netrashetty
Netra Shetty
American Family Insurance (aka AmFam) is a private mutual company that focuses on property, casualty and auto insurance, but also offers commercial insurance, life, health, and homeowners coverage, as well as investment and retirement-planning products. A Fortune 500 company, its revenues for 2008 were over $6.7 billion[2][4].
all of us will have to adapt. Adaptation means learning how to use CGM to provide one form of input in fashioning product and marketing decisions. Those are the messages from respondents to this month's column, who seemed to treat what some might think is the most revolutionary concept in marketing to come along in a long time in a very matter-of-fact way.
Bob Nemens commented, "Traditional marketers may be quick to dismiss Internet chatter as coming from the 'uninformed.' ... If Thomas Edison had been given the option at the time, I bet he would have spent significant time on the online underground." Fernando Polo dismissed the potential pitfalls of bias caused by listening only to outspoken users of the Internet by saying, "Excuses such as 'listening to the wrong complaints' are just that: excuses. Text-mining technologies can now help companies listen to their customers better than ever... My advice: 'Don't let your competitors listen to your clients; do it yourself first.'" Andrea Learned pointed out, "Eventually, those slightly later adopters and less-active types will join in to make blogs a more representative discussion vehicle... The same will likely happen in the consumer generated marketing realm when slightly later-to-adopt consumers realize how much they can influence manufacturers...."
The proper role of CGM was a source of some comment. In particular, the findings of a study cited in the column that associated companies utilizing mechanisms for paying attention to "emerging customers" with the fostering of "disruptive technologies" raised some eyebrows. As Christophe Meili put it, "I'm surprised that consumer generated marketing would foster disruptive innovation. I was under the impression that ... true disruption would be generated less by popular demand than by hard radical thinking." Flavius Chircu suggested that if we regard consumer generated marketing as "something akin to the other party in a dialogue ... (it) becomes a source of incremental improvements whereas anything revolutionary could only come during the 'breaks' in the dialogue." And Caleb DeGrenier commented that "companies still need to surprise the market with innovative products that no single customer would have thought of."
This brings us full cycle to some of our original questions about consumer generated marketing. Is it really something "new under the sun"? Is it, for marketers, a disruptive technology in its own right, something offering decision makers more for less (or, more accurately reflecting the definition of a disruptive technology
Whether your goal is to expand into new markets, introduce a new product or service, or gauge customer reactions, even the smallest businesses can benefit from a simple but well-planned market-research study.
Market research helps you understand your market, your customers, your competitors, and larger industry trends. High-quality research will reveal details about your current customers and will help you target new customers. For example, before you open an organic produce market, it is important to find out if there's a demand for food grown without pesticides and whether customers will pay more for it.
addition to the insight that you’ll gain into customer needs, market-research studies can help you avoid costly mistakes, such as introducing an unpopular line of goods or developing a service that no one really wants. Coca-Cola's introduction of New Coke in the 1980s demonstrates what happens when decisions aren't supported by solid research. Coke revised the formula of its traditional brand of soft drink and lost millions in sales. By performing a study and determining what people thought of the new formula, the company could have avoided public-relations headaches.
When you establish a market-research study for your business, follow these basic guidelines:
Use the right sample. The research sample — your study’s group of participants — has to be just the right size. Too large a sample is not cost effective, and too small a sample offers inaccurate results. You also need to have the right samples from your overall population. Even a sample as small as one percent of a market or group will work, as long as the sample truly reflects the overall geographic area or population that you want to query.
Mirror the market. Your surveys must reflect all characteristics of the market from which it is drawn, such as geographical area or population segment. Nielsen TV ratings are based on very small samplings of the overall audience, but they're accurate to a few percentage points. For example, if half of your target market is aged 65 and older and half is 30 and younger, make sure that the sample size accurately reflects this demographic. If one-third of your market lives in one town and two-thirds lives in another, your survey must reflect the geographic split in order to give you accurate and useful information.
