Guy Kawasaki - Enchantment (TMRE Day 1 Keynote)

The first keynote address at the TMRE (The Market Research Event, 2012) was presented (after an introduction by a phantom MC) by Guy Kawasaki, based on his newest book, Enchantment. 

Interjecting his presentation with stories and personal anecdotes, Guy provided 10 ways to become Enchanting. In my mind, this is another way to encourage the audience to be both compelling and most importantly, authentic, in all your interactions, personal and professional. His top ten list:

1. Be Likeable: Start with a smile (a real one!), be accepting of others, and most important, default to "yes" in all interactions.
2. Be Trustworthy (and trusting): Always be trustworthy yourself, in your actions, and look for something to agree on with the person you need to learn to trust.
3. Be Perfect: DICEE: deep, intelligent, complete, empowering, elegant
4. Launch your idea: Tell a story, in language salient to the person you are telling it to
   
5. Overcome: Objections exist, change the paradigm, talk to all the influencers
   
6. Endure: See the solution through, reciprocate (what can I do for you?)
   
7. Present: Be a great evangelizer for your story (and use 30 point font!)
   
8. Use technology: It's everywhere - get used to it, and shoot lots of arrows out there
   
9. Enchant up: If you want your ideas/work to catch fire, make sure those above you are as fired up as you
   
10. Enchant down: Ensure your team is given mastery, autonomy, purpose
    

My personal favorite point was made as part of "Launch". There are three ways that any person can be helpful to others when communicating - Offer Information, Insights, and Assistance. I thought this was a great mantra for every market researcher.

Looking forward to a great second day of the TMRE conference. What was your highlight from Monday? What is the one idea you would pass along to others who couldn't be here? Comments welcome below.

@LoriReiser
Advanis

Market Research as a Marketing Communications Tool

In Brief: Market Research can provide insights that yields a long running conversation with your customers, if you remember to include them.

Market research nearly always recruits consumers with promises that their responses "will help us improve our service, develop new products, improve your experience, etc." but rarely follows up with those customers to tell them how their answers will or did change the company, and the experience they can expect in the future. 

Market research organizations worldwide seek to distance themselves from spammers and telemarketers, especially those who engage in the deceitful practice of Mugging/Sugging (Marketing/Selling under the guise of research), and are even more concerned with tipping their hand to the marketplace.

These concerns shouldn't stop organizations from engaging with customers after conducting research. Here are a few ideas based on recent work conducted with clients.

1. Say Thank-you: Our client conducts in-depth surveys with customers, which take 15-20 minutes to complete.  At the end of data collection, this client sends a brief thank-you email to all clients. Best practice - include a brief finding from the research, such as "We were glad to see how many people were happy with our reps knowledge, but we'll be working hard to reduce your wait time". 
2. Ask to follow up: Every survey should end with a request "Can we contact you if we have any further questions about your answers". Don't forget to ask for email/telephone. In one instance, our client was surprised by the answers from a particular segment. We contacted 50 of them by telephone, conducted 5 minute IDI's. In under a week, for very little budget, we developed context and insight that would have previously been a question mark.
3. Use market research results in sales efforts: We recently conducted B2B research for a service provider. The outside sales team participated in a debrief of the research. They were able to use this information to tailor upcoming sales calls to clients, whether they participated in research or not (e.g., We understand from recent research that some people want more information about our small business product. Can I take 5 minutes to talk about that?)
4. We're listening - a marketing campaign: Ina recent customer service survey, our client discovered that the greatest pain point of their customers was something that they had already planned to correct - with a new service being launched this Spring. Armed with the insight that this new service is strongly desired by the customer base, a very bold marketing communications plan is being developed to launch the new service with a splash. 

Often, when conducting research on product & service design, it's easy to forget to talk to and listen to consumers at all stages. Here's a few ways that research can be used in that communications process.

Moving Beyond PowerPoint...How to deliver effectively to clients

PowerPoint (and Keynote for Mac lovers!) has been a constant companion for as long as I can remember, going all the way back to my first university presentations, and is the typical standard in my industry - market research. 

Market research suppliers such as myself have a unique challenge in that most of our work must live on beyond our initial presentation, to be re-delivered by client-side researchers,and to be shared via internal networks. It has to stand alone, it can't require our presence or explanation.

