As director of the market research group within the AMA I was surprised that many of my research colleagues at other firms did not attend ostensibly because there were no sessions devoted specifically to brand research.  It was surprising because the other marketing professionals who were attending never doubted for a moment the essential role of research in effective brand marketing.  Indeed, important lessons about the role of research permeated every presentation.

Out of 36 Branding Basics outlined in the conference program, fifteen were clearly about research even though none actually used the word research.  These specific Branding Basics were:

1. Understand the totality of your brand image
2. Understand the likes and dislikes of the customer
3. Understand the associations people draw from your brand
4. Understand what your product stands for with the customer
5. Understand the real desire of your customer
6. Understand the value of the customer
7. Study why a customer buys your product
8. Assess if your brand appeals to customers
9. Understand as a user the imagery of your brand
10. What does your brand personify?
11. Understand the customer’s perception of price
12. Understand the value created for the customer
13. Identify the correct vision and relevant message
14. Understand how the brand compares to its competitors
15. Measure brand equity

In fact, one thing I appreciate about this list is that the word research never appears.  The focus is on understanding (the word from which Versta Research derives its name) and on answering questions.  In our experience, when marketers are focused on the questions they need to have answered rather than saying “We need research on X” or “We need to survey our customers about Y,” the research outcomes are far more useful.

Market researchers should be immersing themselves in conversations like yesterday’s BrandSmart conference. While we need to build deep expertise in the methods, minutia, innovations and trends in research itself, we also need deep immersion in the world of marketing.  This is how and where our research will get used, and it will ensure that we’re doing smart research to help our clients be Brand Smart.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

Not only will this shift from product marketing to customer marketing enhance the ability of businesses to deliver value to their customers and shareholders, but it will likely help market researchers bring higher levels of value to the work they do for their clients.  Why?  Because market research is fundamentally about people.  We are trained as social scientists, and have expertise in understanding peoples’ needs, aspirations, and pain points.  We help businesses understand the opportunities to help people, and of course, to sell to them.

In contrast, a product-centric approach to marketing forces an uncomfortable relationship with market research because the business is overly focused on products.  Researchers interview people to get data, but they spend a great deal of time measuring and tracking information about products rather than customers, focusing on brand attributes, perceptions of products, awareness and usage of one service over another, and so on.  Have you ever filled out a survey (or designed one!) and wondered why most questions are not really about customers and what they need?  Instead surveys are often focused on satisfaction with brands, words that convey the personalities of brands, preferences for one brand over another, and so on.

The HBR authors suggest that brand managers and product managers will be replaced in the future by customer managers, and that customer managers will look a lot like the types of people currently in market research.  To quote the authors:

We’d expect the most effective customer managers to have broad training in the social sciences—psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics—in addition to an understanding of marketing. They’d approach the customer as behavioral scientists rather than as marketing specialists, observing and collecting information about them, interacting with and learning from them, and synthesizing and disseminating what they learned. For business schools to stay relevant in training customer managers, the curriculum needs to shift its emphasis from marketing products to cultivating customers.

With our deep training in social science and expertise in understanding people, Versta Research can help you make the transition to a truly customer oriented approach to doing business.  Give us a call at (312) 348-6089; we would be happy to share our thoughts and perspectives on some of the specific problems you are facing, and we would be happy to share with you a copy of the HBR article as well.

Joe Hopper, Ph.D.