Category — Marketing Research

“When your neighbor loses his job, it’s a recession. When you lose your job, it’s a depression.” - Harry S. Truman

As the US economy looks to be sliding towards recession, if it isn’t already there now, consumers will start to alter certain behaviors in reaction to economic realities. And not all areas of spending are reduced; in fact, some increase at the expense of others.

Here are some more general ones that marketers need to be cognizant of:

Not surprisingly, consumers reexamine their regular spending habits

• Restaurant and take out meals decline, and in home meals increase.
• Coupon usage increases, and they become more aware of in store sales and price reductions.
• Entertainment has some interesting shifts, as movie ticket sales tend to increase during recessions, but spending $250+ on Hannah Montana concert tickets for the kids is certainly over with.

A counterpoint is that sometimes consumers will maintain their “little luxuries”

• These may be simple things, like a Starbucks latte in the mornings, since it can be an inexpensive mood lifter during stressful times.
• However, they will probably focus on just one “little luxury”, and try to pare down the rest.

Big expenses like home remodels and extravagant vacations are postponed.

• If consumers do work around the home, it is probably DIY, and even then to help boost the saleability of a home in a poor housing market.
• Traditionally, consumers used to cancel their foreign travels and focus on places they could reach by car. However, with gas prices as high as they are, even this behavior is in jeopardy.

Consumers try to get a better handle on their credit card balances and monthly budgets.

• This means consumers finding out that cash still works to pay for groceries and the sales of personal finance books take off.
• However, consumers who lose their jobs tend to fall on back on credit, which then leads to a personal finance doom loop.

Hang on tight, we are all in for a rough ride.

Since readership of Insight Buzz has grown over the past couple of months, I thought the end of 2007 would be a good time to bring back a couple of the most popular posts on marketing research.

My method for determining which ones to list was a combination of Feedburner stats, Google Analytics, and plain personal preference.

Certainly the top post by a wide margin was this one on the Top Ten Marketing Research Resources on the Web. I hope to add an addendum after the 1st of the year with several new resources I’ve discovered since first posting this list.

One of my initial posts focused on Search and its potential to provide consumer insights through a kind of digital ethnography. This is another area I’m planning to come back to in the near future.

Lastly, I don’t mean to pick on focus groups, since I continue to find them of value. However, there are instances when they simply aren’t appropriate, which is why I wrote up this list of 3 Reasons Why Not to Use a Focus Group.

There is an interesting comment stream following Merrill Dubrow’s post on problems facing marketing research today, especially in the survey arena. His original post focuses on four main areas of concern:

1. Length of questionnaire
2. Boring, repetitive, poorly written surveys
3. Declining cooperation rates
4. Great variation in quality across online sample providers

I think 1 and 2 are linked, which is why I’ll address them:

First, after roughly 10 to 15 minutes of questions, you can assume the incremental insights from any more questions are probably negated by the desire for consumers to say or check anything just to get to the end of the survey.

Second, brand researchers and their internal clients need to know that a lack of focus in questioning will probably result in a poor survey and a lack of focus in results.  When you start tacking on “Just One More Things”, the muddled nature of the questionnaire will probably do more harm than good.

Finally, Ed Sugar provides an excellent challenge for market researchers in his follow up commentary. Marketing Research professionals should design research methods that “excite and inspire respondents to participate”, much like Nike and Apple create excitement around being part of their brand experience. Like Seth Godin’s concept of “permission marketing“, maybe there is a future for “permission consumer research”.

As I’ve looked across the web for resources on marketing research and consumer insights, I’ve found lots of sites devoted to marketing in general and online advertising, as well as numerous sites focused on search engine marketing and social media marketing. However, when it comes to sites that focus on the consumer research that hopefully informs all these activities, the resources are much more limited.

I have found, however, some sites that do a good job of providing consumer data and insights. The ones listed below are those that I found the most useful, but I’m always open to any suggestions out there that can point me to ones that I may have missed. While this is a Top 10 list of what I think are the best marketing research resources on the web, they are in no special order:

1. Research Brief is a regularly posting blog on Mediapost by Jack Loechner that always has an interesting stat or data table, mostly focused on consumers and their interaction with digital media.
2. Trendwatching.com bills themselves as “an independent and opinionated trend firm, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas”. And they do a very good job of doing just that.
3. As a definitive source on Behavioral Targeting and Web Analytics, Anil Batra’s Web Analysis, Behavioral Targeting and Advertising blog is a great source to subscribe to.
4. Jim Nail at Cymphony’s Influence 2.0 covers consumer insights as they relate to social media and conversational marketing.
5. Many times a good graphic can say more than a deck full of words. Which is why Marketing Charts is a great resource for charts, graphs, and tables that convey quickly and clearly consumer insights related to digital media and internet marketing.
6. eMarketer has a huge amount of internet marketing research information. Some parts, like their excellent daily articles, are free. However, there is even more information, including analyst reports and white papers, for those willing to pay for their total access subscriptions.
7. Another trove of good insights along the lines of eMarketer is the iMedia Connection pages focused on Research & Metrics. There are also other sections on the site that cover media, search, and other digital marketing channels.
8. Another excellent blog centered on web analytics, is Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik. His blogroll linking to other web analytic sites is the most comprehensive I’ve seen out there.
9. Although it is a more a general news site covering online marketing, Marketing Vox always has some consumer centric articles as it covers the pulse of digital media.
10. Finally, while his beat is more marketing in general and branding, Seth Godin’s blog is probably the most innovative and consumer centric writing out there. If you can’t get three good insights reading a month’s worth of his posts, you aren’t reading with your eyes open.

Well, that’s 10. Again, if there are any other good marketing research resources that people can recommend, please post them in the comments.