Marketing Chapter 6 Strategic Research Strategic Research Content Key Objectives Understand The

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Chapter 6: Strategic Research

Chapter 6

Strategic Research

CHAPTER CONTENT

KEY OBJECTIVES

1. Understand the strategic research process and why brand communicators use it.

2. Discuss the main factors involved in designing a research study.

3. Understand how to choose appropriate research methods and collect data.

4. Describe current research trends and challenges.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Strategic research is critical since all brand decisions, including those regarding brand

communication, should be driven by thoughtful and detailed consumer analyses and

insights. First and foremost, marketers and brand communicators must listen closely to

what consumers have to say to ensure that all marketing strategies and communication

efforts are responsive to and reflective of consumer wants and needs. This chapter opens

by posing the question, why do we need research? It then answers that question by

outlining the different ways that research data is used by marketers to guide their decision

CHAPTER OUTLINE

THE RESEARCH PROCESS

 An effective brand communication program is totally dependent upon consumer

insight. Listening to your customer listening is the first step to knowing and

understanding them. Consumer research can help us effectively segment and target

markets by better understanding consumer attitudes, motivations, perceptions, and

behaviors.

 The objective at all stages of the planning process is to answer this question: What do

we need to know to make an informed decision about consumer behavior? Think of

strategic research as collecting the information needed to make good decisions on

advertising and marketing communication strategy.

WHY DO WE NEED RESEARCH?

 Agencies rarely collect research. The client’s in-house researchers or independent

research companies usually handle that task. These firms and departments uncover

and disseminate secondary research data that others have already collected, as well

as primary research to ask questions and collect data of their own.

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 As markets have become more fragmented and saturated, and as consumers have

become more demanding, the need for reliable research-based information in

advertising planning has increased. Figure 6.2 in the textbook summarizes the six

ways research is used in marketing communication planning.

Market Information

 Formal research used by the marketing department or strategic planning is called

marketing research. It includes surveys, in-depth interviews, observational methods,

focus groups, as well as all secondary data used to improve brand communication

plans. Market research, a subset of marketing research, is research that gathers

information about a particular market or segment of consumers.

 Marketing information includes everything a planner can uncover about consumer

perceptions of the brand, product category, and competitors’ brands. Planners assess

 Here are some common focal points and methods used to gather information about a

brand and the marketplace.

 The Brand Experience: When an agency gets a new client, the first thing the

agency team has to do is learn about the brand through brand research. That

means learning where the brand has been in the past in terms of the market, its

 Competitive Analysis: It’s also important to consider the brand’s direct and

indirect competitors, and how the brand is positioned relative to competitors.

 Marketing Communication Audit: Either formally or informally, most

advertising planners will begin an assignment by collecting every possible piece

of advertising and other forms of marketing communication about the brand, as

well as its competitors, as well as other relevant product categories that may have

lessons for the brand. This includes compiling a historical collection as well.

 Content Analysis: The marketing communication audit might include only

informal summaries of the slogans, appeals, and images used most often, or they

might include more formal and systematic tabulation of competitors’ approaches

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Principle: Do your homework about your brand. There is nothing more embarrassing

than proposing a great new advertising idea only to find out it was used a couple of years

ago by a competitor, or even worse, your client.

Consumer Insight

 A basic principle in this book is that effective marketing communication rests on truly

understanding the consumer. Brands have to be true to the consumers who buy them.

Both the creative team and the media planners need to know as much as they can, in

as much depth and detail as possible, about their audience.

Collecting Feedback

 Feedback can be obtained from customers as a part of interactive customer contact –

systematically recording information from customer service, technical service,

inbound telemarketing calls, and online sites. Some businesses use the internet to

involve customers in making decisions about product design, distribution, price, and

Monitoring Buzz and Tracking Behavior

 The internet has made it easy to track comments about a brand. Many marketers

monitor chats and blogs and also do more general scanning for key words to find out

and perhaps respond to what people are saying about their brands.

Neuromarketing

 To get inside consumers’ minds to see what they are really thinking, marketers have

turned to neuroscience, which uses highly technical equipment to scan the brain as it

processes information and makes decisions. Neuromarketing is the application of this

Media Research

 Media planning begins with consumer research and questions about media behavior

that help with the media selection decision. Media planners often work in conjunction

with the information account planners to decide which media formats make the most

sense to accomplish the objectives.

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 Next, media research gathers information about all the possible media and marketing

communication tools that might be used in a campaign to deliver a message. Media

Message Development and Diagnostics

 As planners, account managers and people on the creative team begin the

development of a message strategy, they involve themselves in various types of

informal and formal message development research. They read all of the relevant

secondary research information available to become better informed about the brand,

the company, the competitors, the media, and the product category.

