Understanding a Survey Design – Lessons from the Presidential Polls!

In the politically charged environment, I noticed that surveys are often used as a tool (arguably) to form public opinion. The research and analysis is inspiring and made me wonder if the insights could be directly used towards marketing effectiveness?

A recent HBR article stated that polls dramatically over-estimate support for third-party candidates, when very little actually exists. The premise being “naming any third-party candidate” will garner more votes from responders who are on the fence about Clinton or Trump. However, it won’t translate into real ballot due to the lack of familiarity with these candidates. The revealing conclusion was that the independent candidates cannot be overly optimistic about the survey results, since being named in the survey will alone get you some votes, but the actual support may be much less than that.

Now let’s think marketing surveys – most tend to be “leading” the respondents, so we as marketers can get specific data that we “like.” Not a good sign, if you are banking on survey results to build the business case for a new product/service and have been leading the consumers into picking an answer on the survey. The responses will point to what’s listed on the survey, instead of providing an insight into how much do the consumers know about and/or need the new offering.

Another related and interesting reference in the above article was to a book on “Answering questions versus revealing preferences,” by Zallar and Feldman. The research argued that responders are not necessarily revealing “considered opinions, instead are just answering questions quickly.” The responses do shift based on the answers choices given!  

If I were to summarize in marketing context;

“Educate and NOT lead the consumer to get a more considered opinion.”

This is an important consideration, when designing the survey and considering the responses. Consumers are not sitting around thinking about our new product or service, so a “considered opinion” is the last thing we should expect. However, we can still strive to help them provide a considered opinion through a better survey design, in terms of educating the consumer about the purpose, product/service, benefits and goals. How we do that will depend upon the specified goals, but the results will be closer to a considered opinion, rather than a multiple choice selector.

The article brought to fore some pertinent nuances, even while drawing attention to more common approaches employed, such as, be specific and short, or squeeze in a few more questions to get more responses. But, it is up to us to decide if we want “more” data or “quality” data. The choice is ours!

Marketing and Sales - 4 Steps to Collaborate & Grow

Marketing and sales, while aligned at the corporate level, need to also be aligned at operational level to optimize delivery of products and services. 

As a marketer, I wanted sales to succeed because that had a direct impact on my portfolio’s growth projections. However, that could only be achieved when sales teams were enabled with the right level of operational support, and we would collaborate towards delivering those growth targets. If you are a GM, marketer, etc., who is measured on “Year-over-Year growth,” here are some insights on how we (marketing) supported sales team to achieve 5x portfolio growth. 

1. Create processes for sharing customer and market data – communicate with your sales teams on what does the target market look like, to educate them about how to sell the “right” product(s) to the “right” prospect(s). Sales team needs to know how our customers use our products, so they can better understand customer need and prepare to answer specific questions. The process also helps sales teams prepare for upcoming product changes, considering lead times needed to update training manuals, refine sales pitch, train the agents, etc. 
2. Create easy product bundles and sales hierarchy – as a service provider, you probably have more than 1 product in your portfolio. Bundling some of these products is a great strategy to get greater adoption from the customers and communicate the “value for money.” However, it is even more enticing to sales teams, since they can now meet wider customer needs, easily explain the value proposition (think sales call talk times), and possibly make more money (greater sales incentive). Don’t forget to guide the sales teams in how to pitch and what order to explain various product features in, based on your customer surveys and market research.
3. Create fair incentive and charge-back policies – sales incentive are a great way to motivate sales teams, but ensure that “quality” of sale is never compromised. If left unchecked, “slamming” will get you volume, but after-sale churn will eat into the overall growth and acquisition costs. Having a solid charge-back program will greatly help with better quality sale and subsequent lower churn – make sure that the program is transparent and well understood by sales teams.
4. Create reporting and feedback mechanism – one of the biggest pain-points that I had to address was that of inadequate reporting on sales orders, customer activations, charge-back policies, etc. Institute reporting that clearly shows the funnel and is transparent enough for the sales team to understand how they are making money. Most importantly, make sure marketing and sales teams are looking at the same set of numbers! Create adequate feedback mechanisms (weekly, monthly meetings) to gather field data and share any product updates.

Bear in mind that most of this information resides within marketing organizations, as part of their LTV, ROI, etc., analyses. However, actively communicating with sales will empower them and make them see the results with more context.

When engaged, sales teams have great potential in shaping, positioning and marketing our products and services. Integrate this channel into your market intelligence network to boost your market intelligence and growth strategies.

Customer Centricity and Parallel Marketing Channels

Customer Centricity is enlightening the customer to engage with the brand, no matter what path is chosen. It is, in essence, managing your business with customer at the focal point of your decision-making. What does this entail? Equal focus on enabling multiple marketing channels and implementing internal back-end systems to track customers through these channels.

This implies that all the quantitative and qualitative data from print, web, email and social will need to be integrated such that there is a complete 360-degree view of the customer interaction. 

Big data supposedly is one solution, but is that all? Is it even possible to implement at that grand scale? Are the teams even ready to understand, implement, maintain and utilize the big data scheme to its fullest? 

There needs to be a shift in marketer's mind-set, besides the technology implementation, that aligns with the customer's interaction with their brands.

Let's take an example of the parallel circuit in the diagram above. Electricity travels along the various paths, powered by the battery, lighting the bulb in each path. Our brand needs to replicate the source, powering each of our campaign channels, lighting an interest in customer's mind and closing the loop with customer's connection with the brand (content consumption, purchase, etc.).

3 C’s of Consumer Centricity

Consumer-centric organizations are known to do all they can to engage with their customers and proactively cater to their needs. Often these will include product/service updates, social communications, systems to support consumer-centric strategies, etc. However, it is easy to feel burdened with multi-directional pulls on your consumer-centric strategy as tactical urgencies evolve in any business cycle. Keeping a framework of key consumer touch points is imperative in such situations to stay focused and continue to deliver on the promise of better than excellent engagement. I categorize these core consumer touch points into 3 areas – the 3 C’s of Consumer Centricity.

1. Content – what does a consumer see about your brand, products, services? Are you developing content that clearly communicates and reinforces the value of your products and services? Does this content remind the consumer how valuable their relationship is to the brand and vice-versa? Whether a consumer is using your products or not, we need to evolve our content strategy such that it caters to consumer need for information, before and after they make a purchase decision, and at the time of purchase, you will typically get the nod.
2. Choice – Do we offer choice in our products and services? Is our product strategy in-tune with the evolving market dynamics, namely, technological changes, consumer usage behaviors, market expectations, etc.? After we have successfully attracted consumer attention, we need to ensure we are ready to live up to the promise – great product and service. As and when consumers mature and place their trust in your brand, you need to be able to offer a portfolio that goes beyond the core product(s) and allows the customer to strengthen the bond.
3. Community – Speaking of bonding with brand, what better way than to draw customers into your community. Do you have a community that not only caters to customer queries, but also, provides valuable information to enhance your products/services? Social revolution has brought about a radical shift in organizations’ communications tactics, as to how frequently and what do consumers need to know. We need to proactively build this into our marketing strategy and invest in right resources to maintain it and keep it current. 

As we all know, consumer life-cycle starts well before they become our customers, and continues well beyond their first purchase. The 3 C’s provide a marketer’s view into this life-cycle and by creating the planning tools within this framework may just help simplify analysis, refine your marketing/communications strategies, maximize ROIs and contribute to your maturing as a consumer-centric organization.