Page 37 - Duct Tape Marketing

21Chapter 2: All About Customers

Method Purpose Advantages Challenges

Observation Document actual Anonymous. Can be difficult to
buyer behavior Immediate findings. interpret findings.
Relatively easy Can be difficult to
to implement. target which behav-
iors to monitor. Can be
expensive.

Documentation Study factual Readily available. Time-consuming.
Not disruptive to May be incomplete.
review history of clients operations. Not Research is limited
subject to interpre- to previously
and transactions tation. collected data.

Focus groups Learn about and Convey information Requires expert
facilitation. Requires
compare customer to customers. advance scheduling.
Difficult to analyze
experiences and Collect customer findings.

reactions impressions.

When to call in the pros

Doing it yourself doesn’t mean doing it all on your own. Here are places
where an investment in professional advice pays off:

ߜ Questionnaires: Figure out what you want to learn and create a list of
questions. Retain a trained marketer or market researcher to review the
wording, sequence, and format for you. Then have a member of your
staff or a freelance designer prepare the handout or mailer so that it
makes a good visual impression on your business’s behalf. Include a
letter or introductory paragraph explaining why you’re conducting
research and presenting your business as a strong, forward-thinking
organization that cares about its customers’ opinions and experiences.

ߜ Phone or in-person surveys: Employ an outside group to do the ques-
tioning on your behalf. When you ask the questions yourself, it’s easy to
let your biases, preconceptions, and business pressures leak through
and sway your customers. Posing questions so that they don’t skew the
results is a real art. Plus, customers are more apt to be candid with third
parties. (If you need proof, think of all the things people are willing to
say behind someone’s back that they’d never say to the person’s face.
The same premise applies in customer research.)

ߜ Focus groups: If you’re assembling a group of favorite clients to talk casu-
ally about a new product idea, you’re fine to go it alone. But if you’re
trying to elicit helpful information from outsiders or if you want to learn