market research

Just ignore what they say

  • Thursday, 3 December, 2009
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What customers say they like and how they behave are not the same thing. Don’t always trust what you are told, use data and real insights to drive decisions that have major commercial implications.

So there was a skyscraper, banner and numerous MPUs across the website.  A survey panel was set up and the results came back.  The agency briefed the team, “Your customers really don’t like all the ads you have on the page”.  The message was reiterated in focus groups.  Ditch the ads.  This would be a painful decision, despite customer’s not liking them they were still delivering reasonable revenue.

The organisation was striving to be more customer-centric; if the advertisements were degrading the customer experience then removing them would be a price worth paying.  And so they were switched off.

The result?  Nothing.  Except lost revenue.  Analysing the data, customer volumes remained the same.  There was no difference in the successful completion of customer goals.  Switching the ads off had no impact on customer behaviour on the site; when asked customers said they didn’t like them, but what they said and what they did were different things.

The moral: if you are going to use emotion and what customers say to make commercial decisions, consider A/B testing with real data before making wholesale changes.

Fear of focus groups

  • Tuesday, 7 July, 2009
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I was recently talking to some IT professionals.  We were talking about customer journeys and understanding the customer needs.  They were second guessing these, making assumptions about what is important to the customer how how the customer would best interact with the application.

“How about running a focus group with customers?” I suggested.  Blank expressions.  “Not sure” came the response, “we’ve never done those before”.

But you have done that before.  Every time you run a workshop with the business, that is a focus group.  The listening skills are the same.  Effective facilitation, and using stimuli to promote debate, elicit opinions and test ideas- they are the same.   You just have a different audience and call focus groups something different.

IT should have no fear of talking to real customers, end users.  Getting them together in workshops is something that should come as naturally to IT as it does to the marketeers.  Let’s get focus groups into the vocabulary of any IT project.

Are you listening to your customers?

  • Monday, 16 February, 2009
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Dear CxO,

Looking for free market research and customer intelligence? Look no further than Twitter.

You may not care about social networking, you may think that Web 2.0 is not relevant to your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care what your customers are saying. You may choose to ignore it, but people are out there talking about you; praising you, foul-mouthing you. Go to Twitter Search, type in your company name and see what your customers really think of you.