There are two kinds of research: free research, which business owners do by themselves, as you'll see in the upcoming pages, and paid research, which costs money—but only in the way that an investment costs money. The payoff often is much larger than the investment. That's why many guerrillas use both kinds of research. When they're starting out, they use free research because they want the information. Later, when they're growing and humming, they use paid research because they need it.
Be clear on this: Research—although it can often serve as the spark for breakthrough thinking—is not intended to be a substitute for inspiration. The truth is that research is supposed to provide a connection with your customers or prospects that can get you where you want to go faster and more profitably.
At the heart of research is the keen belief that listening to the opinions of your consumers is important. When you ask the right questions, consumers will tell you what to do to make your business more profitable. Simply by listening to consumers, you will do the smart thing far more often than if you simply decide to go it alone.
Remember when Coca-Cola introduced New Coke and failed miserably? Here's what Sergio Zyman, who was Coke's chief marketing officer at the time, had to say about listening to the consumer:
We orchestrated a huge launch [of New Coke], received abundant media coverage ... were delighted with ourselves ... until the sales figures started rolling in. Within weeks, we realized that we had blundered. Sales tanked, and the media turned against us. Seventy-seven days after New Coke was born, we made the second-hardest decision in company history. We pulled the plug. What went wrong? The answer was embarrassingly simple. We did not know enough about our consumers. We did not even know what motivated them to buy Coke in the first place. We fell into the trap of imagining that innovation—abandoning our existing product for a new one—would cure our ills.
After the debacle, we reached out to consumers and found that they wanted more than taste when they made their purchase. Drinking Coke enabled them to tap into the Coca-Cola experience, to be part of Coke's history and to feel the continuity and stability of the brand. Instead of innovating, we should have renovated. Instead of making a product and hoping people would buy it, we should have asked customers what they wanted and given it to them. As soon as we started listening to them, consumers responded, increasing our sales from 9 billion to 15 billion cases a year.
In the case of New Coke, listening to the consumer might have prevented an expensive disaster. As with so many businesses large or small, too much entrepreneurial ego or downright stubbornness gets in the way of listening to the consumer. Sadly, one of the failings of many small businesses is their lack of consideration to the importance of research and listening to the consumer. And if it is even considered, it is likely to be written off as being unaffordable.
Know this: Ignorance is more expensive than paid research. The testing process often costs you money because you haven't yet determined a winner, though e-mail has drastically reduced the cost of ascertaining the truth. Small-business owners are continually confronted with the need to make decisions about media, copy, headlines, subject lines, prices, colors, sizes, frequency, and target audiences. At all times, they are given two options: wing it or test it.
A lot of marketing pros will tell you that the three most important things you need to do to market anything successfully are to test, test, and test. That is good advice. And the big secret is that you need not shell out any money to learn about your market. If you know what to look for and where to find it, you can obtain crucial information for nary a cent. Let's examine some of the things you might want to find out.
1. What should you market—your goods, your services, or both?
2. Should your marketing feature some sort of price advantage?
3. Should you emphasize yourself, your quality offerings, your selection, your convenience, your service, or only the existence of your business?
4. Should you take on your competition or ignore all competitors?
5. Exactly who are your competitors?
6. Who are your best prospects?
7. What income groups do they represent?
8. What motivates them to buy?
9. Where do they live?
10. What media do they read, watch, and listen to?
11. Do they have fax machines?
12. Are they online?
13. Do you have their e-mail addresses? The more answers you get, the more money you make.
14. Do they have children? If so, what are their ages?
15. What are their favorite sports teams?
16. What are their hobbies?
17. What do their spouses do for a living?
18. What activities most interest their kids at school?
19. Where did they attend high school and college?
20. What are their purchase plans for the coming year?
21. What do they most like about your company?
22. To make your company perfect, what do they suggest that you do?
23. Would they want a free subscription to your online newsletter?
Complete answers to these questions can prove invaluable to a marketing effort. A lack of answers can prove disastrous. Do what you must to get the answers.
In most cases, great advertising is preceded by great research. Four inexpensive research methods will provide you with the information that can make the difference between success and failure.
The first is to get to know your favorite search engines. Be on intimate terms with Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com. I hope by now you have noticed that they have changed everything when it comes to research. I hope you noted the recent day when google was accepted in the dictionary—as a verb. Google that.