No longer used as only as a visual program for live presentations, Powerpoint is now used instead of Word for full reports as well.  We have bent the tools of Powerpoint to meet our needs with multiple bullet points, and indeed full paragraphs on screen in order to convey our thoughts. On the other hand I think we have bent our way of describing and delivering research results to fit into the confines of Powerpoint.

Changes to the way that any managers, but market researchers in particular, present reports, can fall into two major categories:

1. Moving back to a traditional report
2. Finding more multimedia ways to convey results

Traditional Reporting
When was the last time that you wrote a complete paragraph? Or a few in a row? Powerpoint does not lend itself to fully articulating thoughts. Why would it - the software was designed to provide a visual teaser while relying on a live presenter to fill in the details.  Writing in Powerpoint forces you into a "1 point per page" mentality, and makes it difficult to build and show relationships between findings except to build and build slides to a conclusion.

Perhaps its time to turn back to a report developed in Word? Graphics can be developed in any number of programs, and inserted into a document when required to illustrate a point being made.  Reports might even be shorter. 5-10 pages in Word might do the same job as 30 slides in PPT.  If needed, a presentation deck can easily be built, but much more quickly, since it is just for presentation purposes.


New reporting tools

From websites to infographics, people are more accustomed to visual stimulation than ever before.
How have you used multimedia to help convey a message?

Our company recently conducted an internal contest asking for new ways to communicate research findings. Here are some of our ideas...what are yours?

• Infographics
• Audio commentary
• Executive podcast
• www.prezi.com
• Use of HTML or mouse-overs to augment detail
• Project webpage

Do Less With Less

It is a well known phrase, in marketing research and other industries: Do More with Less.  But can you really do more with less, or does this lead to:  Garbage In Garbage Out?


At the recent American Marketing Association Research & Strategy Summit, the question was posed to a group of CEO's from leading research firms:  "How do you do more with less?"

Their answers provide some concrete ways to stretch your research dollars and still gain the valued insights that your company needs.

• You are paying for people.  Remember that a research firm's greatest cost is in its people. Although there are certainly efficiencies in process and technology that firms achieve, inevitably, what you are paying for is the quality of the team working for you. Although you may pay more for a single research project, you also are likely to get better insights that will pay you back down the road.
• Rewrite that RFP. Involve your research partners as early in the process as possible. Instead of taking a procurement perspective (get the RFP out to as many firms as you can, to get the best price), involve a few trusted partners to work with you to ensure that you have designed research that precisely gets to the business issues at hand.
• Synthesize your research. In the past there has been a trend to naming your research problem, and then doing a project (e.g., the branding study, the pricing study), resulting in a lot of research that is overlaps other work. By ensuring that all internal researchers have access and awareness of all recent and planned research, you can design a research program that answers the most questions with less overlap, and less overall spend. 
• Instead of doing more with less, do less with less. Consider if every question that comes your way requires a research project? Can a few smaller issues be combined, or tackled as an add on to another project? Can it be researched via an omnibus? Is the research need strategic?
• Be strategic about your spend. Research departments fund projects with a combination of their own budget and a departmental budget. Follow the lead of Jeff Mercer at Microsoft, who focuses his research dollars on projects that align with the strategic goals of the business units they support, and either defer or don't fund research that doesn't align. 

The Strategic Marketer - Know your customer

This is the first of an occasional series of posts that focuses on strategic marketing.  Market researchers who are valued partners "at the table" are increasingly turning to their marketer skill set. 

My alma mater, Wilfrid Laurier University, is currently celebrating its centennial anniversary. As part of these celebrations, the university recently named 100 Alumni of Achievement. Cam Heaps, of Steam Whistle Brewery, represents my class, and I wanted to share a simple, but important lesson, courtesy of a speech given at the 2010 Market Research Industry Association Conference.

Greg Taylor, Cam's co-founder, first introduced the brewery, and its vision. A key to this vision is the employees of Steam Whistle, the "Good Beer Team". Greg told us that the employees of  Steam Whistle must know all aspects of the brewery, and must understand it's vision.

When asked by an audience member what advice he had for market researchers, he surprised us with his answer - the number of potential market research partners who came on a a sales visit, but failed the very first question they were asked - "Have you ever visited the brewery?".

In answering this question, Greg reminded us to practice what we preach  - if we are in the business of knowing consumers, we also need to know and understand our clients. This is the first, but most important step in being a strategic marketer.