Why does your marketing plan fail?

For marketers, is creativity more important or is the real market more important? When answering this kind of question we cannot fall into either-or thinking.

When a brand's market, user mental awareness, marketing investment, brand image moat, etc. are relatively mature and stable, the creativity of marketers is more important than market research. For example, Durex is a typical example. The copywriting is always innovating, which is of course in line with its user groups and industry needs.

On the contrary, when the brand's market positioning, users' mental cognition, brand image, etc. are relatively vague and blank, the real market is much more important than the marketers' creativity. The market is waiting for us to discover it. Sometimes a discovery can leverage most of or even the entire market.

However, every enterprise is a process from 0 to 1, and any enterprise develops from immaturity to maturity. Therefore, research is a must, and marketing starts with research.

For a company to go from 0 to 1, understand the market, and discover the market, is the only way to do research? Cultural people think so.

However, many companies do not care about research at all, and do not try to understand and respect the market. The reason is that they do not understand research.

What are the specific roles of research? How to design a survey questionnaire? How to conduct implementation research? Don’t be impatient, let’s go through them one by one.

1. The role of research

Research can achieve the following effects efficiently, cheaply and quickly:

1. Fully understand users and give them opportunities to express themselves

There is a famous saying in Western philosophy that "Man is the measure of all things", and there is a similar saying in China that "Man is the spirit of all things". Both of them, to a certain extent, indicate that people are very subjective. Of course, we will not discuss specific philosophical issues in depth.

During the entire consumption process in which consumers understand and come into contact with a company, they will definitely have some or more personal subjective opinions and suggestions about the company.

It would be fine if consumers would repurchase your products. However, if consumers will never consider or choose your business again for some reason, we will forever lose an opportunity to improve our business if we do not conduct research.

For example, in the management of an enterprise, whether it is front-line staff or middle and senior management personnel, in their daily work, they will definitely have their own ideas about the specific work content and problems arising from the work, or suggestions on the enterprise management process and operating process. If a mechanism is not established for employees to express and make suggestions, these good ideas and suggestions will largely rot in the employees' stomachs.

Consumers will make repeat purchases, and through research we can understand what attracts them to the company... In short, through research we can fully understand the consumer's user profile, needs and cognition, the entire consumption process, and personal subjective ideas.

2. Support marketing decisions

Once you have a clear understanding of your users, it will be much clearer and more accurate when you formulate a marketing plan . At least it will be more accurate than just thinking about it while sitting in the office .

The survey data will support the company's decision-making on consumer core needs, cognition and corporate market positioning, and achieve true on-demand production rather than random production . After determining these, product design, publicity and promotion can form a unified and integrated marketing behavior around them.

For example, after Mr. Xiaoma Song decided that Yun Gengwu would adopt the strategy of "real brown sugar, real warmth", its packaging design, spokesperson, and online channel promotion all made breakthroughs around this point and established the brand. The same is true for Mr. Wang Chao’s six walnuts marketing plan.

3. Improve management and data collection

Many times, the execution of a marketing plan is much more important than its formulation. The survey is not limited to external personnel of the company. For internal employees of the company, internal surveys on corporate management and understanding of users can also be conducted.

1. It can help companies improve their own management, enable senior and middle-level managers to better understand front-line employees, and provide employees with a stage to perform and give full play to their abilities, thereby gaining strong support from employees when implementing marketing plans.

2. The accuracy of research on consumer groups can be verified from the perspective of internal employees’ understanding of consumers. The data obtained from internal employees and external consumers will complement each other, making the data more accurate and in line with the facts.

Another point is that it is very difficult for non-Internet companies to collect data. User research can solve this problem efficiently and at a low cost. Then we can think of ways to connect the entire consumption process from front-end to back-end, and the online data registration, analysis, and processing of the business operation process.

Although research has so many benefits, different research questions and research methods may bring completely different results. In order to ensure that everyone can conduct a successful survey and avoid pitfalls, let’s talk about how to design consumer survey questionnaires and corporate employee survey questionnaires respectively.

