Marketing campaigns typically involve three stages. First an advertiser or ad agency hires a marketing research professional to collect data about the target market: demographics, purchasing habits, wants and needs. Then the professional consultant analyzes the data, attempting to create a customer profile that can form the basis for a marketing plan. Finally, the advertiser or ad agency creates and implements a marketing plan using the research it has commissioned.

At least that’s the way things used to work. Today, digital tools available from companies like Mineful enable advertisers and ad agency to do their own research, in effect cutting out the middle man between themselves and the marketplace. The potential for cost savings with this new approach is obvious. Data collection and analysis can be expensive, and if marketers can handle these two stages of the process themselves they can save a considerable amount of money. But there are also other advantages of taking control of your market research.

Research on Your Own Terms
Although it can be worthwhile sometimes to get an outsider’s perspective on your market research efforts, hiring a consultant to collect and analyze market data has some definite drawbacks. After all, no one knows your business better than you.

Conducting your own research gives you complete control of the process. You can decide which potential customers to survey, how and when to contact them, and exactly what to ask. If the results of a survey don’t provide the kind of information you need, you can easily change the survey parameters and try again. Keeping the cost of surveys down also allows you to reach more people or conduct surveys more frequently.

Taking charge of the analysis stage of the research process gives you more control over how you use the data you collect. For example, if you decide to change your store hours or product offerings, you can use the results of your last survey to see how customers might respond to these changes. Since you have complete control of your data, you don’t need to go back to consultants when you want run a new analysis.

Powerful, Easy-to-Use Tools
One of the main reasons why more and more companies are taking over their own market research is that the digital tools available for this purpose have become increasingly easy to use. In the past you would probably have to hire a statistician to help you analyze survey data. But now you can conduct your own sophisticated analysis using tools that require no specialized knowledge. For example, Mineful’s software lets you use a tool called conjoint analysis to see how responses to various questions are related. This sort of analysis can help you understand such things as how customers make trade-offs between price and desirable product features.

Survey software also makes it easy to display the results of your analysis using widely understood formats such as pie charts and bar charts. Dashboards, a relatively feature, summarize data in a format that can be understood with just a glance. Dashboards make it easy to create different types of displays for different levels or functions in your organization.

With tools like these, it’s no wonder why a growing number businesses are taking control of their own market research.

What is product involvement? Marketers have come up with a variety of definitions for this concept, but basically it comes down to this: product involvement is a measure of a customer’s interest in a particular type of product and commitment to a particular brand.

Let’s say you love motorcycles, especially Harleys. You wouldn’t even consider buying a different brand. Obviously you have a high product involvement. (Someone once said that Harley-Davidson is the only brand that inspires so much product involvement that millions of people are willing to have the company logo tattooed on their bodies.)

In general, the more expensive the product, the greater degree of product involvement. People will spend a lot of time researching different makes of cars. They may even consider the car they choose a part of their self-image. Compare this sort of involvement with the attitude most people have toward something less expensive, for example, paper towels. Most people don’t care very much about paper towels, and they have little brand loyalty. They might not even know the name of the brand they usually buy.

Still, there are some inexpensive products that inspire a high degree of product involvement — for example, shampoo. Some women are very concerned about the appearance of their hair. They may have a strong commitment to a certain brand of shampoo because they feel it makes their hair particularly soft and shiny. (Men, on the other hand, typically don’t have much product involvement with shampoo.)

Whether a consumer is buying shampoo or a motor cycle, there is a strong relationship between brand loyalty and how important the product is to the customer. The more a consumer cares about a particular type of product, the more loyal the consumer is likely to be to a particular brand.

Measuring Product Involvement
A simple product questionnaire can be an effective way of measuring product involvement. One question might ask how important a particular type of product is to the respondent on a scale of 1 to 10. A second question might ask how loyal the respondent feels to a particular brand. If most people feel that a product is very important but they feel little brand loyalty, this situation represents a real opportunity for a marketer. With the right message, a marketer can take advantage of this situation to build brand loyalty.

On the other hand, if a survey reveals that most people feel a particular product is not very important, it would probably be a waste of money to try build brand loyalty. Most people don’t feel strongly enough about the product to care which brand they buy.

It’s important to remember that product involvement is different from product evaluation. Respondents might rate a brand highly on an evaluation, but if the product is not important to them they will probably not have much brand loyalty.

