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Marketing Research- Focus Groups
Intelligence gathering is an essential skill
How are your competitor's getting to market? Direct sales, direct mail, telemarketing? What selling points are being made? How do they describe you? Why is the market buying their product? How entrenched are they in the market?
After establishing who the customer is, and where to position the product, there are three important questions to ask about the target market before buying advertising or creating a marketing plan.
- Who are the competitors for the target market?
- How does your product compare to your competitor's?
- Besides your current target market, are there other markets you haven't explored?
Know the competition
To be successful, you must devote as much research to your competition as you do to your target market.
- Study their product/service
- Study their advertising
- Study how they conduct their business
- Analyze how your product/service compares
- Review their annual report.
The competitive choice — five important questions
After analyzing the competition, you must choose your marketing approach based on your discoveries.
- Will you attempt to steal sales from your competitors?
- Will you attempt to convert current customers to your new product?
- Will you attempt to tap different target markets?
- Will you beat your competitors to the marketplace?
Fear and ignorance are two enemies to avoid when dealing with the competition. Healthy respect and in-depth knowledge should be your competitive allies.
Focus groups
- Internal brainstorming will help you create ideas to be evaluated in focus groups
- Never base a marketing strategy on an opinion expressed by a few people in a focus group. To confirm strategies, use large-scale telephone or direct-mail research.
- Present concepts to focus group attendees as simplified ads on boards, with a short, factual headline and sample illustration. It's important to evaluate the idea, not the quality of the ad.
- To save money, some marketers bring in clients or prospects for an informal gathering; while not a true focus group, such a meeting can provide you with some good insights on which to base future decisions. An informal focus groups can be video tapes for review by management.
- It's important to let focus groups bring up negative comments, since they will often highlight a problem that can be fixed before it become a bigger threat.
Quantitative research
- To properly evaluate a marketing idea, new product or customer evaluation, use large-scale research, using telemarketers or direct mail. For maximum results, offer each decision-maker who agrees to take the survey a substantial incentive or $$ reward.
- The easiest way to do research is with existing customers, although prospects are more likely to speak the truth.
- Quantitative research should be limited to multiple-choice questions if possible (and give four choices instead of five so respondents won't be tempted to check too many threes).
- Well done market research can prevent marketing disasters or fix problems that may be depressing your revenues.
- Business-to-business marketers may find quantitative research particularly helpful because the decision-makers responding to the survey are professionals in their field — so the results will carry more weight than data derived from consumers.
Competitive Research
Gathering competitive information can lead to invaluable competitive insights, including a better understanding of how the company — and its competitors — are perceived in the marketplace. This allows you to make truly informed decisions regarding overall strategic direction: realignment of existing sales staff, perhaps, or reassignment of customer service personnel, redirecting of marketing budgets or redirection of research and development plans.
Typically, competitive research is performed via a two-step process. The first step is to conduct an intensive survey of various segments within the marketplace, starting with a list of issues. From this list, a questionnaire or survey is developed to address the issues, which can range from technology to advertising. The purpose of the questionnaire is to gather data from the market to understand how the market perceives the competitive differences, as well as what the competition is actually offering.
The questionnaire and actual survey are developed and conducted to eliminate any market biases. Working with the client, we then develop a matrix of the market that segments the market based on a number of factors; including business type, size, length of time in business and any other areas deemed to be appropriate. We then develop a list of companies with appropriate contacts to be surveyed, a list that might include competitors' customers, non-committed customers (those customers who don't demonstrate any particular loyalty) and your own customers. From this matrix, the surveys are conducted, then tabulated and summarized for the client's review.
The results are often eye-opening. One client, had been using its large size and market dominance as part of their overall sales strategy to attract new clients. Interviews with competitors' clients revealed that large size was the primary reason that they didn't choose our client. Interviews with the competition at a trade show revealed that they were using our client's size as part of their overall sales strategy.
Another client had us competitively shop both its own and its competitors' customer service representatives, on top of surveys of their customers and their competitors' customers. As a result, extensive sales coverage changes were implemented, to give better sales support and overall sales coverage, which brought about increased sales.
Market perception studies
Many companies perform customer surveys. While this is a good first step in gathering feedback, the results often can't be considered statistically valid, since results come only from those who choose to answer, with no feedback from prospective customers or disgruntled customers who have gone to your competitors. A client/market perception looks at product quality, customer service, sales coverage, overall company perception or other issues. We first identify issues or concerns to be explored, working with your company's sales and marketing staff, then incorporate them into a carefully developed question set that's designed to reduce or eliminate bias.
Research is gathered from a cross-section of your markets, which can include your own and/or your competitors' customer base. Our clients have used these studies to assist decisions such as development of new distribution networks, restructuring of existing sales resources, improving customer service and reassignment of promotional/marketing budgets.
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