2. Design of consumer survey questionnaire

The design of the questionnaire is the soul of the survey. A good questionnaire can guide consumers to answer questions step by step, dispel their concerns and aversions, express their true feelings, and grasp key market information.

We should ask questions in the following aspects and do the following in terms of the way we ask questions:

1. Basic user information

The user’s basic information mainly includes: name, phone number, WeChat contact information, age group, occupation and income level, and approximate address.

When we do research, do we need to obtain all the basic information of users?

uncertain. The collection and acquisition of some information is of no help to the company in understanding and knowing the users. Instead, it may disgust consumers and increase research obstacles.

For example, in the retail and catering industries, the user groups are the general public. When we do basic information research, we ask users about their occupational income levels, but this is of no use in making decisions about marketing plans. Who can't afford a meal that costs several hundred dollars? People will be disgusted if you ask about their income.

On the contrary, we can focus on asking the customer's approximate residential address. It does not need to be very precise, as long as we know roughly which community and street it is.

Because the concept of business district is very important for retail and catering, by knowing the address distribution of users, we can know how large the radiation range of our business district is, whether there is a concentration of users, and if so, why this phenomenon occurs? This can be further understood in subsequent interviews and surveys with users.

In short, when it comes to basic information, we need to think clearly about which information is important to us, relatively important, and dispensable.

Another point is that when asking for WeChat contact information and adding WeChat, you can directly set up an option to indicate whether it is inconvenient for the other party to add you on WeChat, because the author personally believes that there are several advantages:

1. It will not cause resentment among customers who are suddenly added on WeChat later.

2. Test the proportion of consumers who are interested in the company, because those who are willing to add WeChat mean that they want to learn more about the company's dynamics in the future, which proves that they want to conduct a second or multiple transactions. Those who are unwilling to leave their WeChat accounts probably do not want to know about the company’s subsequent developments, because the company has nothing to do with them anymore.

2. User consumption habits

The user's consumption habits include the following information: consumption frequency, types of consumer products in similar categories (for example, the beverage category can understand what consumers often like to drink, such as milk tea, coffee, etc.), consumption places of the same category, and further understanding of what consumers think is good about the previous consumption places, and what consumers worry about when making such consumption.

Many companies have concerns about the market after developing their products, such as whether consumers will be interested in purchasing, how many times they will consume, and what the profit level will be.

So we started to conduct research and designed questions like "What do you think of this product?", "Do you like this product format?", "What do you think of the taste?"...

How should consumers answer this kind of question? The fundamental idea is wrong!

If you want to know the above information, you should not ask consumers directly. After all, consumers are not professionals and cannot give accurate answers.

We can understand the consumption of similar categories or the same category through consumers' previous consumption habits, so as to determine and improve our own products. This will be much more accurate. After all, these are existing facts and we should seek truth from facts.

For example, how often do you usually make this kind of purchase? Have a deep understanding of the scenarios in which consumers make this kind of consumption? In this way, you can understand the frequency and scenarios of consumption; where did you like to go for this kind of consumption before? What are the reasons and causes? What is the attraction? In this way, we can understand the competitive situation, which includes competitor pricing information; finally, when making this kind of consumption, what are the consumers’ concerns, or where did they have bad experiences before? This way we can understand where consumers’ pain points are.

3. Consumer source information and consumption scenarios

As the title states, consumer source information mainly focuses on understanding how consumers know about our company's products. Many surveys do take this step, but they stop after this step.

We can dig deeper and after understanding us, we can find out why consumers choose to consume and what their motivations and circumstances are!

Of course we can’t ask this directly as it is too vague and difficult for consumers to answer.

We can make the questions more specific, such as the consumption scenario, in what scenario did you choose to buy our product after learning about it.

At this point, let’s briefly summarize a principle of research questionnaires: make it as specific and concrete as possible, and dig deeper step by step through conversation.

