kind of result (what NOT to do) could only have been uncovered by deliberately engaging with customers and prospects about what’s important to them—that is, ‘listening to the market’.

Regardless of how smart you may be about your customers, often there are key insights that are not picked up in typical customer meetings or sales encounters because they are not the subject or purpose of those conversations.  This is, however, the kind of core issue that is often uncovered in market research.

Do you know YOUR market’s FUNDAMENTALS?  You should, because there is a lot riding on it.

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By Mitch Glasser, March 21, 2010 2:46 PM

On March 16^th Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that she will freeze funds for expanding the virtual fence (a network of cameras, ground sensors and radars) that was supposed to monitor the southern U.S. border with Mexico by 2011.  Having cost the government $672 million so far, a string of technical glitches and delays has put the project in jeopardy.

So how do I equate a $672 million cost with the acronym ROI?  I do so because in this example it means Risk of Ignoring.

You see neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the engineers at prime contractor Boeing bothered to ask the people who would actually be using the surveillance system what they wanted or how they wanted the system to work.  They ignored the very people who would best know the environmental and operational demands the system would have to meet in order to be up to the job.  Had they asked, they would have known that the standard, off-the-shelf surveillance equipment they selected would not be able to handle the heat, high winds, dust and vast distances of the southern Arizona border.  They set out to meet a need they simply did not understand.

So not knowing their market cost you and I the better part of a BILLION dollars (so far).  And I’ll bet that by and large the designers were very smart people and felt they had made sound assumptions about system’s requirements.  They may have been smart, but not smart enough.  They were obviously way too self-assured to think that they needed to speak with the ultimate users of the system.  They didn’t want to hear that their preconceived ideas might be wrong—“I know what I want to do so don’t challenge me with the facts”.

Unfortunately, the avoidance of real customer input is not atypical for many companies.  They create a set of ‘educated’ assumptions about their targeted customers, maybe bounce some ideas off a few colleagues in allied fields (but who look nothing like the target and would never be buyers) and then go design the product.  When they finally bring it to market it becomes painfully clear that they missed a key product feature, or erred in the way it’s delivered, or even that they chose the wrong user types to target.  They not only wasted money, they lost time and credibility by not meeting the revenue time line on which their business case depended.

Don’t be one of those companies.  Know your market first.

Here is the link to the 60 Minutes report on the virtual fence project: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6078904n&tag=related;photovideo

If you don’t want to watch it in its entirety, the relevant portion falls between 4:45 and 8:00 minutes into the program.  You can skip ahead, but when you do so, you have to first sit through a 60-second commercial.  After that you can move around at will.

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By Mitch Glasser, February 7, 2010 2:00 PM

Don’t have the time to research your market?  Let’s see, you’ve taken the time to write a business case, create a marketing plan, do the forecasts, plan the rollout, and you want to use your company’s money to develop a product that will take months to complete, but you don’t have time to see if your market will bite?  This is not how one builds an enduring business.

Sound primary research creates convergence on a common ‘sense of the market’ among management and builds confidence in its implications and indicated actions.  It gives a company greater assurance that its decisions are the right ones, and creates a greater willingness to back them up with the appropriate level of resources.

Investment in primary research can result in a significant ROI, and the size of the return is proportional to how far off you might otherwise be in your product, service or marketing assumptions.  Proper identification of target customers, crisp messages that accurately address customers’ pain or gain with a compelling reason to buy, surrounding your products or services with the proper customer support, and having the right response to competitive offerings can have a huge impact to the bottom line if discovered early in the process.

Primary research should be a line item on every marketing budget right along with collateral, trade shows, public relations, Web development and the like.

So if you don’t ask questions of your market, you won’t know what it needs.  But here’s the rub: If you ask the wrong questions, or don’t word your questions correctly, you still won’t really know.

Just as you would never hand your accounting to someone just because he is a self-proclaimed wiz with Quicken for his home finances, so too should you not entrust the gathering of critical market knowledge to someone not professionally trained in the field.

Poorly constructed questions produce invalid, often misleading information—a condition rarely evident by simply looking at the data.  You run the risk of drawing the wrong conclusions, sending you off in the wrong direction in your product designs, promoted benefits, or a host of other dead ends.  Don’t risk your investment in a professionally developed product or service to market intelligence that is not created likewise.  Given there are dozens of books and articles written about market research, writing questions, constructing questionnaires, etc., this activity shouldn’t be left to someone simply because they have a Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey account.

