The marketing function has been under increasing pressure to deliver. Its challenge is to see new business opportunities before they become obvious, to lead the market and not be led, to have a proactive vision rather than a copycat mentality. To accomplish that, a “facts-based” analysis — using quantitative data from customer surveys, market studies and other sources — can help tremendously, enabling companies to take calculated risks with greater confidence. But such approaches can sometimes be dysfunctional, leading to endless statistical analyses that obfuscate key points. Or they might focus on yesterday’s issues instead of tomorrow’s opportunities. Companies thus need a broadened approach to marketing research that takes into account conversations with customers, observations from the field and insights from executives, among other alternative sources of valuable information. The goal is to enable — not stifle — innovation. To this end, marketing must perform seven key tasks within an organization.
Create a meeting place.
Marketing research needs to facilitate a dialogue between those executives with challenges and those with solutions. Any solution should be based on more than just mere opinion; at the same time, the brainstorming does not need to be narrowly data driven. The aim is to find nonintuitive solutions, that is, value-creating approaches that could be beyond the scope of the research. In other words, research data should enable people to be... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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