Marketing Online

Marketing research in the early days was aimed more at finding
techniques to increase sales than to understand customers. Researchers
applauded the development of store audits, warehouse
withdrawals, and consumer panels to provide needed information
on product movement. Over time, marketers increasingly recognized the importance of
understanding buyers. Focus groups, questionnaires, and surveys
came into vogue. Today the marketer’s mantra is about the importance
of understanding buyers at either the segment or the individual
level. According to an old Spanish saying, “To be a bullfighter, you
must first learn to be a bull.”
Today’s marketers use a whole bevy of marketing research
techniques to understand customers and markets and their own
marketing effectiveness. Here are some of the major research techniques
in use:
• In-store observation. Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy,
runs Environsell to study in-store customer behavior.43 His
researchers use clipboards, track sheets, and video equipment
to record the movements of shoppers. They are “retail anthropologists” studying over 70,000 shoppers a year in
their “natural habitat.” The findings include:
• Shoppers almost invariably walk to the right.
•Women are more likely to avoid narrow aisles than men.
• Men move faster than women through store aisles.
• Shoppers slow down when they see reflective surfaces and
speed up when they see blanks.
• Shoppers don’t notice elaborate signs in the first 30 feet of
the entrance.
• In-home observation. Companies send researchers into homes
to study household behavior toward products. Whirlpool
arranged for an anthropologist to visit several homes to study
how household members use large appliances. Ogilvy &
Mather sent researchers with handheld videocameras into
homes to prepare a 30-minute “highlight reel” of in-home
behavior toward different products.
• Other observation. Observation can take place anywhere. Japanese
carmakers stood in supermarket parking lots watching
American women strain to lower their groceries into their car
trunks and came up with a better trunk design. McDonald’s executives
once a year “work the counters” to experience customers
firsthand. Marketers can learn a great deal by “stapling
themselves to a customer.”
• Focus group research. Companies frequently recruit one or
more focus groups to talk about a product or service under
the direction of a skilled moderator. The focus group may
number 6 to 10 members who spend a few hours responding
to the moderator’s questions and to each other’s comments.
The session is usually videotaped and discussed later by a
management team. While focus groups are an important
preliminary step in exploring a subject, the results lack projectability
to the larger population and should be treated
cautiously.