Fishing for global insight

Understanding your customers and brand perceptions in multiple countries is not a one size fits all project. Differences in cultures, infrastructure, communication channels and sheer geography mean that one methodology will often not work across different countries, as articulated well in this Marketing Week article by Steve Hemsley.

The difficulties and expense that these studies can represent is considerable and can cause conflict between offices.

So why not enlist the local team as the local experts they already are - and empower them to collect and collate the research for you? Working from central questions and a rigorous framework, just expressed differently in different regions (in consultation with a research expert), doing the hands-on research can only help local teams get closer to customers, more engaged in the results and implications.

Creative research methodologies involving imagery, stories and clear, repeatable metrics could create a wealth of layered multi-national customer insight, at lower cost and deeper engagement, for both your team and your customers. Who knows, maybe your sales manager, accountant or CEO might enjoy the venture into something different!

Your team will now know how to fish, and will be able to repeat to catch more tasty insights in the future.

You? Do you think this is possible, flawed or will work for your organisation?

Image credit

will network analysts replace media buyers?

I had the pleasure of meeting a very interesting, very understated expert marketer today.

Not only is he a gem of a person, he made some suggestions that may prove quite fruitful for me in future.

It came about all because I was interviewing someone on the nature, role and quality of qualitative research. The conversation digressed and expanded...and voila, I was having coffee with Mr McPherson. And for the second time in two days, I was advised that I should speak with the same person I had never met!

It made me wonder - beyond the somewhat passe notion of 'networking' that conjures images of predatory sales people, what is the theory behind networks?

A quick glimpse on Wikipedia reveals that network theory explains elements of both the internet and particle physics. Grossly simplified, it is the study of nodes and the simple or complex ties between them. The most relevant study for marketers is the area of social network theory.

Fascinating, and I realised this is an area of increasing relevance for marketers as the emphasis shifts to an acknowledgement and the increased enabling of the power of social networks in influencing purchase decisions.

I ask myself the question - should we move away from, or at least weight our emphasis in research away from a focus on media, existing channels and demographics to a study of social networks? Is this a truer indication of a person and their likely behaviours than the traditional demographic indicators? Is this the next step beyond psychographic profiling?

Is this the next divide to be crossed by researchers and customer-centric organisations?

Flickr credit: martin.canchola