Let Your Audience Drive Your Marketing

MIKE MCMILLAN

Partner & Chief Creative Officer

Introworks Branding & Marketing

mmcmillan@introworks.net

introworks.net

Topic: Marketing/ Communications

It’s afternoon. You’re in the conference room with your management team, getting the download on a recent market study.

On the screen is a list of competitive alternatives provided by your company’s existing customers. “That’s wrong,” your CEO lashes out, “XYZ Company is not a competitor.” Gulp, thank goodness someone in the room points out that the customers’ perception of the competition has some merit. The customer is a competitor because the customer thinks they are.

In marketing, perception means a lot. Everything, really. What your audience perceives of your company, product, service, competitors or category is FACT.

This is not a revolutionary thought, yet it seems far too many folks rely on second-hand, what-we-think-they-think information as the basis for brand management. Get the facts (perceptions) and you can unlock a universe of valuable information to help you make more confident and insightful decisions about your brand.

Wow, what your audience will tell you.

Powerful, applicable marketplace information is right there in the minds of your audience for the taking. And boy, it can tell you a lot. Like how to change your message, where to get an edge on competitors, what your next product should be and how to allocate your marketing budget next year.

The key to getting to these types of answers is to conduct an independent perception study that takes a multi-dimensional approach. It’s easiest to think of such a study in three functional layers:

Perception of your brand. Finding out what your audience perceives of your brand is the core information, the baseline for benchmarking your brand and the right place to start. You think you’re an innovator, they think so, too. Your message is getting through.

Comparison in relation to competitive alternatives. Now this is when things get more interesting. Understanding how your audience perceives you versus your competitors on key business or brand characteristics suddenly gives you a measurably clearer picture of vulnerability and opportunity. Competitor not seen as particularly innovative. Just what you thought.

Measurement against expectations in key areas. It’s one thing to learn perceptions, quite another to understand expectations. Expectations are the context for understanding relevance in areas important to your business or category: price, responsiveness, flexibility, support, et al.

With this information, you can triangulate information against any or all of the input to determine how meaningful it is. Customers in the space don’t expect your industry to deliver innovation. Perhaps it’s time to rethink your strategy.

If you’re looking for the best way to benchmark the current and ongoing effectiveness of your marketing efforts then tap into the most powerful minds in your organization: your audience.

2010-05-12 10:37:43 -0500