Strategy and Planning
Today, the most successful marketing strategies are those which evolve and adapt to meet new developing markets and changing customer trends. Too many marketing agencies have been left floundering as the environment they're used to operating in has already moved on. It's time for RA-360 to step in.
New opportunities and threats are emerging day by day. So our strategy and planning capabilities are tuned towards giving you a competitive edge in today's changing marketplace. First, using our proprietary process we'll go to work understanding your business, like you understand your business. We'll pinpoint exactly what your product/service means to your consumers. We'll discover why they do what they do and what they think about your competition.
By seeing the world through your consumer's eyes, we'll gain invaluable insight into your position within the market place. We can then devise a powerful strategy that specifically addresses your particular needs. Remember, it's simply not enough that you have a service or product to offer. There is a need to go much further to look at trends, pricing and regulations. All these things can be exploited by your brand.
Throughout the entire process, we'll make sure your marketing planning never stumbles or falls. We'll guide you all the way, hold your hand through the soul searching, steer you through your competitor analysis and remain totally objective. Finally, we're here to guide you through the multitude of tactics available to you to ensure you spend your money wisely and secure optimum return on your investment. It's why working with RA-360 is the best strategy of all.
Five Ways You Can Tell If Market Research Is Any Good
Just as senior managers need not be accountants to understand the principles and lessons of the profit-and-loss statement, balance sheet, and cash-flow budget, neither do they need to be statisticians to understand the principles and lessons of fact-based market research.
The principles for any valid, replicable, projectable market research study are the same.
- Survey a population that represents the total universe as defined by the company. Whether your market is women who might be interested in a new health club, food-store decision makers responsible for shopping carts, or homemakers who buy ground coffee, ensure that your sample represents the population. For example, an internet survey that is not weighted to control for bias is not representative of any population other than people willing to participate in internet surveys. It understates the proportion of the market who are not connected (i.e., minorities) and people who have neither the time nor the interest in cooperating with survey researchers (i.e., busy executives, hassled moms, professionals in general). In such cases, you must take care to recruit these underrepresented groups into the study and to weight different types of buyers into their correct proportions in the population.
- Sample enough people within this universe so that their responses are reasonably stable. Interview 500, for example, and any percentage that you get is stable plus or minus about 5 percent. Interview only 50 people, and the wobble in your data increases to a point at which it is relatively unusable. This is particularly important when you are looking to break down your total sample into subgroups such as users versus nonusers, men versus women, high income versus low income, and the like.
- Test the questionnaire to ensure that respondents understand what is being asked and are not being prompted to answer one way or another. This is called pretesting and is something that is becoming more and more rare in marketing research studies.
- Conduct experiments within your survey wherever it makes sense. Expose half the sample to one new product concept, the other half to another. Show respondents three different price levels. Expose people to four different positionings.
- Analyze the responses in a way that makes logical sense. Don't confuse correlation with causation; just because one thing is related to another does not mean that the first caused the second.