Don’t just plan. Act on fresh insight.
July 19th, 2010 by Hugh Kennedy
A few months back I noted that thanks to an inspiring conversation with a planner who was laid off for about six weeks and then snatched up by Saatchi New York, I have begun to call research by its appropriate name, at least for the advertising and marketing world: insight work. I’m not attempting to field this term as a euphemism; rather, to point to the essential task that insight about customers, markets and marketing performs.
Just as you can’t differentiate yourself these days without outbehaving the competition (to borrow a term from Dov Seidman), you can’t differentiate your marketing presence without great insights.
Even if the national trend shows anemic growth in research, there are several reasons why insight work makes sense right now:
1. The economic slowdown has radically changed the consumer’s sense of value and order of priorities. Are your customers and targets thinking differently or looking for a simpler offering from you? How else would you know unless you went out and asked them?
2. Social media is changing the marketing equation on a daily basis. PJA clients who didn’t know what Twitter was six months ago are Tweeting daily to growing groups of followers about their corporate philanthropy and point of view. How do you know which channels are relevant now unless you go out to the market and look for these insights?
3. Just as the companies that lead the way out of the last economic trough (Google, Salesforce.com, Juniper, Trend Micro) were actively plotting and innovating during the nadir of 2002 and 2003, tomorrow’s leaders are plotting today, identifying new audience needs, markets and attitudes that will lead them to develop the next break-out medical device, router, or killer app. Unless you can intuit what your audience wants, you’re traveling in the dark without a flashlight.
Which brings me to the point: PJA’s OpinionPulse online insight groups. Over the past four years we have developed two of these groups:
OpinionPulse Life Science: 50 highly opinionated biological and chemical scientists from across big pharma, biotech, government and academia, with titles ranging from Bench Scientist to VP of Discovery. Currently Domestic US.
OpinionPulse Information Technology: 60 equally highly opinionated technology knowledge workers from financial services, software, hardware, retail, government, manufacturing, insurance and many other industries. Currently Global.
How can you make use of these groups to add insight to your positioning, creative development and test strategy, as many of our clients have done? Just shoot me an email at hjkennedy@agencypja.com and let’s discuss.
December 29th, 2010 at 7:31 am
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