Tocquigny Advertising and Design

Download Improve Your Strategy: Ask Better Questions

Often marketing executives sit around conference tables and debate strategy. Unfortunately, they often debate on the basis of opinion and conjecture. When this occurs, sometimes the debate is settled by the person who talks louder, is more forceful, or has a more distinguished title than others at the table. But occasionally someone stops the debate and suggests what should be obvious — if we don’t know the answers to our questions, why don’t we just ask?

And at first it sounds so easy. Everyone knows that doing research with your customers and prospects can help you develop a clear and effective branding and marketing strategy. But research is more than just asking questions. It is asking the right questions of the right people in the right way.

Ask Yourself Better Questions

Once you decide you need research, there is a natural temptation to jump in and start making a list of questions to ask your customers or prospects. But good research starts with a question for you: What specific decision do I need to make based on this research? This might be:

• What brand positioning will effectively differentiate my product and create loyal, profitable customers?
• What creative executions will resonate with my target audience?
• What price for my product will optimize my profit/market share/revenue?
• How do my customers use my product, and how do I communicate its benefits more effectively?

Clearly planned and articulated objectives will drive the entire research design. Too often this stage is skipped, because it seems too basic, too obvious. But if not done correctly, studies can be completed — at significant time and expense — only to be rejected later as not "actionable."

Case in point: a high-tech marketing executive once gave me a list of things he felt he had to ask his customers. The list was a complicated battery of questions detailing how end users used laptops. How many and what kind of external devices were plugged into the laptop at any one time? What percentages of the time were they plugged in and in use? How did this vary by place (at workstation, in transit, or at home)? The questions were further complicated by the fact that IT professionals were the client’s target purchasers, but only the end users would truly know what devices were plugged in and for how long at home or on the road.

After reviewing this tedious list of questions, which would result in a mountain of data that might not even be accurate, I asked my client the critical question, "What decisions are you going to make with this information?" The answer was simple — it was expensive to continue to place legacy ports on the laptops, and the client wanted to know if some could be eliminated. However, if the study showed, for example, that external disk drives were plugged into laptops on average 28% of the time, this would not to provide a definitive answer on this issue. Based on the decision that needed to be made, I constructed some trade-off exercises to see if IT professionals would be willing to "give up" certain types of ports to obtain lower prices. Not only was the questionnaire ultimately much simpler for the respondents, but also we were able to free up space within the questionnaire to ask other important questions. And, most critically, the results from the study provided a clear indication of the need (or lack thereof) for various ports.

Ask Your Target Better Questions

After exercising discipline to develop clear business decisions that need to be made based on the research, it is tempting to just turn around and ask those questions to your target. But this can also result in research findings that simply are not trustworthy.

For example, let’s say you are trying to promote key product benefits in the marketplace. You want to understand what features motivate the target. You might start out by just asking — is this or that feature important? What about performance? What about price? What about customer service? Invariably, you will conclude that everything is important, and that, of course, consumers want everything at the lowest possible price. Great, you just spent thousands of dollars to learn what you already knew.

A complicating factor is that consumers themselves cannot always articulate why they do what they do, or why they respond to various communications. In addition, consumers understand that part of being a "good" consumer is selecting the product with the most desirable features at the lowest price. However, we know that consumer behaviors are often ruled by unconscious and emotional motivators. Therefore, they may be unwilling or unable to identify their true motivators.

This can be quite obvious when doing communications research. If you ask consumers directly whether they respond to advertising, many will tell you it does not influence them at all. Or they may go the opposite direction and describe the specific type of graphic elements and copy they would like to see in an ad for it to be persuasive. However, the truth is that people remember and respond to advertising that is quite different from the type of advertising they might design themselves.

Carefully crafted research instruments can help to uncover perceptions and motivations by avoiding the direct question approach. Some of the more effective approaches include:

• Ethnographic research. This technique involves observing the target when using or purchasing the product in the everyday environment. It "asks questions" of the target without expecting them to answer in a verbal, conscious way; instead, they reveal their habits and preferences through their behaviors.
• Free association of products/brands with various emotional concepts. This can help identify triggers and motivators that might operate at a more unconscious level.
• Clutter reels and ad recall exercises. These techniques expose respondents to creative concepts embedded in print or TV media along with other advertisements. Therefore, we can gauge how much stopping power the creative has without drawing undue attention to the single concept being tested. Instead, the target experiences the creative in the context of many competing advertisements, simulating the real-life environment.
• Trade-off exercises. This technique forces the target to make trade-offs, much as they would in real-world purchasing situations. The trade-offs prevent the target from getting everything they want at the lowest price. It also can quantify the value of various features even when customers themselves are not consciously aware of how they might pay for various competing features.
• Well-designed research instruments and experienced interviewers. Research subjects are more likely to open-up if rapport and trust is created with the interviewer. However, the interviewer must be careful not to subtly encourage or discourage certain types of responses. Experienced researchers are attuned to these issues and employ probing techniques to encourage, but not influence, responses.

By improving your approach to customer/prospect research, you can achieve much more actionable, insightful intelligence on which to base strategic marketing decisions. The key is not just doing research — or doing more of it — but doing it well. And that means asking better questions, both of yourself and your target customers.