Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Research Practices’

Managing a Successful Consultant Engagement

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Selecting the consultant that’s right for your project is just the first step in creating a value-adding consulting engagement.  To assure success, you and your consultant will need to write an unambiguous description of the expectations, deliverables, and project scope-of-work, and you will need to follow a solid project management plan.  Here’s how …

1. Write down clear, concise, yet detailed, project specifications – overall objectives, the subjects and questions to include, an outline of the methodology and level of effort, geographic or other limitations, the expected depth and detail of the analyses, deliverable, timing, etc.  Do it carefully – you should consider this document to be your contract with the consultant.

Building a good scope of work is an iterative process.  Use the first draft as the framework for discussions with consultant candidates.  Then, collaborate with the selected consultant to refine and focus your objectives and plan.

For expensive or complex projects, you might use your initial draft to solicit competitive bids.  This is a great way to identify alternative methods and to judge the candidates’ experience and insights.  Just be careful not to place too much weight on quoted price.  The value to be gained from an especially insightful consultant or innovative approach can easily outweigh the few Dollars you might save on the front end price.

2. Good communications between the consultant and your designated project manager will keep your project on track.  The trick is to decide how much communication is ‘just right’.  Too little, and the project risks wandering off on rabbit trails; too much, and you’re likely to bog down in minutia.  The main aims of your communications plan should be to 1.) demonstrate the consultant’s continuing progress, 2.) identify and resolve any unexpected difficulties or surprises and 3.) discuss and agree upon any changes to the scope of work, timing or budget (to be subsequently confirmed in writing).

You should carefully and fully document changes that you and your consultant agree to.  Some of the worst consultant project fiascos that I’ve witnessed were the result a failure to clearly describe and document changes.

3. Document the results.  Your project will generate a mass of information, call reports, data tables, charts and graphs – the WHAT of the consultant’s analysis.  Insist that your consultant go beyond the data to dig into the SO WHAT? – the implications of the findings and what they mean to your business.

Remember to keep an open mind.  The reality that the consultant discovers may not look much like your preconceptions

Add more value by collaborating in this SO WHAT? analysis.  Meld the consultant’s intimate and detailed knowledge with the company and market-specific context that you can bring.

Despite all the care you put into writing the project plan, and the conscientiousness of your communications and project management, you’re likely to run into a few bumps over the course of your consulting project.  Insist that you get what the consultant contracted to deliver, but be fair, too, and don’t ask for more than you originally agree to pay for.

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Maximize the Return on Your Business Consultant Investment

Friday, January 4th, 2013

In my last post we talked about when you should consider engaging an independent consultant:

> to accomplish things you can’t accomplish with your own resources, skills, and marketplace connections

> to ‘test the waters’ without ‘tipping your hand’ to your competitors or future customers

> to provide an independent and unbiased assessment of tough, contentious issues

If you haven’t engaged a consultant before – or have been less than satisfied with the experience – here’s a practical recipe for earning the best return on your consulting investment.

1. Select a consultant that fits your need – There’s a broad range of perfectly competent consultants out there, from loose networks of individual experts, to small ‘boutique’ companies, to large highly mechanized consumer survey houses (think Gallup and Harris), to the management consulting giants (Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and the like).  Selecting the right one for your unique needs will depend on issues like the nature of the business problem or opportunity you face, the particular industries and customer groups relevant to you, and your budget and time constraints.

2. Manage the relationship with your consultant – Your consultant is the expert, but you’re the boss.  You are ultimately responsible for the success of the consulting engagement – by setting clear expectations and deliverables up front, by monitoring and facilitating timely progress, and by sticking to agreed upon project goals and resisting the natural urge to pursue ‘rabbit trails’ and ‘scope creep’.

3. Monetize the results – No matter how insightful the results and recommendations of your consulting project, they’re essentially valueless until you use them to change your operations and the role your business plays in the marketplace.  Identify up front the problems you need to solve and how to use project results to solve them, make sure the rest of your organization is on-board with your goals, and follow through with a plan to change your product line, your marketing and business plan, or the way you operate.

Coming up … Posts with practical advice on how to select the proper consultant, how to plan and manage an effective consulting engagement, and how to transform insights from your consultant project into fatter profits.

