Andrew Tenzer writes about the growth of qual research in Marketing Week this week, making the point that qual alone isn’t going to solve everything and quant alone won’t solve everything.
About a year or so ago, I wrote a piece for the ALSD about backward market research where I tried to simplify the original idea in a way that taxed sports marketers could put the idea to use.
Over the last two years, I’ve had a chance to do a good deal of marketing research around the world with some of the world’s most famous sports brands.
The conclusion I’ve come away from during this time is that we don’t spend nearly enough time talking to customers and potential customers and we spend too much time staring at data.
I’ve come to describe this challenge as the battle of proactive vs. reactive.
This is my way of saying that we need to think about the research v. data issue more completely.
To me, research is proactive.
You developed a hypothesis.
You build a research model.
You test your beliefs.
On the other hand, data is reactive.
You get reports.
You see what people have done.
You don’t have much context for why they’ve made their choices.
The real challenge is that we’ve fallen in love with data.
Why?
A number of reasons:
- It is easy to collect data.
- Because you are looking backward, you can draw conclusions pretty easily.
- The data tells you what people did, you can’t be wrong.
On the side, research is often feared:
- Research is imperfect. You might miss the mark by asking the wrong questions. Or, you might find out your assumptions were wrong.
- Research can feel expensive and time-consuming…and, like waiting around. It isn’t because if you find out people don’t want what you are selling, you may save your business millions of dollars or more in real expenses and opportunity costs.
- Due to bad thought leadership that runs out the BS arguments that some “leader” didn’t do market research, usually Steve Jobs. Even when that point has been proven wrong in a court of law.
The battle is for courage.
The courage to take action without knowing what the likely outcomes will be. This means doing research to stretch the possibilities that are available to you.
Research often gives people the cover to take a set of actions, but they often neglect to ask themselves the question of whether they can know for sure that the future is going to look just like the past. As Roger Martin points out, that isn’t often a good way of betting.
Courage here means using data and research as a tool to keep your finger on the market’s needs, desires, and wants, but never losing sight of the reality that you are going to have to make a decision that has no guarantee of success because the future is always new and different, even if it is only just a little bit.
What’s your take?