 Writers and art directors almost always conduct informal research of their own. They

may do their own personal observation research and may visit retail stores, talk to

salespeople, and watch customers buy. They may also look at previous advertising,

 The next step is to produce and test different Big Ideas both informally within the

team and through more formal structured research. Creative development research

often uses qualitative methods to assess the idea’s effectiveness. Called concept

testing, it can help evaluate the relative power of various creative approaches. The

approach is to test the Big Idea to see if it communicates the strategy behind the

message, and also test various executions of this big idea.

 After the Big Idea is agreed upon, the creative team will rough out the message across

the IMC tools being used and they will test executions to determine if there are any

 Another technique used to analyze brand meaning is semiotic analysis, which is a

way to take apart the signs and symbols in a message to uncover layers and types of

meanings.

Evaluation

 After an advertisement or any other type of marketing communication message has

been developed and produced, it can be evaluated for its effectiveness both before and

after it runs as part of a campaign. Pre-testing is research on an execution in its

Chapter 6: Strategic Research

 Pretesting is also important for assessing other IMC tools. Some sales promotions

should be tested if the firm is unsure of the strength of the offer. A company can

simulate the promotional offer and pretest it with a variety of consumers to evaluate

the strength of its appeal, perceived value, and the consumers’ purchase intention.

Design the Study

 New advertising assignments always begin with some kind of informal or formal

background research into the marketing situation. This secondary research involves

the regular collection and reporting of data by outside organizations. We will

compare it with primary research, which is original research tailored and conducted

by the company or brand.

Secondary Research

 Background research that uses available and published information about a topic is

called secondary research. When advertising people get new accounts or new

assignments, they start by reading everything they can find about the product,

company, industry, and competition. It’s called secondary because it is information

that has been collected and published by someone else.

 A typical advertising campaign might be influenced, directly or indirectly, by

information from a variety of sources including in-house agencies and outside

research suppliers. Some of the more traditional sources of secondary information

are:

 Government Organizations. Governments, through their various departments,

provide an astonishing array of statistics that can enhance advertising and

 Trade Associations. Many industries support trade associations – professional

organizations whose members all work in the same field – that gather and

distribute information of interest to association members. Examples include the

American Frozen Food Institute or the Game Manufacturers Council.

Chapter 6: Strategic Research

 Secondary Information on the Internet. For any given company, you are bound to

find a website where you can learn about the company’s history and philosophy

of doing business, check out its complete product line, and discover who runs the

 There are also many industry-related sites for marketing that report on research,

essays, and best practices. They include:

 Advertising Age (http://adage.com) is a global source of news, intelligence, and

conversation for the marketing and media community.

 BrandEra (www.brandera.com) offers information by product category.

 Cluetrain (www.cluetrain.com) publishes new ways to find and share innovative

marketing information and ideas.

Primary Research

 Information that is collected for the first time from original sources is called primary

research. DDB is a worldwide marketing communications agency that conducts the

annual DDB Life Style Study, a form of primary research. An example of a company

that took on its own research is Perdue Farms and its classic “tough man” campaign.

 Primary research suppliers (the firms that clients hire) specialize in interviewing,

observing, recording, and analyzing the behavior of those who purchase or influence

the purchase of a particular good or service. The primary research supplier industry is

extremely diverse.

 Many advertising agencies subscribe to large-scale surveys conducted by the

Simmons Market Research Bureau or by Mediamark Research, Inc. These two

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Basic Research Designs

Primary research can be designed to collect both quantitative and qualitative data.

Quantitative Research

 Quantitative research delivers numerical data such as number of users and

purchases, their attitudes and knowledge, their exposure to ads, and other market-

related information. It also provides information on reactions to advertising and

 Quantitative research is usually designed to either accurately count something, such

as sales levels, or to predict something, such as attitudes. To be predictive, this type

of research must follow careful scientific procedures. Two primary characteristics of

quantitative research are (1) large sample sizes and (2) random sampling. The most

common qualitative research methods include surveys and studies that track such

things as purchase behavior and opinions.

 One of the biggest problems in using quantitative methods to study consumer

decision processes is that consumers are often unable to articulate the reasons they do

Qualitative Research

 The goal of qualitative research methodologies, therefore, is to move beyond the

limitations of what consumers can explain in words or in responses to pre-planned

questions. Qualitative research is considered exploratory and provides insight into the

underlying reasons for how consumers behave and why.

 Common qualitative research methods include such tools as observation,

ethnographic studies, in-depth interviews, and case studies. They trade large sample

sizes and scientific predictions for greater depth of insight. They probe to seek

understanding to such questions as:

 What types of features do customers want?

