Category Archives: Market Research

The Price Isn’t Right

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“We lose money on every deal, but we make it up in volume.” That cold joke was tossed around a dying company I worked for a couple of decades ago. Yet behind the gallows humor was a bare truth; the company was bleeding and part of the problem was in pricing our deals. Knowing what to charge is non-trivial, but survival-level important. This is especially true for start-ups: Price too high and you earn no revenues. Price too low and you slowly spiral into the muck of bankruptcy. Knowing what to charge for products and services is often treated like a voodoo ritual, where mystic insight from corporate elders drive the decision. I once took over a marketing department for a software company and asked the innocent question “How did you decide on the product’s price?” The grizzled CEO said “That’s what all products in this market cost.” Unsatisfied with … Continue reading →

Stop Researching

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“Researching to 100% assuredness is 100% stupid,” surmised a wise old marketer. Marketing research is essential, but so is action. Perfect knowledge is impossible in the same way as constantly moving one half of the remaining distance toward an object. At some point you have to stop researching because diminishing rates of risk reduction make no since given the cost of research and the costs of delay. But like many alcoholics, knowing when enough-is-enough is clouded by your direct participation. One way to triangulate when to quit researching is to pair the costs of too much research verses too little. We all do this informally, but two problems evolve from hipshot restraint. First is that everybody has a different perception of risk based on their perspective. Start-up entrepreneurs are likely to short research in order to get to market quickly – to obtain first mover advantage. They will override the … Continue reading →

Invisible Competitors

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Want to see me cringe? Be a start-up founder and tell me you don’t have any competition. Every company and every product has competitors. They may not have offices, there may not be a product, and your prospects may not know they are using your competition. But everyone has competition and it can come from very unexpected sources. Even Google has tangent barriers. Google’s Android mobile operating system is the most popular on the planet, especially in China where they appear on 90% of smartphones. The competition is not the hodge podge of OSs in the other 10%. Nor is it the gaggle of Chinese knock-off companies that wish Google would release the source code to new Android versions more quickly so they could create near-real-time Android clones. The new competitive threat is the Chinese government. Mao’s mavens are not entering the smartphone market. These control freaks simply don’t like … Continue reading →

Not Satisfied?

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Not knowing if your customers are satisfied should make you unsatisfied. One of the oldest and yet more ignored market research activities is customer satisfaction surveying. Since customers are the source of buzz – both positive and negative – knowing what your paying customers think and feel is critical to seeing potentially fatal problems and capitalizing on stunning capabilities. It also can uncover where you think what you offer is important but actually disinterests the market. It’s almost as good as surveying lost sales an activity which is very valuable and equally rare. The key objectives of every customer satisfaction survey are to know where a company excels (for promotional purposes), where it lags (for improvement) and where there are opportunities for profitable change. I once ran a customer satisfaction survey that included a pricing sensitivity measure and discovered that my client was undercharging for their product. They received a … Continue reading →

Questionable Surveys

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Asking the right question is as important as asking the right people. We do a lot of primary research work at Silicon Strategies Marketing, and that means we do quite a bit of surveying (so much that we run our own software suite for online surveys). Surveying remains the cornerstone of quantitative investigation even in this age of constant polling where nominal surveys receive less than 0.1% response rates. Which makes the oversupply of sloppy surveying mythologies downright depressing. There is both science and art in survey design. It begins with knowing what critical information is to be acquired – what business decision you are making. Non-specific problem definitions lead to non-specific questions which produce non-specific answers (to be specific). Surprisingly many folks do not precisely understand the business decision they face, and we spend a lot of time in business coaching to improve their focus before assembling their surveys. … Continue reading →

Don’t Survey

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I have talked clients out of broad market research studies. Doing so doesn’t help my bottom line. We at Silicon Strategies Marketing do quite a bit of market research work, both qualitative and quantitative. Surveys have become one of my favorite projects because divining numerical answers from complex situations engages my inner geek. Our clients have a tendency to want to know everything today. They envision surveying their broad markets with dense surveys that measure everything, right down to if respondents were or were not bottle babies. I talk nearly every one of them out of this. Your market is divided into segments, for which there are a small handful of magical requirements. Yet all segments are not created equal – some are more interesting and profitable than others. After developing your segmentation model, your next step is to scorecard potential segments and quickly decide which are most viable– for … Continue reading →

Suffering Surveys

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I thought my client had stopped breathing. We were going over elements of a large-scale survey he wanted Silicon Strategies Marketing to do for them. The mechanics were fine, the methodology was agreeable, and the timelines were A-OK. But when the cost to incentivize respondents was presented, I momentarily mistook his slacked jaw expression as a sign of a cerebral stroke. He quickly reached into his desk draw, took a slug from a flask, then asked if the incentive amount was a typographical error. The benefit behind primary research is that it delivers precise answers about your market. Surveying remains the best way to build quantified business cases and MRD‘s. However, surveying on the cheap produces unreliable results, and surveying in some ways is getting more expensive by the minute. The basic problem is that unless the subject matter of a survey really excites people, they would rather not invest … Continue reading →