‘If I had six hours to chop down a tree I would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.
There is no better time for this quote from Abraham Lincoln than this COVID -19 lockdown period. It goes without saying that we are all worried about the Coronavirus. How is this going to impact my life, my work, my family?
Customer is learning to go online and doing everything online, personal hygiene is becoming more important than ever, people are working from home, learning is commoditised, family participation in household work has increased and there are lot more changes. We’ve seen evidence of consumers’ perspectives changing just recently, and they will likely continue to evolve.
In these changing times, it is important to understand changing customer behaviour and review and realign (if needed) your Product, Marketing, Distribution, Go-to-Market plans and processes before you jump right back into the market.
Here are some types of Market Research studies that we feel can be done to support in some of the above business decisions, even during COVID times through Online & Telephonic Research (without actually meeting with customers).
1. Customer Journey Mapping – Understand Customer Decision Journey or Path to Purchase for your customers and align your processes accordingly to excel. According to a CapGemini report, in Automotive industry, close to half of the consumers want to minimize visiting dealerships to compare deals and mainly use online channels for information search and purchase. Companies and dealers must do Digital transformation and quickly step-up the use of mobile apps, social media, voice interfaces and AR/VR to provide a seamless, “zero-contact” experience. This phenomenon of online is visible in other industries also like Consumer Durables, Real estate and others.
Consumer decision journey helps in creation of Journey Maps having various stages in Path to Purchase. The activities in each of the journey stages is detailed to understand the emotion and impact of those experiences. Performance of company and competition is then understood and strengths, weakness and opportunities are identified. These are further used to modify the process and experiences (if required).
2. Brand Positioning – Understand and sharpen your brand positioning. This time gives good opportunity to refresh Brand Positioning and see if the positioning is sharp and well differentiated. Prepare your Brand Tree which can help in understanding Brand Positioning which mainly comprises of 1.) Brand Strengths 2.) Competition 3.) Clearly defined Target Customer 4.) Customer Insight 5.) Benefits – Product or Service 6.) Values, Attitude and Beliefs 7.) Reasons to Believe 8.) Differentiator and 9.) Finally, Brand Core or Essence. Brand Tree can be prepared through Market Research (Qualitative and Quantitative) along with brainstorming among Marketing, Research and Brand Teams.
3. Customer Profiling – Understand your customer better and sharpen your Target Group definition. We’ve seen evidence of consumers’ perspectives changing just recently, and they will likely continue to evolve. Customer is learning to go online, personal hygiene is becoming more important than ever, people are working from home, learning is commoditised. All these and many more changes are impacting the customer’s preferences, behaviour, attitudes, beliefs. So it is very important to understand this changing and evolving customers. Get your customer Pen Picture developed.
4. Digital Brand Track – Understand and evaluate your brand’s digital presence and performance. Since consumers are spending more time on internet so it is good to capture their voice and Brand Perception from digital media. Digital Brand Track can be done by extracting all the information related to Brand from various online data sources. Various data sources that can be studies are – e commerce reviews, review sites, social media, blog comments, domain specific niche sites, peer review forums, etc. By doing this one can analyse the category drivers, the overall position of their brand in the market, for example, knowing about the latest trends, negative and positive feedbacks, comments, reviews, likes, etc. Knowing what buzz your brand is creating in the market is always useful.
5. Data Analytics (Internal customer data) – Data and information are increasing rapidly; the growth rate of the information is so high that the information available to us in the near future is going to unpredictable. Tons and Tera-bytes of Data is continuously getting generated and already available within company. Hence it becomes easier to analyse as there is no need to generate any new data. Analytics can provide various insights and outputs towards business decisions like Segmentation, Cross Sell Opportunity Analysis, Customer Profiling, Channel Optimisation, Marketing Mix Modelling, Forecasting and various other insights etc.
6. Concept Product/Advertisement Test – Check 3-4 options of concept Product or Advertisement test (in the form of Animatic, creative, etc for Ad and Concept design/MVP format for product). Companies can come up with various MVPs or Concepts of products or advertisement suiting the need of changing consumers and can get them evaluated from customers to understand which concept resonates better with them in terms of likeability, etc. These concept or MVP can be in the form of Animatic or Narramatic for Advertisements and a Picture with Features for Design or product concept.
We’re committed to continually providing high-quality research to our clients in this time of uncertainty and can support in all the above solutions. You can reach out to us at atul@wiserfeed.in for any queries or requirements.
