Research methodologies

Blink:
In reading the first article, I found myself agreeing with most of what it had to say. In fact, not being a marketing person I was actually really surprised that some of the things they were talking about were “surprising” to the marketing / research experts. It seems to me that giving people a sample of anything, whether it’s a song, drink, or chair is never enough to tell if it is a good product. I do think that consumer research is important and that you can get some good information from it, but it is very important to make sure you put that information in the appropriate context, which is something else the article talks about. It goes back to the saying garbage in garbage out.

What I found really interesting is that in the music industry which to me, an outsider, seems to be driven highly on the preferences of the public, they would put so much stock in people’s opinions of a song from an artist they likely have not heard of, and completely ignore the real world data of his fan base. When you know that this artist does not really fit into any particular category, but base your research on people who are picked to listen to an artist for a particular category, you automatically bias them against him. If I am an avid Top 40 fan and that is what kind of music I am asked to listen to and rate, if I hear Keena the first thing I think is that this does not sound like what I am used to so I already have a negative feeling about it.

Another extremely important point is that no one particular research methodology can give you a complete picture, the CLT example with Coke vs. Pepsi demonstrates this spectacularly. Just because I like a taste of something does not mean that I will like more of it. It might be interesting now, but that could be it, just interesting. A purchase is not just a purchase, there are many reasons why people chose any one product, whether it’s a drink, food, music, or anything else. And as you are trying to understand if something is going to be well received it is important that you understand what need the product fills for the consumer. Is it that “I want the best for my family” so it must be the best quality, is it “I need to save some money” so I am looking for a good deal, or “I am trying something new” so should it catch my attention. Once you understand what is driving the customer you can understand better what need that product fills and how to better design a testing strategy.

Finally, it is also important not to rely on experts for testing. I feel that experts generally have a refined or even pretentious taste about things. This is not to say that experts are not important, because they definitely help improve the products we use, but when it comes to preference there is a difference in theirs and an average consumer. The lunch story is a great example of this, food experts taste everything about the food they eat, even crackers. This is important because they can tell you a lot more about what the average consumer may like since they can taste each individual aspect of a product, but it is harmful in that their preferences are likely more refined than the average consumer. An average person can tell you if they like or dislike something, they may not be able to tell you why, but if you know they don’t like it, I think that is more important than knowing they don’t like it because of reprocessing or too much of a woody taste, which is something a expert might see as a problem but an average person may not. Of course this information is important to go back and make adjustments, which is where experts come in, but the initial reaction of an average consumer in my opinion is far more valuable.

Ulwick:
Again I agree with most of what this article is talking about, it also suggests that customers don’t really know what they want, or to put it in the Keena articles words, they don’t really know what they like. The interesting thing about Ulwick is that he is proposing a solution which he developed. On the surface his methodology seems sounds and I am sure that it can be effective in some situations. But I also think that this is a too focused approach, this is just one methodology which can never provide all the answers. What’s missed here again is that there is no one solution, there are only tools which work in some situation and not in others. Rarely is there a situation where a single tool will fix the problem, or in this case provide the answers. What needs to be done is use this methodology in combination with other research techniques to develop solutions for your audience.

An aspect of research that the article does a good job talking about, though not directly, is to know your customer. I feel that no matter what way you chose to “research” your customers that data will be useless if you don’t know exactly who your customers are. Again it goes back to what is the purpose of your product development, are you looking to improve on an existing product, gain market share, be the innovative product, or develop an entirely new segment. Depending on what you desire to do, your customer will be different in each of these situations.

Finally the article seemed a bit like an advertisement for the methodology. It focuses a lot on the failure of Kawasaki and on the success of Cordis. There is no mention of the countless success from traditional customer questioning, or a situation where this methodology was not so successful. Additionally it makes it seem like it was this methodology that made the innovation possible, I have no doubt that the methodology helped, but there are many other factors that likely also helped. Good product innovation is also a result of a good R&D department, sales force which understand the customer, and a strong understanding of the market you are playing in. It provides some interesting insights, but really does not seem to say anything new. I am sure there is more to the methodology than the article goes into, but based on what I read it seems like a lot of it again is something a good marketing person would think of. It’s the marketers job to understand what the customer is asking for, even if the customer does not know that himself.

Zaltman:
This was an extremely interesting article and the way they took a very scientific approach to solving a very non-tactile, emotional issue was particularly exciting. This process seems to be deeply rooted in the emotional aspect of how we feel about products, which I think, is something that many research approaches do not focus enough on, or do not focus correctly on. By using the pictures to express people’s emotions about a specific topic you get more insight about how they really feel about something, rather than just asking defined questions. The issue that I think comes up here is that, though you get deeper into everyone’s thoughts about a topic, you rely on another group of people, presumably experts, to interpret thoughts.

