AD:TECH - Marketing Reseach Methods

[Garrett]

Bonny Brown of Vividence presented Tuesday on marketing research methods. She started with a concept that every brick and mortar company should consider.

She said that when people come to your website they think of it as your company. So if you're Ford, and you have a broken link on your site, your customer thinks less of your company. You online businesses understand this already.

Her presentation focused on more than broken links though - she looked more at issues of usability, and emphasized that strategic direction must come from your customers.

Research, she said, reduces costs of time as well as potential damage to your brand equity.

The stages of research are this:

>>Discovery phase where you define strategic direction
>>competitive assesment by customers (allow customers to compare your site to your competitors)
>>Understand your strengths and weaknesses
>>Do a drivers analysis - what potential fix will drive the response you want?

She also emphasized the necessity of having real customers perform real tasks on your site during your research phase, and be sure that you're controlling your data collection so that you can compare apples to apples.

[hal]

Hello Garrett,

You have reminded me of something my Marketing prof said now some 3 decades(!) ago. Market research can take you off into some strange directions, based on perceptions... or preconceptions.

Case in point. The airline passenger sits down in Coach and looks around to get familiar with his surroundings. Almost by accident he flips open the ashtray (well, this was 30 years ago!). "If the ashtray is full, then there must be something wrong with the engine."

Same concept. The only thing that's really changed is the date. The broken link is not a maintenance problem, it's the whole company sliding into the dumper.

Ouch!

Hal