Don't want to fiddle with a computer? Go to your local library. The reference librarian, one of America's greatest untapped resources, can steer you to the right search engines, guide you through shortcuts, then direct you to books and other publications that contain a raft of moneymaking information for you. Today, reference librarians know the Internet more intimately than most other people do. After all, reference is part of their job title.
Some of the sources you will be directed to have market studies of your area, conducted by companies that paid impressive sums for the data. Others contain studies of products or services such as yours and indicate the level of their acceptance by the public. Still others include census reports, research reports, and industry studies. Whenever I used to write a book, I found myself in libraries, ferreting out information. When I write a book these days, I get my information from the Internet. I lean heavily on search engines, which are becoming easier to use and better at their job. Who is the true expert on those search engines? You've got it—your reference librarian.
The more customer information you have, the better equipped you'll be to serve those customers. This is where inquisitiveness pays off big.
An invaluable yet commonly overlooked way for you to get information is to ask your own customers. If you have a new business, I strongly suggest that you prepare a lengthy questionnaire for them. On it, ask them everything under the sun.
Large corporations that enclose brief questionnaires with their manufactured items, such as TV sets, electric razors, or blow dryers, report that fewer than half the questionnaires are returned. These questionnaires often consist of only five or six questions. On the other hand, I had a client who gave each of his customers a fifteen-question survey. Seventy-eight percent of the forms distributed were completed and returned. It seems that many people enjoy providing personal information, just as long as they can remain anonymous.
Suppose that you want to establish a company that provides auto mechanical services at people's homes rather than in a garage. You might prepare and distribute—by e-mail or surface mail and on your Web site—a survey that asks the following questions of your prospects, namely, motorists.
We are establishing an automotive service that makes "house calls." To help us serve you most effectively, please provide the following information:
What type of car do you drive?———
What year is it?———What model?———
How long have you owned it?———
Who usually performs mechanical services for your car?———
Would you want these services to be performed where you live?
List the three main reasons you would want "house calls" made to service your car.——— ——— ———
Would you pay more to have "house calls" for your car?———
What is your sex?———Your age?———
Your household income?———
What radio stations do you listen to?———
What TV shows do you watch?———
Which magazines do you read?———
What type of work do you do?———
Do you have a fax machine?———What is your fax number?———
Are you online?———What is your e-mail address?———
Do you have a Web site?———What is your Web address?———
Would you purchase products as well as service from a traveling automotive service?———
Who do you consider to be our competition?———
Where would you expect us to advertise?———
Do you have any other comments?———
In this game of twenty questions, you always emerge the winner. By studying the questions only, you can easily see how much you'll learn. Think of how informed you'd be by studying the answers! This kind of questionnaire should be distributed for a number of months, and the answers should be studied each month so that trends can be spotted after the business is established. Note that the questionnaire doesn't ask the name or address of the customer. Anonymity is preserved, enabling you to ask many personal questions. Some questionnaires do ask for names and addresses, sacrificing the promise of anonymity in the quest for more detailed personal information. Guerrillas use both, knowing that the more personal data they have, the better they can target their marketing.
When you analyze the completed questionnaires, you'll learn specifics about your prospects, how best to reach them through the media, how to appeal to them, and what kinds of cars they drive. You can analyze the questionnaires by grouping the responses to each question. Perhaps you'll learn that the majority of people interested in patronizing your business drive foreign cars. This alerts you to the possibility of sending a mailing to foreign-car owners. Their names are available from mailing-list brokers. It might be that your customers are owners of older cars. Again, you can reach these people with a targeted mailing. The questionnaire will help you focus your advertising to the right people.
From the questionnaire, you can learn who your competition is by learning who usually performs mechanical services for your prospects. You can determine what it is you offer that is most enticing to your customers—again helping you choose the proper emphasis for your advertising. You'll discover the sex and age of your customers, and you'll learn exactly how and where to communicate with them once you ascertain the newspapers, radio stations, TV shows, and magazines that interest them. If your customers are primarily white-collar workers, the questionnaire will inform you of that fact, and you can tailor your media selection to that reality. You can learn which marketing vehicles will work most effectively for you, and you can get a report on your own service.
This analysis greatly helps you in determining your marketing thrust, yet it's extremely inexpensive. Use the information to update or revise your marketing plan. And just think, your only expense was for the duplication of the questionnaire—well under $100. This is free research at its best, and, frankly, you're nuts if you don't take advantage of it. Repeat it every few years to keep abreast of your market. Things change with lightning speed, including details about your customers.