Get quantifiable results. Successful studies follow proven approaches based on statistics and sampling. But don’t worry — you don't need a PhD in mathematics. Most results can be tabulated with simple arithmetic and broken down into percentages that anyone can understand.
all of us will have to adapt. Adaptation means learning how to use CGM to provide one form of input in fashioning product and marketing decisions. Those are the messages from respondents to this month's column, who seemed to treat what some might think is the most revolutionary concept in marketing to come along in a long time in a very matter-of-fact way.
Bob Nemens commented, "Traditional marketers may be quick to dismiss Internet chatter as coming from the 'uninformed.' ... If Thomas Edison had been given the option at the time, I bet he would have spent significant time on the online underground." Fernando Polo dismissed the potential pitfalls of bias caused by listening only to outspoken users of the Internet by saying, "Excuses such as 'listening to the wrong complaints' are just that: excuses. Text-mining technologies can now help companies listen to their customers better than ever... My advice: 'Don't let your competitors listen to your clients; do it yourself first.'" Andrea Learned pointed out, "Eventually, those slightly later adopters and less-active types will join in to make blogs a more representative discussion vehicle... The same will likely happen in the consumer generated marketing realm when slightly later-to-adopt consumers realize how much they can influence manufacturers...."
The proper role of CGM was a source of some comment. In particular, the findings of a study cited in the column that associated companies utilizing mechanisms for paying attention to "emerging customers" with the fostering of "disruptive technologies" raised some eyebrows. As Christophe Meili put it, "I'm surprised that consumer generated marketing would foster disruptive innovation. I was under the impression that ... true disruption would be generated less by popular demand than by hard radical thinking." Flavius Chircu suggested that if we regard consumer generated marketing as "something akin to the other party in a dialogue ... (it) becomes a source of incremental improvements whereas anything revolutionary could only come during the 'breaks' in the dialogue." And Caleb DeGrenier commented that "companies still need to surprise the market with innovative products that no single customer would have thought of."
This brings us full cycle to some of our original questions about consumer generated marketing. Is it really something "new under the sun"? Is it, for marketers, a disruptive technology in its own right, something offering decision makers more for less (or, more accurately reflecting the definition of a disruptive technology
Whether your goal is to expand into new markets, introduce a new product or service, or gauge customer reactions, even the smallest businesses can benefit from a simple but well-planned market-research study.
Market research helps you understand your market, your customers, your competitors, and larger industry trends. High-quality research will reveal details about your current customers and will help you target new customers. For example, before you open an organic produce market, it is important to find out if there's a demand for food grown without pesticides and whether customers will pay more for it.
addition to the insight that you’ll gain into customer needs, market-research studies can help you avoid costly mistakes, such as introducing an unpopular line of goods or developing a service that no one really wants. Coca-Cola's introduction of New Coke in the 1980s demonstrates what happens when decisions aren't supported by solid research. Coke revised the formula of its traditional brand of soft drink and lost millions in sales. By performing a study and determining what people thought of the new formula, the company could have avoided public-relations headaches.
When you establish a market-research study for your business, follow these basic guidelines:
Use the right sample. The research sample — your study’s group of participants — has to be just the right size. Too large a sample is not cost effective, and too small a sample offers inaccurate results. You also need to have the right samples from your overall population. Even a sample as small as one percent of a market or group will work, as long as the sample truly reflects the overall geographic area or population that you want to query.
Mirror the market. Your surveys must reflect all characteristics of the market from which it is drawn, such as geographical area or population segment. Nielsen TV ratings are based on very small samplings of the overall audience, but they're accurate to a few percentage points. For example, if half of your target market is aged 65 and older and half is 30 and younger, make sure that the sample size accurately reflects this demographic. If one-third of your market lives in one town and two-thirds lives in another, your survey must reflect the geographic split in order to give you accurate and useful information.
Get quantifiable results. Successful studies follow proven approaches based on statistics and sampling. But don’t worry — you don't need a PhD in mathematics. Most results can be tabulated with simple arithmetic and broken down into percentages that anyone can understand.
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