As a design and marketing professional I can’t tell you how it makes me cringe when a client says… “I showed this to a bunch of people and they all said ______”
Fill in the blank with what ever the client is trying to convince themselves of at the moment. Unfortunately most of our customers are greatly swayed by what their friend or wife or business associate has to say. Often resulting in the less effective logo, campaign or website getting picked over one with more promise. We see it all of the time, Initially the client loves concept A… then they show it to “those people” and the next thing you know they are convinced they need to give up what they initially thought and pick concept c. It’s just human nature when you have a big decision you want reinforcement from the people you trust, we all do it. But in an ideal world, the person who would be best to provide this type of advice is not your best friend, it’s your customer. As marketeers we have always known this, but it’s really hard to get people to spend the money to do quality market research. Most people still shoot from the hip.
We have seen Google tackle some huge problems with varied success. As a search engine, they can’t be beat. Advertising platform, again hard to beat in terms of “bang for the buck.” But some of their recent endeavors like Google TV have not gone quite as well. Google has just unveiled it’s latest service and I think this has promise. It is Google’s consumer surveys.
The way it works, we meet with you and discuss what we want to know and who your consumer is, then we use this info to create online surveys to gain consumer insight. Then people will complete the questions to access premium content online. For instance, you may be able to download a song or watch a movie for free in exchange for filling out a brief survey (sound familiar?). The new twist is this is all done online and you get real time results presented neatly on the screen in graphs and spread sheets. The publisher that allowed you to get this info in exchange for an opinion, get’s paid by google. You pay google per response. And in the end you have an opinion that actually is meaningful at a much lower cost than traditional focus groups.
Want to see some examples of this? Look at these results.
There are more interesting advantages to this compared to traditional surveys, for instance, you can see how survey responses vary by geographic region. Also, Age, gender, location and income of respondents is available for all surveys. Surveys can contain questions that screen out respondents that are not your customers. And possible the biggest difference, this can all happen quickly. We can even insert this into the proofing process on a typical logo design project.
Wanna know how you can harness this powerful new marketing tool and make it work for your business? We would love to discuss it with you, give us a call!