Business-Building Focus Groups: Consumer Dialogue Monitor

This newsletter article provides a means to step away from the day-to-day demands of brand marketing, and to stay in touch with customers’ needs proactively rather than having to play catch-up. It presents a dynamic tool to stay ahead of the curve on consumer trends to satisfy unmet needs, aid product development, and retain brand loyalty.

Change Is The Only Thing We Can Count On

Nonstop mega-mergers, smaller/faster digital products, expanding Internet commerce, strong demand for culinary diversity, out-of-control real estate and gas prices – just a small sampling of the changes that have had a major impact on consumers in recent years. Marketers have various means to gauge consumer response as these shifts occur, at least in the aggregate. Behavioral measurements on a more personal level, and staying in-tune with related consumer attitudes are more challenging. Further, using this information to address future needs and foster growth, versus merely maintaining the status quo, presents even greater difficulty.

Business-Building Means Being Proactive

Consumer Dialogue Monitor (CDM) is a strategic tool to engage target consumers in an ongoing discussion to evaluate their needs and wants. It goes beyond traditional research to provide more regular versus sporadic feedback. By keeping a pulse on consumer attitudes, values, and behavior, significant issues and trends are revealed that might ordinarily be missed. Thus, CDM is a proactive program – affording in-depth investigation of high-potential marketplace ideas. In turn, these offer opportunities to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Conceptually, CDM is a business-building technique designed to keep current users satisfied, identify ways to entice prospects, and uncover growth opportunities in general. The perspective is shifted to the consumer from the product, imparting a deeper understanding of the category and brand’s emotional core. This more intimate, consumer-driven brand view provides a relevant foundation to use as a springboard for strategic and marketing efforts.

For ad agencies, Consumer Dialogue Monitor can additionally serve as a powerful selling tool to attract new business prospects, and as a business retention service for existing clients. Its value in providing insights into general attitude trends, and as an account planning tool to represent the consumer conscience is clearly evident.

Periodic Read of Your Customer

To conduct a CDM, focus groups are done on a quarterly (or appropriate interval) basis, each time typically including a total of 4-6 groups per target segment in 2-3 geographically-dispersed markets. The methodology is customized according to needs. Potential issue areas well-suited for Consumer Dialogue Monitor might include:

• Understand target at deeper level: General attitudes/values/lifestyles relevant to category, impact of external factors such as the economy, war, gas prices, homeland security
• Consumer decision-making process: More precisely isolate the underlying rational and emotional factors, level of involvement, and identify key drivers influencing loyalty
• Brand discrimination: Tap into consumer mindset as to how consumers differentiate brands in the category – extent and specific points of differences
• Problems/unmet needs: Identify specific problems or concerns about products/services, and category needs that haven’t been met; explore potential “fixes” to aid product development
• New product development ideas: Modify/generate ideas of interest to consumers, not specifically related to problems or unmet needs
• Behavioral shifts: Changes in shopping habits, venues, or sources of information, and reasons why, and ways in which usage and needs have changed over time
• Consumer-brand relationship: Interpret subtleties regarding the role the brand (and its advertising/promotions) plays in consumers’ lives
• Dimensionalize category attributes: What the most salient attributes really mean to consumers
• Product communications: Guidance to fine-tune advertising, promotions, collateral materials
• Usage feedback: Obtain directional reactions for new or existing products/services

Key trends and insights are identified as findings are compared each quarter/period, with learning integrated over time. Recommended follow-up actions based on these findings are then developed, factored by importance and relevance.

Consumer Dialogue Monitor is a dynamic strategic tool to provide leadership opportunities for brands to compete more effectively. It helps retain loyal customers and potentially entice new ones to build a stronger brand franchise. By creating an ongoing exchange with consumers, CDM develops a unique understanding of the target on a “flesh and blood” level, revealing deep-seated purchase motivations and general attitudinal trends. And importantly, it provides a practical, relatively low-cost means to stay in-tune with your customers – the key to any successful business-building effort.

This article is from Strategy Matters, a periodic newsletter from MARAfriedman Brand Strategist, which covers brand strategy issues and associated research toolbox options. More information about this methodology is available at www.MARAstrategist.com.

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