Knowledge is power in marketing

What if you knew she loved Brahms, watched every episode of Emmerdale Farm and was a passionate bird-watcher.

Now could you buy a gift that would make you the number one in-law?

How many times have you tried to buy for someone when you didn’t know enough about them, their background, their interests, what values were important to them?

You end up buying yet another book voucher, when, with a little knowledge of your ‘market’, you could buy them something they really want.

Market research does have something of a bad reputation. Many business people remain suspicious of investing in something that merely confirms what they already know, or even worse, presents them with mounds of irrelevant information.

One of the issues is that we can lack objectivity when gathering data. As US writer Gregg Easterbrook puts it “Torture numbers, and they’ll confess anything.”

Insights Vs Information

Instead of getting real insights we really just try and fit information to our existing prejudices.

Objectivity is crucial.

Another problem is that researching is simply too easy. Plugging "monitoring software, Europe" into Google yields more than 2.4 million sites. I can get information on anything from how to monitor fraudulent staff expense claims to the latest in neonatal monitoring technology.

It is easy to assemble a 100 page report from the internet on your market - but you can still be no closer to answering your questions.

The right sort of knowledge can give you a lot of marketing power. As exporters you have to make marketing decisions every day, from the insignificant to the momentous.

The more you know about your target markets the easier and more obvious those choices become. How do I price this, should I use the web as a channel, is this conference worthwhile?

All decisions you might make now with your gut you could make with your head.

How do you get the right marketing information? The key is having a research strategy, where you start with the end in mind.

1. Starting at the end

Using research effectively starts at the end point. You need a very clear understanding of what decisions you actually want to make with the research information.

Are you trying to change your pricing approach? Deciding on the best channel to market? Confirming the positioning of your product against competitors? Unless you have specific decisions in mind, asking the right questions of your customers is difficult.

Of course you have to be prepared to act on the information. Finding out from the market that you are perceived as providing poor customer support doesn't mean you should mount an advertising campaign saying how good your customer support is, it means actually trying to fix the problem.