 What are the motivations that led to the purchase of a product?

 What do our customers think about our advertising?

 What are consumers’ emotional links to the brand?

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 Qualitative methods are used early in the process of developing a brand

communication plan or message strategy for generating insights, as well as questions

and hypotheses for additional research. They are also good at confirming hunches,

ruling out bad approaches and questionable or confusing ideas, and giving direction

to message strategy.

Experimental Research Design

 Experimental research seeks to establish a cause-effect relationship between

variables and uses hypothesis-testing techniques, such as comparing consumer

response to different message treatments. The idea is to control for all factors except

the one being tested—if there is a change in the results, then the researcher can

 Sometimes in experimental research the measurements are electronically recorded

using such instruments as MRI or EEG machines or eye-scan tracking devices.

Electrodes can be used to monitor heart rate, pulse, and skin temperature to determine

if people have a physical response to a message that they may not be able to put in

words. In particular, emotional responses that are hard to verbalize may be observable

using these types of sensors.

CHOOSE METHODS AND COLLECT DATA

This section focuses on the types of research used in message development and the

research situations where these methods are typically applied. Consumer research

methodologies are often described in terms of the type of data they produce: numeric

(quantitative) or verbal/behavioral communication (qualitative).

Quantitative Methods

 Most quantitative research in marketing communication is survey based. However,

consumers can also be contacted in malls where they are invited to participate in

experimental research.

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Survey Research

 Survey research is a quantitative method that uses structured interviews to ask large

numbers of people the same set of questions. The questions at the end of the survey

 Incentives are important when doing surveys. Different audiences have different

interests, so make your incentive appealing to them. Be careful, however, not to bias

your results in the process.

Sampling and Data Collection

 Sampling is used because, in most cases, it is cost prohibitive to interview everyone

in the population or target market. Instead, the people are a representative sample of

the larger group, a subset of the population that is representative of the entire

population.

 For survey research to be an accurate reflection of the population of interest, those

who participate must be selected at random, where every person who belongs to the

Online Survey Research

 The way research is collected from respondents has seen almost constant change as

new technologies continue to make the process more cost efficient. Online surveys

now make up half of the $3.3 billion spent on market research. The internet has

opened up new opportunities for collecting data, as is discussed in the Matter of

Practice feature in this chapter. The internet is also a useful tool for monitoring

online behavior.

Qualitative Methods

While some types of surveys are best suited as quantitative research methods, other types

can be used for probing and gathering more insightful responses.

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In-Depth Interviews

 In-depth interviews are conducted one-on-one using open-ended questions that

require the respondents to generate their own answers. The primary difference

Focus Groups

 A focus group is a group of 6 to 10 users or potential users of a product who are

gathered around a table to have a discussion about some topic, such as a brand,

product category, or marketing communication. The objective is to get them talking

 Focus groups can be used at any step in the planning process. However, they are

typically used in the early stages of information gathering to probe for patterns of

thought and behavior that are then tested using quantitative research tools, such as

surveys.

 A friendship focus group takes place in a comfortable setting, usually a private

home, where the participants have been recruited by the host. This approach is

designed to break down barriers and save time in getting to more in-depth responses.

Customer Suggestions and Comments

 Dialogue creates new ways to listen to customers. In newer approaches to

communication, feedback is achieved by monitoring more interactive forms of

marketing communication, as well as the responses and customer-initiated dialogue

that comes through response devices such as toll-free numbers and email addresses.

 While informal feedback has always been available in stores through suggestion

boxes and customer satisfaction cards, Target took the idea online by publishing an ad

in the Wall Street Journal asking customers to “Tell us what more we can do for

Chapter 6: Strategic Research

Panels

 An expert panel gathers experts from various fields into a focus group setting. This

research tool can stimulate new ways of looking at a brand, product, or customer

pattern.

 A consumer research panel is an ongoing group of carefully selected people

Observation Research

 Observation researchers study the actual behavior of consumers in settings where

they live, work, shop, and play, acting as professional snoops. Direct observation

research is closer and more personal than most other forms of research. Researchers

 Cool watchers, researchers who keep tabs on trends, also use observational research

when visiting places and events where their target market gathers. A variation of

observational research is participant observation. In this research method, the

Ethnographic Research

 Ethnographic research involves the researcher living the lives of the people being

studied. Observers immerse themselves in a culture to study the meanings, language,

interaction, and behavior of the people in a group. This method is particularly good at

deriving a picture of a day in the life of a typical consumer.

 Direct observation and ethnographic research have the advantage of revealing what

people actually do, as distinguished from what people say they do. The biggest

drawback to direct observation is that it shows what is happening, but not why.