Once upon a time, pearl divers would go as deep as 100 feet in search of a single pearl. Nowadays the art and danger of pearl fishing has been largely replaced by pearl farms.
Marketing Deep Diving is about finding pearls of wisdom by conducting deep conversations with clients and prospects. It goes deeper than broad-based customer surveys to seek out nuggets of truth. What do clients think? What do clients want? How competitive is the organization?
This is the second of three blog posts that look at Deep Diving in Marketing as part of the process of understanding market dynamics and customer behaviours.
WHAT This post gives an effective Deep Diving process to uncover core truths
WHY The first looked at why organizations need to go marketing Deep Diving.
HOW The third looks at how to go Deep Diving, as well as where and when to go diving.
The Deep Diving marketing process used by Train of Thoughts includes 5 stages.
Research & Discussion
This is about finding the right areas to dive. This knowledge comes from initial primary research, experience, and internally from the organization or department commissioning the research. It’s not an area that can be rushed because it’s crucial to correctly capture the research requirements and conduct interviews with people who can add value to the process.
Interview Planning
Deep Diving is about conducting a small number of 45-60 minute interviews. In total, there are no more than 50 interviews, likely closer to 25.
Interviewees can include clients, prospects, employees, industry analysts & experts and even people who chose not to buy your solution.
The discussion areas are important because they need to directly relate to the problem that is being solved. They need to be drafted, reviewed, discussed, redrafted and, sometimes, trialled. As in broad web-based research, initiating the call and starting the conversation is not the difficult part. The difficult part is asking the right questions to get the right answers and listening. The appeal of a discussion is that you can ask follow-up questions to check your understanding of the answer and the interviewee can ask for clarification on any subject area before sharing an opinion.
Conducting the Research
The research calls are really conversations. There is an agenda and a series of discussion areas but no formal script as in a market research call. Questions tend to be open-ended and discussions dive in to areas of interest. Quite often conversations morph and meander based on the interviewee’s interests. And, quite commonly, research plans change as interviews are conducted and new seams of information are identified.
Conversations can be recorded too (with permission) so that copious notes don’t need to be taken while listening and it becomes a natural conversation with someone you might meet at a business networking function.
Analysis
Analysis is done throughout the process. Usually notes from each completed call are used to assess the value in continuing a particular discussion area or opening up new ones. The analysis is not about uncovering quantitative facts such as “57% of interviewees thought the corporate messaging was weak or OK”. It’s about arriving at core truths such as “the corporate Value Proposition does not resonate with the market and is seen to be too similar to the competition”.
Interpretation & Review
Interpretation of the responses answers the all important “So What?” question and it can be done in many different ways. For example, applying a few simple subjective measures and developing graphical interpretations are great communication tools as they enable debate and discussion.
Having a lot of conversations and writing the report is easy. What’s more challenging is sharing the analysis and interpretation and jointly reviewing results. Different people bring different perspectives and it’s very valuable for the initial draft interpretations to go through a series of different viewpoints to ensure that alternatives are explored. A strategic marketing person may look at a qualitative truth quite differently from a communications specialist.
Does Train of Thoughts go Deep Diving?
Train of Thoughts brings experience and objectivity to organizations when it goes Deep Diving, having surfaced successfully from many dives. To find out more, contact tim@trainofthoughts.ca.
Just a thought.
Tim
Photo taken and licensed by Jogesh S
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