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Little Focus Group of Horrors – Tales from the Dark Side of Marketing
(The names have been changed to protect the innocent.)
Over the past couple months an enterprise software vendor has been running a series of blind focus groups designed to ascertain what the market view of their products really is. They’ve gone the full monty on it, with one way glass mirrors, professional moderators, and have worked with a truly representative cross section of consumers, not just their own customers.
Prior to the focus group, this company considered themselves top in the industry, in terms of technology, in terms or market perception, and in terms of customer support. They walked tall, chests puffed out proudly.
Unfortunately, that isn’t what the focus groups (and there were many across the country) told them. Universally they heard their brand associated with words like “second tier,” “outdated technology” and “poor customer service.”
This was truly heart wrenching stuff, which echos completely across the organization, not just in the marketing department, but through the produt teams, technology, customer support and especially in the halls of upper management.
One telling statistic came through: when ranking products, one competitor continually came up on top, especially in terms of technology where they were ranked as heads and tails above all others. That competitors product? A white label version of the vendors application, the same exact software that the groups had also tagged as “outdated technology.” Calling all the results into question.
The lessons here are legion:
- You need to do blind focus groups to guage market opinion – talking to your customer base alone will give you warped view of the world. Typically, someone says “let’s talk to the customers” so they get all the sales people to give them contacts. The problem is those contacts represent the most tame of the existing customer base, and also they represent exactly the people who have a vested professional interest in your product. Yesterday I wrote about Branded Communities, and this is yet another reason they don’t make sense for focus groups, as you will only hear from the people who are proponents of your product
- This is really Opinion Research – opinions stink and everyone has one. The problem is that no one in your market is going to be a real expert on all the products, especially when it comes to enterprise software. So when asked, they fall back on guesses, what they remember from that 10 minute demo at the tradeshow 2 years ago (which isn’t much, although they do remember that hangover, which was truly epic).
- A blind focus group is a loaded gun – you can expect your going to hear some very bad things. Your baby is ugly. Remember that you’re seeing a cross section of the market, which is going to be a warts and all experience. You’d probably do best to throw out the best 10% as well as the worst 10% of views just to get a more realistic view. The problem is, at some point your CEO will be looking at this research, and they have notoriously thin skins when it comes to hearing about problems.
Personally, I think that the fact that the same bit of software was listed at the bottom and the top of the solutions in this vertical speaks to an obvious marketing problem with this vendor. If their competitor can sell it as “the best of the breed” then why would their own customers think it is outdated?
Okay, question for the masses: Have you done a blind focus group? Would you consider doing one? How would you deal with the message these guys got?
Tags: focus group
Branded Community or Sponsoring Niche Communities
Paul Gillin posted on a topic 
I’ve been mulling over for the past few days: Branded Communities. I’ve said it in the past and I will say it again here and now: why would you buy a build a branded community when you can rent one instead?
From Gillin’s post:
Pssst… is intended to bring fans of General Mills products closer to the company by inviting them into a members-only space where they can receive inside information, get coupons and samples and share their opinions about the company’s products. This is all the stuff that I preach organizations should do with branded communities. The site is produced in collaboration withGlobalPark, a company that manages online panels.
Pssst… is good in concept but bad in execution.
David Churbuck posted on the issue and asked one very pointed question:
Begs the question of who does a decent job with a branded community — aside from the usual product support forums, etc. — I can see some reasons for stumbling, but begs the question: who joins a community about bad yogurt?
The classic example would be Nike+ – where they’ve built a fairly successful brand community. However, I think a yogurt community might be a tough sell.
That said, building a branded community is a daunting task. Potential issues:
- Time to Market - do you have time for a 6-9 month dev cycle?
- Core Competency – do you have people who can actually build and manage a community?
- Expense - do you have a budget to build, and even more importantly, a budget to maintain a community?
At NameMedia, I work with Niche Community Sites, and we’ve been coming up with interesting ways to put companies and their brands in touch with the customers they want to reach, and we’ve got some compelling stories about new and innovative ways in which we’re doing this. A couple brief examples:
- Brother Sewing Machines is reaching young crafters, the absolute gold standard demographic for them, at Craftster.org – here is an example of them working with the community.
- Dynamite Plant Food is reaching master gardeners on DavesGarden.com and they’ve had a lot of success in gaining market share against their bigger competitor.
- Random House Publishing is putting craft book authors in direct touch with crafters at Craftster.org - see them in action here. (David Churbuck will recognize that as shades of our old “Ask the Authors” forum on Reel-Time.com.
It took Nike over 2 years to build their community. We were able to get the Brother campaign up and running over night on Craftster.org.
Okay, this isn’t meant to end up sounding like an ad. My point is that you can get real results fast working with Niche Communities and Niche Social Media. While I’d love to tell you that NameMedia has the market cornered on creative sponsorship, there are a lot of other creative folks out there.
Or course, we’ve got 20 million visits a month, over 30,000 conversations a day across our sites, in niches like outdoors, photography, technology, gardening, crafting, and astrology. Our list of sites.
