Research non-stop
Editor’s note: Chris Grecco is partner at King Brown & Partners, a Sausalito, Calif., research firm. He works in the firm’s Lexington, Ky., office.
Online research has become a viable method for gathering market information. Over the past few years modern market research has included online focus groups, Web surveys, and Web site usability tests to harness the speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness of the Internet to understand customer needs, buying preferences, and attitudes.
But despite its benefits, we believe the Internet has not reached its full potential as a tool for understanding the marketplace. The marketplace created by the new economy has forever changed the rules of market research. Demands for access to better data at even quicker speeds are now the norm.
The true promise of online research lies not merely in gathering data and reporting on it in the traditional way, but in capturing real-time market realities that provide continuous market intelligence. Although a world where CEOs click a browser to get the day’s customer satisfaction report has not yet arrived, the need for real-time windows into the marketplace has never been greater.
The world at “Web speed”
In this quick-paced environment, executives need continuous data streams, on a minute-by-minute basis, brought right to their desktops. The world is moving faster than ever. The Internet, and the new information economy it has created, underscores a need for instantaneous access to market information. This is not an option but a precondition for being in business.
The recent fall of e-commerce companies in the stock market is a case in point. Out of nowhere today breaking news can impact your company, your brand or your position in the marketplace. Companies need to check the pulse of their marketplace to outside variables and gather market intelligence they can use immediately.
In a recent study we conducted for a large brand management firm, the speed factor came through as perhaps the most profound variable affecting brands in the new economy. In this study we measured the awareness, distinctiveness and future expectations for more than 250 brands among thousands of Internet users.
The results were striking. Here we found companies that were fairly recent start-ups in the Internet and technology sectors had already generated the same level of awareness in the marketplace as better-established competitive brands. The study challenged the traditional assumption that brands are slow to build and decline, revealing a new world of brand marketing that is beginning to emerge in the Internet arena.
The Internet isn’t just changing how companies do business, it’s changing how brands are developed and sustained in the market. We now live in a time when brands can establish themselves in a few years by leveraging the Internet.
One-on-one marketing: here to stay
Successful companies increasingly leverage the power of the desktop to improve their position in customers’ minds. In the not so distant future, companies will provide personalized interfaces between their products, services and marketplace as a way to build and sustain lasting relationships with their marketplace. This customer-based reality is already defining consumer loyalty and used as a way to better market a company’s products.
Amazon stands out as a company that builds upon understanding of its customers to increase sales and strengthen customer relationships. Amazon helps people discover products online through sophisticated techniques that suggest buying recommendations based on other Amazon.com customers who share tastes and interests. They have also created customized user home pages based on past activity and stated preferences.
By continually gathering information about customers, Amazon has moved from a “one size fits all” store for the mythical average customer, to making the perfect store for everybody.
New competitive challenges
In today’s marketplace, you can be out-positioned in a few months if you are not checking and responding to your marketplace. Because information is now quickly disseminated, there are more variables that must be responded to quickly. Companies can’t wait months to learn what people think about their products, brands and Web sites when competitive pressures are at an all-time high.
The explosion of new products and services, many of them Web-driven, has created a world where brands can now achieve a market presence, and sometimes dominance, in as little as a few months. Today, with the help of the Internet, a couple of MBAs can launch a frontal assault on major, established brands from their living rooms.
Long-established brands are now vulnerable and must be continually aware of their position in the marketplace. This is especially true when companies sell look-a-like, commodity products, driven largely by brand identity. A pet product retailer, for example, must be continually aware of their market when they sell products just like the competition.
Companies with a Web presence are realizing the need to take their online brand identity as seriously as their offline identity. It used to be that most of a company’s focus was on the technology side of their Web sites. Now, companies focus on extending the power of brands through their Web sites--which is, ultimately, an expression of the company’s brand.
A continuous model of market intelligence
The desktop is emerging as powerful an information delivery channel as television, newspapers and other vehicles. Data gathered on a moment-by-moment basis provides a way to “check the temperature” of the marketplace.
One of our clients, a banking and financial institution, provides an example of how new online approaches are being used to enhance traditional methodologies to perform regular tracking studies on their Web sites. Their purpose is to explore customer satisfaction and site usability to better facilitate online banking and brokerage services.
The company places a link on its public and its secure sites that resembles a banner ad, and customers who want to take part in the survey click on it. Customers and non-customers rate site functionality, product features and site usability. Surveys only take a few minutes and offer an incentive through a sweepstakes. When somebody agrees to the study, the client site links participants to our server where they take the survey. Afterward, survey respondents are linked back to our client’s site.
The studies are always driven by immediate information needs. Prior to creating the surveys, we get input from all departments. Managers of online banking, for instance, might be working on an enhancement to the site’s bill-pay function, or marketing might want customer feedback about direct mail or advertising. The goal is to update the survey to gather the most pressing information needs on a company-wide basis.
Another client, an online grocery shopping and delivery service, is a good example that used a combination of online approaches and traditional market research methods. The company is embracing both online and traditional research to pave its expansion into 15 new markets. Given the diversity of its marketplace, it uses online research to better understand consumer attitudes and buying preferences.
Instead of conducting one major satisfaction study a year, it performs customer satisfaction and Web site usage studies on an ongoing basis. Regular online surveys put participants in front of its site, have them do a set of tasks, and uncover any road blocks. The firm also performs usability tests to make the online shopping experience easier for customers.
But the ease of information access through the Internet is not without limitations. Cost savings and other factors that make online research so appealing must still be backed up with solid analysis.
While instant access to the numbers as a goal will provide constant access to necessary market information that companies can use, detailed analysis at various junctures must be included to interpret information. We must avoid data dump and answer the most important question of all: What do all the data mean?
As my company develops its proprietary model of continuous market intelligence, the central idea is that instead of periodic market research studies, data will be collected continuously from Web-based surveys and displayed onto the client’s desktop.
We expect that, in time, we won’t be doing episodic research at all, but will do online studies that track consumer demographics, attitudes, and buying behaviors. Data collection will be a non-stop process. Then, every so often, we will analyze, interpret, and summarize the data.
We look forward to the day when CEOs can click their mouse and get a real-time graph or pie chart that summarizes customer attitudes. This is the true promise and potential of online-assisted market research: not only as another tool in the marketer’s toolbox, but a process that helps companies be aware of their brands, customer satisfaction, and the impact of marketing programs on a real-time basis.