Large consumer companies like Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, and Frito-Lay spend millions of dollars each year on marketing research to gain an edge in a competitive market. They have a large staff of people with PhDs, MMRs, and MBAs creating and managing complex research studies to provide data and insights to support business decisions.
But what about smaller or medium-sized businesses? Are the insights leveraged by big companies beyond their scope because of a lack of resources and personnel? Should they depend on guesswork and intuition to drive marketing decisions? The answer is NO.
Attaining insights to drive your business is within the reach of any business. The scope and scale may differ, but the focus should be on five key learnings.
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- Know Your Company
- Know Your Customers
- Know Your Prospects
- Know Your Competitors
- Know Your Communications
A good starting point to addressing all of these is an Awareness, Attitude, and Usage (AAU) study. A comprehensive AAU study provides the necessary component measures to understand and define your place in the marketplace and how you are perceived by consumers and prospects. The study can be scaled to fit the needs of the organization based on the size of the market, the number of competitors, and the extent of your budget.
Awareness (the percentage of the target population who are aware of your brand vs. other brands) helps marketers understand their position in the marketplace and the success of their marketing communications programs. Awareness is measured in three components:
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- Top-of-mind awareness- the percentage of people who mention a brand as the first one that comes to mind.
- Unaided awareness- the percentage of mentions of brands that people recall beyond top-of-mind without any prompting.
- Aided awareness-the percentage of mentions after providing a list of brand names from which to choose.
Attitude measures provide insights about the reputation of your brand and competing brands in the mind of consumers, leading to the development of your brand positioning. Attitude is usually measured using a series of statements about brand attributes that respondents rate on how well those attributes fit with or describe the relevant brand.
The final part of AAU, Usage, is directly linked with sales and provides insights into the number, frequency, and timing of purchasing combined with the consumer’s behavior and thought process while purchasing the product.
A well-constructed AAU should also include psychographics, lifestyle, and demographic questions that can be used to categorize and segment consumers in the marketplace. Here is how an AAU can provide insights to the five questions:
Know Your Company
Organizations of all sizes must develop detailed strategic plans that describe their mission, goals, and objectives and define key strengths and weaknesses. Through the AAU study, you will develop a greater understanding of the marketplace dynamics and consumers to identify your unique selling proposition and better target your organizations’ goals and objectives to the needs and characteristics of the marketplace.
Know Your Customers
Beyond understanding how consumers perceive your products and services, the AAU study can help you further understand the needs and wants of your customers and characteristics about their lifestyle, media consumption, and demographics that you can leverage to better meet those needs and wan
Know Your Prospects
Like a shark that must swim forward to stay alive, a business organization must grow to survive. Marketing Research is necessary to learn about the differentiating characteristics of your non-customers, your prospects. Deploy the AAU study among prospective customers to measure their attitudes and usage of your and competitor brands as differentiated from your customers. Additionally, the data can be used to identify prospects in homogenous groups or segments that can be differentially targeted with specific marketing programs to gain their adoption of your products or services.
Know Your Competitors
Having insights about your competitors can identify gaps in their delivery of consumer needs and wants to exploit in your tactical marketing. Of course, the AAU will provide a relative measure of brand awareness for your company and that of your competitors. The AAU should also include interviews with customers of your competitors to measure their attitudes and to understand competitive brand positionings. Ultimately, your analysis should “map” or compare your brands’ strengths and position versus those of your competitors.
Know Your Communication
In a world overrun with messaging, how do you get your messages to stand out? The AAU will provide information about how successful your marketing campaigns are in building awareness and supporting your brand positioning. The attitudinal information will also help guide the development and structure of your advertising and promotional messaging to effectively break through the clutter, clearly communicate, and support the positioning and unique selling proposition of your products and services.
Don’t avoid conducting marketing research because you feel that it is out of reach due to cost, complexity, or relevancy. Share on XYou need to know Your Company, your customers, your prospects, your competition, and your communication to be successful. AAU marketing research can provide you with those answers.
For more on this and other Marketing Research topics, follow me on LinkedIn or reach out to me at carl_fusco@yahoo.com if I can help you in any way.
Carl Fusco is an accomplished Marketing Research Consultant who helps businesses more effectively solve problems by applying research techniques and data-based insights.
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