What do clients think? What do clients want? How competitive is the organization?

Marketing Deep Diving is about uncovering core issues through the lens of lengthy, targeted, loosely structured, one-on-one interviews with clients and prospects that take the organization deeper than marketing slogans. It’s about finding pearls of wisdom.

This is the first of three blog posts that look at Deep Diving in Marketing as part of the process of understanding market dynamics and customer behaviours.

WHY The first post looks at why organizations need to go deep diving.
WHAT The second post describes an effective deep diving process that uncovers core truths.
HOW The third post looks at how to go deep diving, as well as where and when to go diving.

What problem is being solved?

The starting point for any marketing professional is often to define the organizational challenge such as:

• It is losing market share
• It is not gaining market traction
• The organization needs help with new development opportunities
• There is a misalignment between the Value Proposition, the Messaging, the Communications and Client Behaviours

Correctly defining the problem leads to the right questions about the market, clients and potential solutions. But answering those questions without good information can lead to knee-jerk “let’s try this” solutions.

What is the usual response to needing information?

The usual response is to initiate research to poll customers, take average measurements and draw quick conclusions. The arrival of compact online research tools like Zoomerang and Survey Monkey means that everyone is now an instant researcher. A thousand surveys can be emailed at 9am and a report prepared by 5pm. But online research tools are only as good as the questions, the targeting, the answers and the interpretation. Too often, the answer are not available because the right questions were not asked. This broad-based market research is very useful as it draws the framework, but a deep dive in to what people are really thinking and doing, provides the pearls of wisdom.

Why is Deep Diving different?

Deep Diving is based around one-on-one, 45 to 60 minute interviews. The interviews follow an agenda, but not a script. Open-ended questions cover specific discussion areas and don’t force interviewees to answer questions on a scale of 1 to 10. It does not involve hundreds of interviews – it’s usually between 25 & 50 focused interviews, depending on the organization. Face-to-face is best, but not always practical; telephone calls work fine most of the time. Working from shortlists of clients, prospects and others, an experienced, objective professional can uncover the brand truths, interpret competitive positioning and find out what excites and frustrates customers through this Deep Dive process. They can build a depth of interpretation that goes far beyond a spreadsheet.

Why is Deep Diving useful?

There are many reasons why Deep Diving can be useful:

• It builds a richness of understanding that is not available when studying charts that tell you “68.2% of people who bought the product in the last year are somewhat satisfied”.
• It offers an understanding of the corporate value proposition
• It identifies client motivations and core truths
• It brings an impartial, external assessment to the management table

Deep Diving is frequently done in conjunction with other research. It provides the qualitative overlay to the quantitative framework; the interpretation to the market analysis.

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 Richard Ozh.

Tagged as: Deep Diving, market research