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What Mungo
Dunnett Associates delivered?
Identifying
your real competitors
You
will have a pretty good idea of who your main competitors are.
But is that what your customers think – and on what grounds
are the real competitors beating you?
Customers
generally have a much better idea of how a business stacks up against its
competitors than the business itself does.
And don’t forget that the customer’s perception of how you
stack up is much more important to your bottom line than how you think
you stack up.
Finding
out who the competition really is, and how you perform on the elements that
customers are really interested in, is vital.
It is information that will make your business more profitable.
Identifying
what your customers want from you
You
need to know what customers like about your business – and what annoys them.
This will reveal the things you need to focus on, either because they
are real strengths that you can make more of in your marketing, or because
they are weaknesses that are obviously doing more harm than you imagined.
You
also need to know about the customers you don’t have: those who have
recently stopped using you, or those who you tried to win, but lost to a
competitor. What
are the real reasons for their decisions?
This
will tell you where your competitors are operating more effectively, and help
you refine your own business’s positioning.
Most importantly of all, it will lead you to those improvements that
may be practicable (and cost-effective) if you are to choose to compete more
strongly.
Assessing
your marketing
A
major benefit from any research exercise is a proper understanding of how
effectively your marketing activities are functioning.
This
entails finding out which, of your various activities, customers have actually
seen; what credibility they gave it; and the basis on which they made their
decision to use you, or your competitor.
This
is one of the ‘quickest wins’ from market research: finding out what
customers actually respond to, what is working, and what is wasting your
money.
Conducting
the research
Face-to-face
interviews are revealing, simply because of the opportunity to build a better
rapport with customers and probe more effectively for their real views and
motivations: but these are expensive.
A much more cost-effective form of research is usually telephone
interviews.
Questionnaires
are cheap, but in research you demonstrably get what you pay for:
questionnaire respondents will be a small proportion of the whole, but more
importantly they will not be representative of the customer groups you
need to hear from.
They are a quick fix, but to be used with considerable caution.
Acting
on the research
The
most common failing of research exercises does not lie in the research itself:
it lies with the company’s failure to act upon the findings.
The
most effective research is carried out with a clear intent to implement the
findings, and a determination to see that through.
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