This week focuses on market research. My goal is to first understand how to research and analyze markets and customers and then learn the process of segmentation, targeting, and position. This week, I will complete the first four chapters of the book, which provides tools to prepare the first submission of our marketing plan. This includes an environmental scan, market research component, and segmentations targeting positioning component.
Dr. Rosling’s video reminds me that key components of research include not only data collection and analysis but also presentation of the data. Often time, research study results in massive amounts of data. This includes not only static but also dynamic data that continuously changes over time. Data visualization, such as what shown in Dr. Rosling’s video, provides a powerful mean both to understand the data and to then communicate what discovered to others. By converting raw data into easily understood visual information, he is able to present huge amount of data and make insightful summaries of key points memorable in a few minutes. His presentation of 200 years of global health is very impressive. I can easily see the trends and understand the important facts that he summarized from the visual display.
The video by Malcolm Gladwell helps me understand the essence of segmentation and targeting focus. With the Pepsi story “There was no such thing as the perfect Pepsi. There are only perfect Pepsis”, Gladwell delivered the key point that no product can be all things to all customers. Since people’s preferences group into multiple clusters, there is no perfect product for everyone. So instead of creating for one perfect product for everyone, we should focus on creating perfect product for the targeted cluster.
Another key point I learned from the Gladwell video is that people do not always know what they want. So we need to show them what they want to satisfy the unmet need. As he pointed out in the video, it is only when people got introduced to chunky spaghetti sauce did they realized their need of chunky spaghetti sauce. This concept is similar to what Bezo presented in his talk that one of marketing’s roles is to invent on behalf of the consumer. Just like the chunky spaghetti sauce, people do not realize their need of kindle until they see it.
When my company started working with the railroads to develop the train communication system, our customers did not know what they want either. What we did is getting together with the railroads and gathering information about their operation. After understanding our customers, we can then invent on their behalf. We created a train communication system solution and presented a proof-of-concept to the railroad customers. Once they saw our proposed system, they realized that it is exactly what they want and they funded my company to develop the system.
I just got asked to think about potential future projects and start developing a business case for each potential future project. The SWOT analysis was completed. The next step is to understand market and customers. We still focus on railroads and we are developing a marketing research plan to gain better understanding of railroad customers. Both ethnographic and online research will be employed. The railroad customers cannot always articulate what they want in a product. So we are going to get together with the railroad customers and learn more about their operation to detect their expectations and be able to invent new products for them.
For my marketing plan of alternative fuel vehicles, I use secondary research as a starting point for situation analysis. Team 1 has done a great job in data collection and sharing information within our consulting group. We use the visual display of data such as graphic map and pie chart to create insights to our client.
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