Predicting Product Involvement with New Products
New product surveys can help marketers predict what sort of involvement a new product might create. The key here is to ask questions about similar products that a respondent might already be familiar with. For example, suppose you were going to introduce a new line of organic snack foods. Your survey might ask how important people consider snack foods and how important they consider organic foods in general. These questions will help you forecast the potential level of interest in your product, and its potential for building brand loyalty.

You have conducted a well-designed customer satisfaction survey, and you’ve collected mountains of data. Now what? You’re not just going to let the results sit on a shelf in your office, but do you have a comprehensive plan to get the most value out of your investment? Here are a few suggestions about the next steps to take with the results of your survey.

Respond Quickly to Urgent Customer Problems
Often a customer satisfaction survey will include a few questions meant to identify issues that need to be addressed immediately. For example, a hotel chain might ask how long it took a customer to reach a representative on its toll free reservations line. If this is a crucial issue for the company (and it should be), then this question will be flagged for immediate analysis and action.

Other factors that might call for a quick response are very low overall ratings or the use of key words (such as “dirty” or “rude”) in written answers on the survey. If the survey was not anonymous, it may be worthwhile to contact people who responded very negatively to gain a better understanding of what went wrong. This will also show dissatisfied customers that you take their concerns seriously and you want to do something about them.

Make Someone Responsible
One way to sort responses to a customer service questionnaire is by area of responsibility in your organization. For example, certain questions may point out problems with accounting or sales or billing. By making individuals responsible for dealing with specific issues that come up in a survey, you are much more likely to get the issues resolved. If everyone is responsible for solving a problem, then no one is.

Assigning responsibility for specific issues also addresses a common problem with customer satisfaction surveys: the results don’t filter down to people who can do something about them. Too often managers circulate summaries of survey results or key findings without giving front-line staff the information they need to improve customer service.

Implement Customer-Focused Changes
Any response to customer feedback should be developed with the customer in mind. This includes setting goals for improving customer satisfaction. For example, if a customer purchase survey identifies shipping delays as a problem for your online store, you need to do more than just revamp your shipping procedures. You need to set specific goals for shipping a certain percent of orders within a day or two.

When you make customer-focused changes, let customers know about them — especially those customers who took the time and trouble to respond to your survey. To keep your message positive, present the changes as an improvement in service rather than a response to a problem.
Keep Track and Keep Asking
It’s easy to think of customer satisfaction as something you check on with a survey once a quarter or twice a year. But to get the most of out of surveys, you need to constantly keep track of how well your organization is responding to the issues customers raise. You also need to keep thinking about how to refine your survey process so that you can continue to get the information you need to keep your customers satisfied.

In a severe recession like the one we are now experiencing, consumers change their behavior. They look for cheaper alternatives to the products they usually buy. They weigh major purchases more carefully and spend more time comparison shopping. They may even decide that things they valued in the past, such as keeping up with the latest fashions, aren’t really that important any more.

These changes in consumer behavior make market research more necessary than ever. With customers cutting back on their spending and being more selective, companies can’t afford to make mistakes in their marketing efforts. Yet the recession has led most major marketers to cut their research budgets by 10 to 20 percent. To deal with these reductions, marketing managers need to do what consumers are doing: take a good hard look at how they are spending their money and focus on things that provide the greatest return on their investment.

Going Online
Many marketing consultants are suggesting a practical way to deal with tighter research budgets: shift more resources to online surveys. Telephone surveys and in-person surveys can be expensive and slow. For cost reasons, they are usually limited to fairly small samples. Each additional respondent adds to the cost of the survey.

On the other hand, online surveys can reach a large number of customers for a reasonable amount of money. Each additional respondent adds almost nothing to the cost of the survey. And online surveys are fast and efficient. Customer feedback can be analyzed easily to gain a better understanding of how the recession is affecting buying decisions. For example, conjoint analysis can reveal the tradeoff customers are making between price and desirable features. Online survey providers such as Mineful can help marketers make the most of this type of analysis.

Focusing on Core Customers
Tighter research budgets mean that marketers need to focus more on their core customers, the ones who are most loyal and most profitable. Maintaining strong relationships with these customers is the key to minimizing the pain of the economic slowdown.

Some companies may be tempted to take these customers for granted and focus their market research almost exclusively on attracting new business. But that would be a mistake. Even the most loyal customers are feeling the pinch of the recession, and marketers need to understand how to keep these people satisfied.

