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How Marketers Are Moving from Intuition to Fact-Based Decision-Making

Given the complexities of modern marketing, many suggest the days of making decisions based on gut instinct are increasingly impractical. According to a recent article in Advertising Age, research has become a requirement to drive fact-based decisions. The challenge is “many marketers' inability to understand the methodology and calculations behind data they get,” said Greg Stuart, former CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and co-author of the book “What Sticks”.

This lack of understanding has created a catch twenty-two where budgets are cut and researchers are doing online surveys to drive costs down and increase speed. However, some think it is decreasing the quality, and in turn undermining marketers’ confidence in research. Procter & Gamble Co., the largest buyer of research globally, disclosed that online surveys with rented sampled conducted weeks apart last year yielded different results, and were also different from responses done by mail surveys.

“It's becoming harder and harder to get people's attention to do research,” said Tony Palmer, Kimberly-Clark Chief Marketing Officer. "It's becoming clearer and clearer that what people say and what they do is different. So there's a real need to drive research to newer techniques, toward research that deploys anthropology and observation."

Employing or training marketers with research skills could help to find quality trade-offs for better research and knowing how to improve quality issues. Another option is to put researchers in C-level roles. "I like to have a quant jock or a researcher by my side in running a business," Mr. Stuart said. "I like to have direct access to that expertise." However, finding C-level researchers is rare and will take time before that becomes wide-spread in the industry.

The question still remains, how do marketers integrate “fact-based decision-making” into the business? One solution Vision Critical would recommend is to create an online proprietary research panel.  Unlike renting sample (also known as access panels), this is a dedicated group that market researchers can engage with and learn from over time. This enables research to become more engaging with shorter more targeted surveys allowing marketers access to timely data as results stream in real-time.

Vision Critical is the world leader in providing proprietary panels to hundreds of organizations like Banana Republic, Dairy Queen, RIM Blackberry and Virgin Mobile. If you would like to learn more, contact Julie Romas at julie.romas@visioncritical.com or call 604.647.3557.

To read the full article from Advertising Age, click here (subscription required).

Posted on September 25, 2007
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