How do we get our VP Marketing to use market research?

Q: Our marketing department is headed by a VP who used to be a finance director. There are two of us hired just a year ago as brand managers. We were recruited fresh from college where we were marketing majors and “cum laude” graduates. The high pay was the main attraction and the recruiting HRD’s words telling us that “there’s more to learn working in a local company than in a foreign one.” The company supported its promise of more learning by sending us to your AMR (Applied Marketing Research) seminar, and to your Brand Positioning seminar. That was just two months after we started working.

Our question is about what has already happened twice.  We had mid last year an advertising post-test.  The results clearly told us what to change in the ad message and where to shift our ad media budget.  But our Marketing decided to maintain the post-tested ad campaign.  The other market research was completed early this year and was about a product test on a new product.  The test showed that Marketing needed to get the product improved on one feature that was a weakness and to add a new feature that consumers looked for but did not find in the new product.  Instead of doing the recommended improvement and adding the missing new feature, our VP Marketing    instructed our ad agency to instead develop an ad campaign focusing on the features rated as the product’s perceived strength.

We just learned that the post-tested ad campaign failed in attaining its effectiveness numbers.  We don’t know what will happen to the new product but again based on what we learned from your AMR seminar, we are ready to predict that this too will most likely fail.  We feel frustrated and plan to e-mail our VP Marketing to whom we directly report to start using our market research data, results and specific recommendations.  Please give us some tips about how we should go about getting our VP Marketing to start using our market research.

A:  We are familiar with your “frustrating” experience.  But please realize that what’s frustrating to one manager may be inspiring to another.  So let’s see if there’s enough reality to your “frustration” to warrant your e-mailing your VP Marketing.  Learn more about why he’d rather rely on his past experience than in using market research in, for example, deciding to continue with his ad campaign or in launching his new product intro.

We start from your VP Marketing’s perspective.  From what you’ve said about his two choices, he looks like he knows what he’s doing.  We cannot say that he’s not using the market research data and findings because they are rather generic in character.  You yourself said that the research results were “clear and specific” about what ad message and ad media investment to change.  The product test results were just as “clear and specific” about what to improve and what to add to the new product before launching.

So it seems that your VP Marketing knew what exactly he was giving up when he chose not to listen to those research-based insights and instead to proceed according to what he learned from his past “successful” experiences.  Unfortunately, he also chose not to share or may be simply forgot to share with you the “wisdom” from those past experiences.  But we do not believe he even thinks that such sharing is part of what he regards as his responsibility to the brand people reporting to him.  It’s his chosen leadership style that past victories had probably reinforced.

We’re also reminded about something similar that happened to one of our AMR seminar alumni who reported this.  This “alumnus” got so enthusiastic about all the “new” lessons about market research utilization that when he got back to the office he started “correcting” all the “wrong” things that his marketing colleagues and even his boss were doing or not doing about market research.  His “old” boss got so peeved with his “know-it-all” corrections that one day, he pulled him aside and said in a voice heard by everyone: “Just because you attended an expensive one-day Applied Marketing Research seminar, you think you know everything?  Tell us, is what you learned to correct that superior to what my 36 years of successful experience says should be done?”  So, try to learn first what specific past experience is your VP Marketing using in each of his two choices and weigh that against what market research is saying.

Now, we shift to the two market research studies. Your assumptions are that they were both correctly designed, conducted and analyzed.  Learn to challenge these assumptions.  For example, did the “effectiveness numbers”  of the ad post-test include the ad message’s “word-of-mouth” value-added?  As you know from the AMR seminar you attended, most TV commercials succeeded in their audience reach and persuasion not because of the power of TV but because of the word-of-mouth “pay-off” that came after the TV viewers’ ad exposure.  If your ad effectiveness numbers did not include this metric, then perhaps the failed ad was because of this research deficiency.  This is just one of the many research decisions to validate.  Check with your AMR seminar manual for the others.

You ought to perform a similar challenging-of-assumptions routine with the product test data and findings.  Remember the lessons you learned in the AMR seminar about what went wrong with the product test of the “New Coke” when the then Coca-Cola CEO wanted to introduce it to replace the classic Coke in celebrating the brand’s 100th year anniversary?  We’ve also written a previous column on that classic case.

So overall, there are some rethinking you should do.  Rethink your intention and its basis.  There were two sides to reconsider.  In each, you need to challenge your basic assumptions.  So challenge them in the way we’ve explained.  Only when you deeply understand the two sides to your question and weighed their respective pros and cons, only then you decide on e-mailing your VP Marketing.

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!