Looking for New Opportunities
The recession has presented serious challenges for most businesses, but it has also created some interesting opportunities. Marketers have always looked for ways to convince customers to rethink their purchasing habits and decisions, and the recession is forcing customers to do just that.

Customers seem to be more willing than ever to try new brands and new products. They are studying ads more closely and taking a harder look at what they are getting for their money. Companies that make an effort to understand what customers are looking for in this tough economy will do a better job of attracting new business. These new customer relationships will be even more valuable when the economy turns around.

Market research reports and customer satisfaction surveys provide truckloads of valuable data. The challenge for marketers is to make sense of it all and present their analysis in a clear, useful way. Dashboard reports help marketers meet this challenge. They provide simplified data analysis that allows decision makers to see at a glance what’s working and what needs to be changed.

Dashboards Display Key Indicators
The dashboard in a car allows the driver to see at a glance key indicators such as speed, RPMs, and engine temperature. The dashboard in a management information system works the same way. Any organization collects an enormous amount of data. The problem is that all this valuable information is not easily available to the people who need to use it — the people in the driver’s seat.

Dashboard reports provide key indicators that show how well an organization is functioning. Specialized dashboards have been developed for all sorts of business operations, everything from sales to security. They are especially useful for data-intensive operations such as survey analysis and market research.

Here’s how they work. Programmers use efficient software tools, such as those developed by Mineful, to create customized displays of data gathered from customer satisfaction surveys or market research reports. These displays might include bar graphs, pie charts, or other visual representations that are easy to interpret. Different displays can be created for different types of users. For example, high-level executives might see a summary of customer satisfaction data for different parts of the business, while product managers might see results just for their own operations.

Key Features
Dashboards are showing up on more and more desktops because they offer a number of valuable features. For example:

Businesses have been using online surveys for a while now to measure customer satisfaction and conduct market research. They know that success in business always involves listening to customers. But a few forward-thinking businesses have taken this listening process one step further. They are using online systems to solicit product ideas from both their customers and their staff.

A Different Kind of Questions
Most online surveys ask customers to evaluate a product or service. For example, a hotel might ask, “How would you rate our check-in process in terms of convenience?” A survey intended to solicit news ideas might ask a different kind of question, for example, “How can we improve our check-in process?”

Putting a Dollar Value on Ideas
A new idea many sound promising, but will it actually lead to increased profits? That is the calculation that business managers have to make. In the case of a new product, this calculation can be fairly straightforward. A manager has to estimate two things: what it will cost to implement the innovation and how much the innovation will yield in new sales. If the expected benefits outweigh the costs significantly, a manager will probably give the innovation a green light, then monitor costs and sales figures to see if things turn out as expected.

Social networking sites such as Facebook have given marketers a new approach to Internet advertising — something called viral marketing. Viral marketing is really just a high-tech form of word of mouth advertising. Here’s how it works.

Suppose you own a bakery. You have lots of loyal customers, but, like any business owner, you would like to have more. You create a free page on Facebook describing your business, and you update it frequently with news about special promotions or new product offerings. You encourage your customers to visit your page and become “fans” of it. When they do, you can send them automated updates, and they can visit your page with just one click from their Facebook accounts. To increase traffic to your page, you might decide to buy targeted ads on Facebook.

So far this approach is rather conventional. It is really no different from the way businesses have used the Internet for a number of years. But something else happens when people become fans of your Facebook page: the name of your business is added to their personal profile. Now all their Facebook friends see that they are fans of your business. Some of them become fans, and the process (you hope) just goes on and on. This is the essence of viral marketing: encouraging people to pass on a marketing message to others. If your message is appealing, it has the potential to spread exponentially throughout your community and beyond.

Facebook has actually taken the concept of viral marketing one step further. Suppose you decide to run a Facebook ad targeted to everyone in your local area. Suppose, also, that you have a Facebook page with 100 fans, and each one of those fans has 50 Facebook “friends.” When those friends see your ad, it will say something like this: “Sample our delicious baked goods. Your friend Adam Smith is a fan.”

Clearly the potential for viral marketing is enormous, but how do you measure its effectiveness? Earlier approaches to Internet marketing used some traditional methods of measuring how well an ad worked. For example, each ad might have a unique 800 phone number for responses. Or each ad might have a link to a coded discount coupon that customers could print out or use online. But these traditional methods don’t lend themselves to social media marketing.
Marketers have developed new approaches to measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign. They measure such things as:

Marketers face some tough choices in these challenging economic times. How much of their budgets should they devote to new advertising options such as social media? Is this a time to cut back on marketing budgets, or should marketers spend more to compete for scarce consumer dollars?