The third way to take advantage of inexpensive research is to prepare a questionnaire similar to the preceding one and give it to people using the kinds of services you provide. By doing so, you research serious rather than potential prospects. You'll receive fewer returns than the 78 percent my client enjoyed, but you'll learn something—which is much more valuable than knowing nothing. Naturally, you won't hand your questionnaire to motorists if you're selling computer education. If that's your business, you'll want your questionnaires in the hands of people entering or departing computer stores. If you are a traveling hairstylist who makes house calls, hand your questionnaires to people leaving beauty salons or barbershops. Whatever your business, you can find prospective customers somewhere: with their kids at the playground, at the beach, in the park, downtown, at the hardware store, at the ballpark. Chances are, you've already got a line on where they are. All you have to do is go there and distribute your long list of questions.
How do you ensure that the prospective customers will return your questionnaires? You can furnish them with stamped envelopes. You can tempt them with offers of free but inexpensive gifts. You can offer them discounts, newsletter subscriptions, free reports—if they complete and return your questionnaire. And you can use pure honesty by explaining, at the beginning of the questionnaire, exactly why you are asking so many questions. Just be sure to include your address so that the questionnaires will be mailed (or brought) to the right place.
You should have an introductory paragraph atop your questionnaire, which could read:
We're trying to learn as much as possible from motorists in the community so that we can offer them the best possible service. We apologize for asking you so many questions in this questionnaire, but we're doing it so that you can benefit in the long run. We promise that your answers will remain anonymous (note that we are not asking for your name). And we also promise that we'll use the information to help you enjoy better automotive service.
An honest introduction such as this serves to disarm people who resent being asked so many questions, and it explains exactly why you are distributing the survey.
Once again, you end up with valuable information. And again, it costs you hardly a cent. A true guerrilla will use all three methods to get free research. Then he or she will put the information to work to create a first-rate marketing plan, using reliable data that can aid in selecting marketing methods, evaluating the competition, and framing the creative message.
The fourth method of free research is to tap the greatest information source ever developed: the Internet. It truly is, as Bill Gates said, the information superlibrary. And it is more conveniently located than your local library. If you can't find what you're looking for on the Internet, you're probably not looking in the right places. (However, I want to remind you that the most crucial information is not and probably never will be on the Internet—that is personal information about your customers. As much as I laud the Net, as much as I implore you to engage in a weekly surf to learn the intricacies and secrets of the Net, I realize that it can't tell me Thing One about my customers. Only my questionnaire can accomplish that.)
There are insights about Internet research known to all cyberguerrillas. These are the most important insights.
• If you're using the Internet to locate information about anything related to an industry, first locate the Web sites of businesses involved in that industry. You'll find them to be a treasury of information. When I wrote a chapter about computer networking for a recent book, I found more substantial and easy-to-understand information on the 3Com Web site than I did in technical journals. 3Com manufactured computer networking hardware, so it was in the company's best interest to present information clearly. Same for Cisco Systems.
• Use several search engines. Search engines undergo continual improvement and vie with one another to be easiest to use and most comprehensive. No one search engine is best for all purposes—each seems to have its own areas of specialization. Check a few if you want to get the most valuable and most recent information.
• Look beyond the Web when you're searching for information online. Millions of documents and files are available via Gopher, WAIS (wide area information servers), and FTP (file transfer protocol), and you can use search utilities, such as TurboGopher, Win-Gopher, Archie, Anarchie, and Veronica, to find them. Gopher servers store university or government documents, such as trade statistics or opinion-poll results. WAIS store the full text of articles, reports, and speeches by famous people, among other facts. FTP servers store files containing lengthy reports, graphics, charts, demo programs, and video clips. Much of this data may never be available on the Web. Use these searching methods to avoid missing important information.
• Don't overlook the importance of chat rooms for quick responses to ideas, products, and marketing thoughts. Bright people are online chatting, and they are quick to render opinions. You can learn significant information by simply asking in a chat setting. Look for chat rooms where your questions might be appropriate, and then ask away.
• Use e-mail for customer surveys. It is so simple to respond to them that response rates for online surveys are appreciably higher than for mailed surveys. Don't worry about asking too many questions, but don't overdo a good thing. Offer to send responders the results of your survey, for they are probably inquisitive people if they're willing to answer your questions.
These are not the only methods of conducting inexpensive research; they are simply the most common and effective. There are free newsletters galore—good ones—on every topic you can imagine. Don't ask me where; ask your friendly search engine. You can also get information from your local or state chamber of commerce, any industry organizations to which you belong, and any industry publications of which you are aware. Make a field trip or two to poke around and talk to people in your business but who are not in your geographic area. Guerrillas abet their primary research with these additional sources of knowledge. Knowledge is the currency of the twenty-first century.