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The Essence of Marketing Research

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

The essence of marketing research is ‘reducing business uncertainties by learning more about the markets you participate in’.  It’s about improving your odds when you’re trying to predict the future:  “How will customers respond to my new ad message?  What message would be more effective?”  “Which features of a potential new product are valuable and attractive to customers.  How much are they worth, in the price of the new product?” “Who has most / least influence on buying decisions at Company ABC?”  “If we do X, how will competitors respond?”

There are 4 essential steps to any successful marketing research project:

1. Collaborate with business leaders to define a significant business problem or opportunity, and describe the information, insights and understanding which will be needed to solve it.

2. Identify the most likely sources of the necessary information, and design a methodology to gather, analyze and interpret the information.

3. Execute the methodology.

4. Use the resulting information, insights and understanding to help decision makers solve the original problem.

 The sources and techniques selected in step 2 depend strongly upon the nature of the problem you define in step 1, so there’s no single answer to your question about “…what types of questions they ask and what type of an expert do they seek when performing primary research.”  Most projects tap into the experience and opinions of multiple important groups, including:

– Direct customers and non-buying potential customers, always including a spectrum of job functions – R&D, brand management, operations, logistics, purchasing – and management levels.

– The customers of our direct customer, and other companies that operate in the chain of turning raw materials into end products – other guys who play a big part in determining our customer’s success or failure.

– Suppliers of other materials or equipment to our customer

– Competitors (This can be tricky.  Hiring a consultant to get information or use techniques that would be illegal for you directly is no protection for you (or the consultant) under US anti-trust, trade and espionage laws.)

– Government employees and academia.  For example, people in the Department of Commerce and regulatory agencies are nearly always knowledgeable and helpful, and US government libraries, publications and databases are generally excellent.

The optimum techniques to use and the most productive questions to ask are dictated by the business problem you’re trying to solve and the nature of the groups whose opinions and experience you focus on.  Large groups (owners of single family homes, consumers of laundry products, independent auto repair shop owners, for example) might be sampled with statistical survey techniques, while individual in-depth interviews might be more appropriate for smaller groups (for example, makers of kidney dialysis machines, designers of office furniture, or paint chemists).  Group techniques (like focus groups) may be great for gathering initial impressions, but are less useful sources for detail and reliability.  

In almost all cases, the real value-adding capacity of marketing research comes from its ability to answer questions that impact the future – questions like “What if …?” and “Why?” – NOT  from its ability to execute a methodology and answer the more simplistic “How many?” and “Who?”.

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Marketing Research – A Day in a Boy’s Life

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Imagine paying good money to follow a 12 year old to school and through the mall, rummage through his room, and quietly observe how he interacts with his friends and family. Then imagine repeating it with dozens of other 6 to 14 year old boys. That is exactly the sort of marketing research Disney is doing to try to learn how to attract more boys to their audience and to the Disney brand.

Regardless of what you’re selling – movies, games and clothing to kids, the house on the corner, a railroad car full of industrial plastic, or an evening at a fancy restaurant – understanding what makes your customers tick is a large part of your success. A few gifted sales people seem to have a unique instinct, but for most businesses, marketing research provides vital insights into why customers behave as they do – insights about where they choose to spend their money, and why.

Marketing research comes in many forms, from the simple and informal to large, highly structured large formal studies. Today’s New York Times reports on Disney’s use of the marketing research technique “ethnography” to gain a candid, day-in-the-life experience of what 6-14 year old boys are really like.

The Times reports that boys “hop more quickly than their female counterparts from sporting activities to television to video games during leisure time. They can also be harder to understand: the cliché that girls are more willing to chitchat about their feelings is often true.” Big ‘duh’ to any of us who have lived with 12 year olds, but Disney’s insights likely run a lot deeper than that.

It will be interesting to see how the Disney brand and programming evolve to add more boy-focused appeal to a line-up heavily tilted toward Hannah Montana and The Little Mermaid. Perhaps …

– Some outdoor adventure themes
– Outwitting the older crowd to right a wrong
– Helping smaller, younger girls and boys figure how to handle a tough situation
– Learning a new skill – from klutz to competent

How would you like to see Disney appeal more to boys?

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