While this seems to be a very methodical process, it feels a lot like some sort of psychological experiment rather than a methodology used to gain customer insights. As valuable as it would be to get this information I get the feeling that some participants may be uncomfortable with the depth of emotional questioning that goes on and will refrain from giving their true responses or explaining the degree to which they feel a particular way about a particular topic.

Finally it seems that the writer wanted to focus on the technological aspect of this methodology as a substantial improvement over other what I would call more traditional research methodologies. I personally don’t understand the focus on how findings are presented and the digital presentation and point and click aspect to the methodology. While it is interesting, in today’s digital driven business world nothing they are doing is particularly groundbreaking, and I really think the focus should be on the results and quality of results, not on the presentation medium. While the writer does suggest that the way different groups see results is different, I still don’t see this as any advantage or a key improvement this methodology has to offer. Overall this is an extremely interesting research technique and I like the incorporation of the subjects’ feelings towards a topic by way of their subconscious rather than just questions.

The customer experience is extremely emotional whether we realize it or not, and what we don’t always see is the role our individual thoughts and feeling about everything from packaging to reputation play in the final purchase decision. Each article touched on what the writer felt was important, and each methodology is reasonable in a particular context. I think the true art of marketing research does not lie in developing or using the one best methodology but understanding who the customer is, what the product is, what need you want that product to address, and what particular set of research techniques will give you the most robust answers. People are emotionally driven, and before you can design what they want you have to understand what drives them and how you can satisfy that emotional need we all have.

Marketing Persona

When I entered this class I had no concept of a persona as a marketing tool, let alone how useful it could be. After reading the chapter on persona lifestyles, it became very clear what benefits a company can gain by spending time to appropriately develop personas. In the same way Steve Jobs intuitively used a persona for the apple customer when developing the first iPod, everyone can benefit by clearly defining the target customer and what needs/pain points the product will address. In this way we can assure that the product, whatever it may be, under development is not over developed and try to be everything to everyone, but rather very focused on its purpose and abilities. Much in the same way that flip video cameras are.

With that new knowledge I can now undertake the role of a marketing professional in the process of developing a persona. My primary goal is to define the questions which will provide me with insight about the persona. Clearly defining questions is a key part of this project, if we get into too many specific of any particular individual our persona will not be representative of a market segment but rather be too much of an individual. Getting too detailed will give us a lot of information about a particular person, but does that really help us develop something which needs to appeal to the “masses”. On the other hand we do not want to be overly general as this would provide us no real data to work with.

Firstly I am concerned with what is the age and sex of my persona, for our purposes the persona is a 28 year old male. Once we know the age we can consider what other questions are important about this persona. Key here is what this 28 year old man does for a living. Is he some sort of professional, is he in school, does he have a job, or is he unemployed. Building on our persona we find out that this man is a student.

An interesting part of building a persona is that there is no standard methodology, rather each question builds on the previous during the development of the persona. Now that we know the man is a student, our next question is what kind of student? Is this man in medical school, law school, business school, has he gone back to finish an undergraduate degree, or some other form of education? The answer to this question is that our man is a 2nd year MBA student at the University of Texas. The information up to this point has actually provided us far more insight to who he is than is apparent on the surface.

I think this would be a good time to take what we know and make some inferences about the general type of persona we are dealing with here. Firstly we know this persona will likely be working somewhere in the business world, and having a masters degree will likely put him in the higher levels of our income segmentation. This is important because we can assume this persona will have disposable income to spend on our product, if he likes it, and likely can recommend it to his friends and coworkers. Additionally we may be able to infer that he will likely be someone who does not have a lot of time both a as student and working professional and needs things to be convenient.

From here it would help to ask some more questions about our persona, is he married and if so does he have any children. This question may change some of our previous assumptions about his spending habits, but it is important to make those assumptions first then change them if necessary. It turns out that he is single and has no children. Now, knowing that he is single with no children we can infer that the personal time he does have, he has complete control over. So next it is important to know what he likes doing in that personal time. Does he spend it studying for classes, reading up on industry news, does he like to invest, and does he like sports or just being lazy and doing nothing? The way he spends his personal time is very telling about who this man is and how we can cater our product to him. Our persona is a moderate reader, outside of required reading he enjoys keeping up on the latest sports and political issues so he knows what going on in the world. Additionally when he has time he enjoys being active by playing sports or working out. He often runs because it is good for him, but does not enjoy it and looks at it more as a chore rather than a fun way to get exercise, so depending on our product we may be able to help him with his perception of this. Finally we can assume that this persona is fairly in touch with the latest in mainstream technology, we has a face book account and uses twitter both at home and on the go from his iPhone.

During the process of developing this persona we have asked some general but very informative questions which brought us to the final persona product. Our persona is a 28 year old Male MBA student. He is graduating soon and single, giving him a lot of personal time with full discretion of his disposable income. Since he is not married and has no kids he also does not own a house, he prefers to rent as it cuts down on the responsibility of maintaining a home.