If you’d like to hear more about the creative campaigns we’re doing, get in touch with me or leave a comment here. I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg and there are probably better folks than me to tell the story.
Tags: Branded Communities, Brother, Craftster.org, DavesGarden.com, niche communities, niche social network
10 Dec 08 | Community Building, Online Media, Publishing Technology, Social Networking, Web 2.0, marketing | Comments (0)New Journalism in Action – Using Twitter as a Photoblog with the Iphone
The idea: to run a live Tweet stream from the varied events of the Sutton, Ma Chain of Lights, a celebration that happens at many different locations thoughout the town and its villages. I used my Iphone with the Twitterlator Application that lets me post pictures direct to Twitter with pictures that I take on my phone uploaded right at that moment. The tweets all contain the hashtag #suttoncol – short for Sutton Chain of Lights which make them searchable via the Twitter search function, formerly known as Summize. You can check out the full tweet stream here.
Additionally we (my 9 year old daughter Mackenzie helped me with this) took photos at the events we attended with my Canon Power Shot A530 5 megapixel point and shoot camera.
Why Would You Bother: Sutton, like many small communities, doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the local paper, The Worcester Telegram, and substantially less from the television stations. Even if they did send someone out to cover the events, they’d have gone to a single location, took a quick couple pictures, or did a quick standup talking to some happy kids, then they’d have been off to their next assignment. Local events are naturals for crowd sourcing, and what better way to do it than live tweeting with a hashtag, posting a photo gallery, etc.
When I sat down last week to add pictures to the National Gallery and Gift Shop site to help publicize the event, I was surprised to find there were no pictures online anywhere from the Chain of Lights last year, save a few marketing shots by The Vaillancourt Folk Art Museum. (more…)
Tags: chain of lights, microblogging, New Journalism, Photo Microblogging, Sutton Chain of Lights, Sutton Ma, twitter
08 Dec 08 | Blogging, Community Building, Online Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, marketing | Comments (6)Experiments in New Journalism – Live Tweeting the Sutton Chain of Lights Festival
I’ll be live tweeting today from the various events of the Sutton Chain of Lights celebration, in Sutton, Massachusetts. You can find my tweets at http://www.twitter.com/mncahill or by searching in Twitter for the #suttoncol hash tag.
My tweets throughout the day will include pictures of the event via my Iphone, and later today I’ll up load a photo gallery of the pictures. If your out and about in Sutton, I encourage you to tweet using the same hashtag and I’d be happy to put your photos into the photo gallery I post later.
I you aren’t tweeting and just want to catch up, I plan to be that the National Gallery and Gift Shop on Putnam Hill Road at 1pm.
Tags: chain of lights, Manchaug, Sutton, Sutton Chain of Lights
The Dour Marketer – Churbuck.com
The Dour Marketer | Churbuck.com.
David nails it. Marketing is changing fast, and it’s all about the ROI.
With those markets off 40% from their highs in the fall of 2007, marketers are also feeling very dour right now, and despite feeble exhortations that now is the time to double down and crush the competition, all signs are in place for a major flattening and decline in global marketing programs from advertising to PR. It is an article of faith that one of the first expense items to get whacked in a downturn is marketing and other corporate services perceived as “soft” and nice-to-have versus essential to make payroll and keep the lights on.
Some marketing activities will survive and continue through these hard times, and I believe it will be the newest techniques and tactics which endure thanks to the simple fact that they can be measured so well. These are the days when every dollar or Euro spent on marketing has to defend itself from that king tyrant Le ROI.
David gives us a real world view. Not the airline magazine version, but the “been backwards and forwards through the numbers a thousand times looking for nickels and finding pennies” view. Then from there, he offers real advice, and even better a commitment to providing more info going forward. For now, his advice for a couple zero cost marketing wins:
- Open a blog. WordPress.com. Stop. Go no further. Go there. Open a blog. Go battle with your PR and legal teams and before you visit them do a quick Google search for “corporate blog policy” and print out one of the many policies held up as classics by the experts. Do a search and replace and put your organization’s name in the appropriate places. Get permission. Start blogging. Cost: zero.
- Monitor what other blogs say about your organization. Google Blog Search. Technorati. An RSS reader. Google Reader. Bloglines. Whatever. Learn them. Set up RSS search feeds on your brand names and start reading. “Engaging” with bloggers? Google search on the topic. There’s more advice out there than a herd of consultants could impart for a fee in a year. Cost: zero.
How to Market in a Crisis « Magnosticism
How to Market in a Crisis « Magnosticism.
Rob O’Regan discusses how you market when things have gone bad…like AIG bad…with a random survey of the Investment Bankers websites.
I won’t ruin it for you. Go over there and read his piece and you’ll understand why he’s my go to for real marketing information.
Post Olympics Reviews from Lenovo
When a project ends, good companies do post-mortems to determine what worked, what didn’t to help them improve institutionally, while identifying possible opportunities created, and mitigating any risks exposed. Great companies do this and they do it in a way that the rest of us can benefit as well. Such is the case of two excellent post Olympics assessments from Lenovo.