The key thing to remember is that, eventually, you will get direct input from your market.  It is simply your choice as to when it happens.

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By Mitch Glasser, February 6, 2010 6:00 PM

The use of primary market research is not nearly as wide spread as it should be.  Here’s my take on why that’s bad for business.

You’re spending a significant sum of money starting a new business, developing and launching new products, or introducing a new marketing campaign for an existing service.  What portion of your investment is earmarked for gathering market understanding to direct your efforts? How much will you spend to reduce your risk of failure and maximize the return on your investment?

As a means of determining market potential, most companies engage in some level of information gathering: studying published industry statistics and reports, probing competitive web sites, doing feature-by-feature comparisons, etc.  These are all examples of ‘secondary’ data—that is, they involve analysis of already-existing information.  Further, many seek the guidance of industry experts, advisors and consultants. Many businesses use this research as the basis for identifying potential markets, developing market messaging, securing additional investors and setting sales targets.

As useful as these sources can be, often they are only broadly related to the specific marketing and business issues you face.

These sources and individuals, you see, are not YOUR MARKET!

YOUR MARKET is…

the people who potentially will write you a check for what you sell…

and you need to ask them if your offer will be compelling enough to do so.

Because if it isn’t, you don’t have a product… or maybe even a business.

Truly listening to your market means doing primary market research—that is, getting information directly from existing or potential customers or sales channels about their reactions to your product or service.  Doing surveys, holding focus groups or conducting in-depth interviews are some of the tools used for soliciting input from these most fundamental sources of information.

Primary research is a formalized method for objectively listening to your market to determine who your potential customers are, how they make purchasing decisions and the reasons they use the products or services they do.   The key word here is objectively.  This type of information does not come from group-think sessions in which senior management ‘envisions’ what the customers’ collective needs are—they are too closely involved with your current products.  Nor does it come from your sales staff, who are hired to be proponents of and evangelists for your products.  They are trained to influence and convert prospects into buyers, not to listen objectively.

The market research industry is on the order of $10 Billion.  The majority of these sales were to large businesses—those who have long experience with research services and continue to place a high value on them.  Small and medium-sized businesses, which need to be no less successful in their marketing efforts, use primary research to a much lesser extent.  This is often due to lack of experience and understanding of the unique benefits it can deliver.

Beyond the marketing department, research benefits many core business functions:

• Sales—Selling is tough enough without trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong customers or with messaging that “misses-the-boat”.  Creating effective sales tools requires having a clear sense of your customers’ pain and how your offer helps to relieve it.
• Finance—Revenue forecasts tacitly assume you’re selling the right service to the right set of customers.  Assuring that this is the case will reduce your risk of missing your financial targets.
• Operations/Customer Satisfaction—Documenting customer needs for service and support assures better cost control and higher customer satisfaction and retention.
• Senior Management—Success in the market will increase market share, build company valuations, build business credibility and make it easier to raise additional capital to fund growth.

In Part 2 I’ll cover additional reasons why research is an invaluable business tool.

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By Mitch Glasser, February 6, 2010 3:20 PM

Welcome to my blog, Know Your Market.  Although my company’s name is Glasser Research, what really drives me is helping my clients do superior marketing.

Market research is the only input function of the marketing discipline—all else is focused on output.  In order for a company to get the most out of all their outbound activities, it needs to start with an objective, and often a ruthlessly objective understanding of its target customers.  This type of information does not come from group-think sessions in which company management ‘envisions’ what the customers’ collective needs are—they are too closely involved with their current products to do so.  Nor does it come from the sales staff who are hired to be proponents of and evangelists for products and services.  They are trained to influence and convert prospects into buyers, not to listen objectively.

That’s where market research comes in.

In my years of doing research I have seen and heard of numerous occasions where clients have gotten research-based input which completely changed what they thought were spot-on plans for a new service  or ‘improvements’ to an existing one.  These episodes continue to reinforce the need to test the assumptions underpinning a product to make sure what is introduced into the market has a compelling, profitable story to offer.

Doing superior marketing, then, requires having plans and strategies based on sound market knowledge.  To think otherwise is fraught with risk.

In subsequent posts I hope to provide content and examples which illustrate the value of a research-based approach to marketing (and the risks of not having one).  Being market-driven is no longer an option.  It is crucial to a firm’s long-term survival in today’s competitive markets.

Thanks.  See you next time.