Ever wonder why products and services are bad? Shouldn’t companies be able to make their offerings better, perhaps through market research? It may have been clear to us at Matter for years, but it looks like some other folks are finally getting it…
“Marketers generally distrust research and data,” said Greg Stuart, former CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That attitude helps keep the industry driven largely by gut instinct and what Mr. Stuart calls “tribal custom.” But tradition and gut are increasingly impractical given the complexities of modern marketing, he said.
He cites a relatively simple marketing plan with five elements — positioning, segmentation, TV, print and online media plans — and five choices within each element. It amounts to more than 3,000 permutations. “We’d have to be out of our minds to think we could know what to do in our gut,” he said.
Researchers’ relatively low status within companies and agencies, he said, leads to marketers ignoring their advice or never seeking it in the first place. At the same time, many marketers’ inability to understand the methodology and calculations behind data they get, Mr. Stuart said, “allows research to be abused, sometimes by researchers but also by people trying to sell things.”
“There is a general belief [among researchers] that over 50% of the research done at companies is wasted,” said Bob Barocci, CEO of the Advertising Research Federation. “They’re asked to do things that, even if the research project is perfect, won’t be useful.” He attributes much of that to research done purely for defensive purposes to support decisions already made. “It’s covering-your-butt kind of thinking,” he said.
But he also blames research departments for much of the disconnect with marketers. “Often all we do is present numbers,” Mr. Barocci said. “We don’t present insights.”
Kimberly-Clark Chief Marketing Officer Tony Palmer said survey research itself may be part of the industry’s image problem. “It’s becoming harder and harder to get people’s attention to do research,” Mr. Palmer said. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer that what people say and what they do is different. So there’s a real need to drive research to newer techniques, toward research that deploys anthropology and observation.”
Read the entire AdAge.com article here