consumer insight

MARKETING Rx



What consumer insighting can give that benchmarking can’t


By Ned Roberto, Ardy Roberto

Philippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 05:01:00 05/09/2008


Question: We heard the senior Marketing Rx-er once spoke about consumer insighting. We agree with him that underneath every successful marketing campaign, a good consumer insight was responsible. We also like his point that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to only one method or one source of insighting.


We’re in the crowded consumer processed food business. Our consumer insighting does not come directly from talking to consumers as you’ve suggested is better. It’s indirect. We’re into competitive benchmarking and competitor intelligence. In fact, we now refer to our Market and Consumer Research Department as Competitor Intelligence Department.
We appreciate the senior Marketing Rx-er’s emphasis on the many many consumer insighting research methods available both quantitative and qualitative. We actually tried two of them: One quanti and one quali. But they each just took too long and were both expensive. Benchmarking and competitive intelligence by contrast gave us consumer insights that were quick and relatively cheap and sometimes very cheap.


Please tell us: Is consumer insighting research really worth that much more? What can we get from it that we can’t get from our benchmarking and competitive intelligence?
Answer: We should start with where you are in consumer insighting. That’s with competitive benchmarking and competitor intelligence. You’ve already mentioned their two key advantages. So we won’t get into those. Instead, let’s take a closer look at their insighting capabilities.
In competitive benchmarking, you have the benefit of “best practice” in your search for a solution to a marketing problem. That best practice need not be and is usually not found in your own industry. Take the classic case of Toyota’s search for a better inventory control system that ended in its own “just-in-time” best practice. Toyota found that not in Ford where they started their benchmarking but in the vegetable section of US supermarkets.


You may ask: Does that qualify as a consumer insight? Not directly but indirectly, yes. After all, the search for just-in-time was provoked by Toyota’s felt need to serve the car market and car-buying motorists more efficiently than competition but at a larger profit.
Competitor intelligence is even less difficult to connect to consumer insighting. For example, what your innovating competitor is able to offer ahead of you came from its consumer insighting research. Your past experience with competition in your processed food industry must certainly confirm that.


So both benchmarking and competitor intelligence are ultimately consumer insighting-based or -inspired. But that doesn’t answer your question of what’s in consumer insighting research that’s not in benchmarking and competitor intelligence. Of course, that’s not the point of the foregoing explanation. We wanted to firmly establish in your mind that every effective insighting including your benchmarking and competitor intelligence approaches is ultimately consumer insight driven.


Now, on to your question—


Notice that benchmarking and competitor intelligence is about your current market and industry. And as you yourself said, it’s a market and industry that’s now crowded. In the coming years, it’s going to be more crowded. So what’s the prospect of business growth?
Insights from benchmarking and competitor insights will promise a usual single digit sales growth. When it’s double digit, it’s typically going to be in the neighborhood of between 10 and 20 percent, or if you pray hard enough, maybe between 20 and 30 percent. It won’t be a doubling or tripling of sales.


That will be the case unless the insight is about a “new uncontested market” segment. Such a new market segment can double sales because it’s another market. When its market size is about the same as your current market segment, it’s like duplicating in sales your current segment. When the new segment is about double the market size of your current segment, then it’s easy to see how the simple arithmetic will triple sales. It’s like duplicating twice over in sales your current market segment.


This sales-doubling or sales-tripling consumer insight comes from a consumer insighting research that’s been specifically designed for that purpose. In his consumer insighting seminar, the senior Marketing Rx-er refers to it as “the market-growing insighting research.” It’s not just sales-growing but market-growing. The impact is still on sales but in market-growing, that’s mega-sales-growing.


You may of course say, as many marketing colleagues of ours also say, that innovating competitors may be into such a market-growing insighting research. So the easier option is to do a Matsushita who just waits for Sony to come out with a market-growing new product. It then gets a prototype, reverse engineers it and then comes out with a much-improved imitation. That’s what they successfully did with the Betamax and came out with VHS as a superior Betamax.


But this is not an independent either-or option. You can resort to it as you can also at the same time get into the discipline of having your own consumer insighting research system. In setting up for your insighting research agenda, you also have the option of outsourcing the research, or else go for a D-I-Y (do-it-yourself) alternative. You said that you found research outsourcing too time consuming and expensive. So the more cost-effective and quicker alternative for you is a



D-I-Y research approach.


It’s unfortunate that marketers and marketing researchers refer to D-I-Y research as “quick-and-dirty” research. When incorrectly designed and nonscientifically implemented, it’s true that a D-I-Y research is quick and dirty. But when you bring statistical and marketing science into its design, implementation and analysis, you can turn a D-I-Y research into a decent “quick-but-clean” research. How to do this is, of course, another matter and suited for another column.