Esteban Panzeri
First off, I’ve got to call attention to Esteban Panzeri’ post “End of Madness Recap” from his blog, “The Challenge”. Since I spend a lot of time in the trenches shoveling bits and bytes around, I naturally gravitate to the folks that turn the dreams into reality, and on this project, Esteban was apparently the guy.
He comes up with an excellent list of lessons learned and among them:
- Ideas will flow like rivers, it is execution that matters
- One must learn to focus and discard things quickly
- Anything can be done
- Outsourced stuff does not always work as it should
- Distributed content is the future
“Ideas will flow like rivers, it is execution that matters” – a line I am printing out in 72 point type to hang in my office. Yes, indeed, ideas are important and without them, there is no innovation, but too many of us forget that at some point we need to stop talking a start doing. Only a select few ever truly learn this lesson. (more…)
Tags: david churbuck, Esteban Panzeri, lenovo, new marketing, olympics
Mid-lining: Why Shooting for “OK” Gives You Incredible Results
We can’t be great at everything. If the need for excellence is getting in your way of trying, then lower your expectations. At least then, you try, and sometimes trying is enough.
A very thought provoking post. Utterly contrary to most of what you read, but has the ring of truth, and borne out by experience.
Fearless Marketing Tactic: Wear A Black Cocktail Dress
Jay Ehret comes through with another awesome post: Fearless Marketing Tactic: Wear A Black Cocktail Dress
The little black dress may work for some, but you’ve got to have the right feature set. I don’t – I tried it and I was laughed out of the bar.
Think about what the real assets of your product are and how to feature them in the best light and you’ll never be far from wrong.
Why Most Online Communities Fail…
David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“. David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages.
1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great way to get off on the right credibility foot. Worthen does the correction, but …
The point I’d like to make goes more to the point in Churbuck’s piece that will be overlooked – “This is bad research on a tired topic.”
You see, the thing that all of the social media gurus, wannabes, and willneverbes would have us believe is that community is easy. You build it and they will come. The truth is so very far from there that if it was commonly known no marketer in his/her right mind would ever utter the words “let’s build a community, gang!” again.
Sounds harsh? Well, it ought to. There are way to many businesses committing to creating community development without the slightest thought of what the real ramifications of failure are. And even worse, they judge the cost of creating their communities solely on the basis of what the servers, dev costs, etc. will be and routinely devote little or no resources to actually managing and developing that community.
I say it again, more clearly: a community will fail surely if you do not devote experienced people to building and moderating it.
Note that word, people. I don’t say person. And there’s a lot more that goes along with this. There are ton of real, hard costs that you’re going to face in order to make a community successful. Building in these terms isn’t development, it’s people attracting other people to your service, getting them committed, and giving them reasons to stay there. This big myth is that communities build themselves. When done right, it will look like they build themselves, but there’s always someone helping the community get going.
This is where I see companies fall flat on their face time and time again (sorry, not gonna name names here, but I could). They think that assigning a marketing intern to run the site they just poured a million in development and up front costs into, is going to be sufficient. People come in once, if your lucky, look around, realize they’re essentially hanging out in an empty room and leave. Eventually the company folds up shop, does a post mortem, fires the intern and promptly forgets every lesson they should have learned. Then someone chimes in “hey gang, let’s build a user forum and share our brand.” Then the cycle starts all over again.
Most businesses have no business running communities. They want to make “the brand more transparent” and in the end, they hurt the brand by creating a bad user experience that has nothing to do with their actual brand, but through association, it’s now taking the hit.
If you don’t have experts who can show you working communities they’ve built, and if you’re relying on consultants who aren’t cautioning you, you need to be very wary. Personally, I feel the best place to expose the brand to a community is through active sponsorship of existing communities. You don’t need to own it, you get a ton of mileage for your buck, and the positive effects start right away, not a year from now when your development cycle is done.
Think about it…why own a community when you can rent one…
More reading:
Helen Whitehead on Why Do Online Communities Fail? – a well thought out piece with some good advice.
R. Todd Stephens, Phd – making the point that communities struggle when there’s no good business reason to get involved.
C. David Gammel at High Context Consulting on the Three Reasons Branded Online Communities Fail
Update: Tom O’Brien at A Human Voice commented on the Churbuck post with probably the most important note of all “the community vendors were scrambling hard to pull the curtain back up..” Darned straight, they have been scurrying to get the genie back in the bottle. Tom’s own post – “Social Media Madness: Build it & they will come . . .” also puts the lie to to the maxim that brands need to develop communities. As he puts it, the community often already exists, and “increasing brand value” isn’t their goal.
Tags: Ben Worthen, deloitte, media gurus, online communities, online community development, online community failure, wsj
About Us
I'm Mark Cahill - Online community developer and content management wonk since 1995. I'm interested in new media, communities and social networking, and love saltwater fly fishing. For a longer version, you can read my full about us page.
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