A recent marketing survey conducted by Adweek provides some useful insights into what experts in the field are thinking and doing right now. Participants were given a menu of responses to the question, “How will the economic downturn most affect advertising?” The response chosen most often (by 30% of participants) was that marketers will “use better targeted ads to improve return on investment.” A smaller number (22%) said that advertisers would spend less. Apparently most people in marketing believe that cutting back on advertising is not an appropriate way to respond to difficult economic conditions.

The Shift to Online Advertising
The survey results also showed a strong interest in Internet advertising, with 23% of participants saying that the most important marketing trend is that “the shift to online would accelerate.” Another 15% of participants believed the most important trend was that “ads will follow traffic to social media.”

Despite these results, online advertising still represents a fairly small slice of the advertising pie. According to the latest figures from Advertising Age, Internet advertising receives only about 10% of advertising dollars, compared to more than 40% for all types of TV advertising. The research service eMarketer predicts that Internet advertising will continue to grow at a steady rate, and by 2013 will represent 15% of total spending.

What Marketing Execs Are Saying
The consulting firm Anderson Analytics recently surveyed members of the Marketing Executives Networking Group to learn what they considered the top marketing trends for 2009. More than half of those surveyed thought their budgets would decrease because of the ailing economy. Survey results focused on these five trends:

Marketers would love to be able to read the minds of consumers. They would love to know what precise combination of price, features, benefits, wants, and needs triggers the decision to buy a particular product. There are many ways to approach this mysterious subject. One that lends itself nicely to online surveys is what is often called a “purchase intent survey.” Here’s how it works.

A survey might ask a question using a five point scale such as:
Which is most true about this product?

The Internet has created a new era in market research. Online surveys, coupled with the latest analysis tools, provide unprecedented insight into what customers want and need. To make the most of this information, market researchers need to present it to upper management in a clear, persuasive way. They need to demonstrate how market analysis can have a direct effect on their organization’s bottom line.

Bursting the Tech Bubble
When people talk about the “tech bubble,” they are usually referring to the inflated price of technology stocks around the turn of the century. But there is another kind of tech bubble — the bubble of knowledge that sometimes isolates experts from the decision makers in an organization. To reach those decision makers, market research experts need to burst the bubble and present their findings in a meaningful way.

First, you need to take a hard look at the language you are using. Every profession has its own jargon, and market research is no exception. Statistical tools can be very powerful, but the language of statistics can be impenetrable to managers who have no training in the field. In presenting the results of your analysis, use everyday English and standard business terminology. Show managers that you speak their language and understand their concerns.

Second, make it visual. Many people, even upper-level managers, have trouble understanding the significance of statistics. Fortunately, the latest online survey software gives you a variety of ways to present the results of surveys in visually appealing ways. For most people, a bar chart is much more meaningful than a column of numbers. Just remember to keep your charts and graphs clean and simple. A pie chart with 18 slices is not going to be very appetizing.

Third, stay focused on significant business issues. Your research may have uncovered all sorts of interesting information about customers, but you need to decide what’s really important. Remember that people have a limited attention span. Don’t clutter up your presentation to management with insignificant details.

Overcoming Resistance
In making your case to management, keep in mind the human factor. In many cases, successful managers have earned their positions because they have a history of making good decisions. Many of those decisions may have been based on gut instincts and intuition — what executives like to think of as good judgment. Top-level executives are often paid handsome salaries for their judgment, so why should they rely on your numbers rather than own instincts?

The key to overcoming this type or resistance is understanding how receptive to your message executives are likely to be. With some executives, you may need to present your analysis as just a refinement of your organization’s marketing plans. With others, you may feel free to challenge some basic assumptions about the best way to attract and keep customers. Remember that what you are doing is actually a kind of internal marketing. Your customers are the people who run your organization, and you need to come up with an effective way to get them to buy into your message.

Finally, be sure to show management that you are focused on the future, not the past. From a business perspective, online surveys are useful mainly as a tool for predicting customer behavior. Use your results to do a “what if” analysis of changes your organization might make to keep your existing customers and win new ones. Don’t be afraid to remind decision makers that there is a direct relationship between customer satisfaction and profitability.