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Strategic
Issues
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FINDING
YOUR 8008 — LISTENING TO THE CUSTOMER FOR SUCCESSFUL MARKETING
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A
successful marketer is one whose customer runs so
deep in him that he not only sees everything from
his customer’s eyes but even begins seeing things
which his customer hasn’t yet begun thinking about.
Like, in 1972 Bill Gates was only sixteen when he
saw a ten-paragraph article on page 143 of the magazine,
Electronics, on Intel’s new chip 8008 and understood
how he would fulfill his destiny of putting a ‘a PC
on every desk’. .
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The
reasons why such simplistic listening approaches don’t
produce clear actions and reliable improvements is because
we don’t realise that :
* Listening is a process and not an event!
* Looking at tabulated data is not listening!
* Listening to the paradigm change is very different!
Listening: A Process, not an Event
In the case of the product XYZ given above, note that
the plans to listen to the customer have come out of
a compulsion based on an ‘event’ viz the MD’s remarks.
This should not happen in good companies.
Wise people visit a hospital for regular check-ups so
that they can avoid falling sick which requires hospitalisation,
expensive consultations and treatment. People who are
not wise first fall sick and then go to hospital for
extensive tests, expensive treatments and long recovery
periods. In the same way, well-managed companies do
not wait for their businesses to become sick and develop
symptoms before they listen to the customers. They have
regular programs of listening and learning from the
market — like periodic U&A (Usage & Attitude) studies,
customer satisfaction surveys, customer panel audits
and so on.
The biggest advantage of such pre-emptive tracking is
that it becomes a tool of knowledge management by creating
an organisation-wide learning and reference database.
Many trends can be detected early and corrected in time
before they become serious:
* In the tracking of one consumer product brand, the
regular tracking revealed that the average age of a
typical buyer was increasing, which meant that the youth
was getting alienated. This problem was corrected by
launching a new variant of the brand for the youth segment.
* In another case, regular tracking revealed that the
new ad campaign was not working as well as the previous
one and so it was promptly replaced. The great Indian
saint Kabir’s immortal doha,
Dukh mein sumiran sub kare, sukh mein kare na koi/
Jo sukh mein sumiran kare, use dukh kahe ko hoy
could as well apply to us here as follows:
Everyone consults the market in difficult times but
none in times of ease If you consulted the market then,
why would difficulties ever arise?
Looking at Tabulated Data is not Listening
Sometimes there is no information in the data or even
in the statistics. When I was at Cadbury’s, someone
came up with an idea of expanding the chocolate market
by reducing the price. This caught everybody’s fancy.
Every book on economics says that demand goes up as
price falls. We decided on a consumer survey which would
essentially depend upon answer to the question ‘Would
you buy more chocolate if we reduced the price?’. We
never got around to doing that study because our sales
manager pointed out that our sale had been going up
continuously over the years in spite of a regular price
increase of 8 per cent per annum! I am glad common sense
prevailed because I am afraid that had we gone ahead
with that questionnaire, most people would have answered
‘yes’ to that question without really meaning it. And
if we had lowered our prices, the increase in sales
as indicated in the ‘research findings’ would not have
come.
You must know what you should not ask the customers.
There are some questions no customer can answer truthfully
because they are so inescapably correct. If I were to
ask ‘If you had the time, would you exercise more?’,
how many of you would dare say ‘No’? But how many would
really exercise more? There is no information in the
data provided by answers to such questions.
There are many consumption choices. |
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