When questioning your target audience, it might help to list some of the basic needs people have. Ask them to make check marks by those that pushed their particular buttons. Most people will react to one or more of the following basic needs (known as "appeals" in advertising lingo):
Achievement
Ambition
Comfort
Convenience
Conformity (peer pressure) Friendship
Health and well-being
Independence
Love
Power
Pride of ownership
Profit
Savings or economy
Saving time
Security
Self-improvement
Social approval (status)
Style
If you believe that people patronize you because you offer convenience and economy, you may be surprised to learn, via your questionnaires, that they give you their business because your work adds to their sense of security.
You can engage in more free research by conscientiously studying the other marketing that is going on in your community—not only that of your competitors but also that of everyone. Engage in frank conversations with your customers. Talk with your competitors. Talk with other businesspeople in your community. You'll find that they'll provide you with useful information and won't charge you for it. Research will help you save money and earn money, and free research will help you save and earn even more.
I'd be remiss if I didn't let Robert Kaden have a word about paid research. He's the author of Guerrilla Marketing Research, a valuable addition to any guerrilla library, and although he's all for free research, he doesn't want you to overlook paid research. Here, in his own wise words, is why:
For small companies and entrepreneurs, research is one of the last things they think they can afford. Mostly, research is viewed as a highly discretionary expense. One that is difficult to justify because research costs aren't easily attributable to immediate paybacks.
The owner of a small manufacturing company once said to me, "If I spend $50,000 on research, will I get $100,000 back"? I responded, "If you don't spend the money on research, how will you know that you won't ultimately waste $500,000 advertising your product using the wrong message?"
Another said, "I could hire two salesmen for the cost of your research. If I do that, I know how much in sales and profit I can expect." My response was, "Maybe you should hire one salesman and spend money you would have paid the second to learn about your customers and why they aren't buying more from you. In this way you can help the salesmen you now have be more effective. It just might be that if your salesmen were better informed, their selling efforts would increase dramatically."
Trusting the process is always in question the first time money is spent on research. The vague hope always exists that the results will lead to smarter decisions, which will increase sales and profits that would not have happened otherwise. This makes it all the more critical that great care be taken in planning the research and anticipating the kind of actions that will be taken when the research is completed.
It is also important to realize that research might suggest action not be taken. When considering a new venture or change of course, there are always costs associated with the risk. Often, research will indicate that an idea is not worth pursuing. Or that the money necessary to do the job effectively might be beyond company means.
In such cases, the payback from the research is the prevention of costly mistakes.
Just as one hallmark of the guerrilla marketer is ongoing learning, another is ongoing research. Researching your marketplace should never stop. And the Internet makes it so easy. With even a brief foray into the extraordinary world of search engines, you'll be bombarded by new research, facts, and information that will help you grow your business. You don't even have to try that hard.
You and your business will be better served if you do take a proactive approach. The Internet is an ever-expanding sea of information. Use it often. Ask it questions about your business. Go to the library. Talk to friends and relatives. Do everything that is free and that your time allows. As your business grows, you will reach a level of sophistication. When your continued growth will be dependent on the right answers to the right questions, only paid research can do the job you need.
Eventually, you may run out of questions to ask and feel that it is time to stop doing research. When that happens, these are Kaden's top ten questions for you. He suggests that if you answer yes to any of them, you should buy yourself a new car, yacht, RV, summer home, or whatever, because you obviously don't need the money for paid research.
1. Will your business grow profitability on pure momentum?
2. Will your business grow without improvements?
3. Do you know everything that your competitors can do to hinder your growth?
4. Are you convinced that you can't lose customers or gain new ones?
5. Are you convinced that there is nothing that can happen to cause your products to become obsolete?
6. Are you sure that your business isn't subject to changing trends?
7. Are you sure that you are the only one who can generate good ideas about how to run your business?
8. Are you clairvoyant?
9. Do you get tomorrow's stock market reports in today's newspaper?
10. Have you contracted for sale of your business that will make you millions?
There are two variables you must always consider in your quest for research. I've saved them for the end because I want them to remain in your mind whenever you engage in any kind of research—free or otherwise. The two variables are: (1) the quality of the information, and (2) the source of the information. You need both high-quality information and a reliable source for your research to be worth a hill of beans. If you have both, that research may be worth a mountain of money.