4. Consumption process and suggestions

The consumption process and suggestions mainly include: the consumer’s first impression when entering the store, which consumer products are selected, and what product recommendations are given.

Continuing with the above principles, we cannot directly ask consumers such questions as they are too vague and difficult to answer. We can make them more specific and substantial.

For example, compared with *** store, what do you think is better or worse about our store than it? What are the differences between our store and the ones you usually use and what you expect?

As for suggestions, we can start from two perspectives. One is to put the changes we want to make to the company into the test to test the reaction of consumers. The other is to make suggestions on specific processes and products.

For example, what do you think if we add a discount mechanism for long waiting time? Or how do you think a certain product will be more in line with your habits?

That’s about all we have to say about the design of consumer survey questionnaires. It is very embarrassing for intellectuals to "teach you how to do things". If you want professionals to do professional things, please feel free to contact the author. (Advertise for yourself)

3. Design of the Questionnaire for Enterprise Employee Survey

After designing the questionnaire for consumers, you can design the questionnaire for corporate employees from two aspects:

1. Consumers and employees

The people who have the most contact with consumers must be front-line employees. They understand consumers relatively well.

We can use this to indirectly understand the consumer's basic information and consumption process recommendations.

For example, ask the store clerk about the consumer's clothing and age group in terms of basic information. In terms of the consumption process, what questions do consumers generally ask store clerks? What are the more notable behaviors during the consumption process? Will consumers chat about things related to the company? If so, what are they chatting about?

It is better to stick to the general principles, make the problems specific and substantial, dig deep into the problems, and start from the contact between employees and consumers.

It should be noted that when conducting surveys on employees, one cannot obtain their basic information and the survey should be anonymous so as to allay their concerns.

2. Enterprises and employees

In addition to understanding and confirming consumers from employees’ mouths, you can also give employees opportunities to express themselves.

We can continue with the above questions and ask employees to come up with their own solutions and suggestions regarding consumption processes and consumer problems. It may be better than you think, and it can help employees realize themselves and stabilize the morale of the troops.

And let employees express their suggestions on leadership style, management communication methods, working hours and content, and salary and benefits, of course all of this is anonymous.

Only when the bosses and companies respect their employees will the employees respect their bosses and companies . In this way, I believe that everyone will work together, and we will achieve very good results in the implementation of subsequent marketing plans, the cultivation and shaping of corporate culture, and the retention of new employees.

4. Implementation of the Survey

Note that our title is the implementation of the survey, not the implementation of the survey questionnaire. Because there are definitely more than one way to conduct research, but the questionnaire is the main form, and the question items and methods on the questionnaire can be shared.

1. Implementation of the survey questionnaire

There are two main ways to implement consumer survey questionnaires: asking in-store users to fill it out and pushing it online for users to fill out.

You can ask consumers to fill out a questionnaire when they enter the store by designing a low-cost surprise for them. Then ask them to fill out a questionnaire and they will give you a product.

In this way, you can first establish a good first impression and build good psychological expectations. Then, during the user's consumption process, find the right time to ask the user to help fill out the questionnaire. This can also lay the groundwork for the next face-to-face interview by saying that if you select consumers who fill out the questionnaire well, you will give them a certain amount of free food.

In this way, the whole process is more complete and consistent.

The main ways to push survey questionnaires online are through public accounts or in consumer groups. Of course, the overall idea is similar to the on-site questionnaire. If you want consumers to actively and quickly participate, the most effective way is to offer discounts, which can not only stimulate next consumption, but also conduct quick research. Of course, some people will fill out questionnaires even if you don't give them anything, but it's inefficient.

For the employee survey questionnaire, choose a time when you are not busy and have the employees fill it out without affecting their work.

2. On-site observation and research

In the fourth aspect of user questionnaire design, we wrote about consumption processes and suggestions. In the process, it is difficult for the questionnaire to reflect all the details of the entire process .

Because consumers may only remember the things that impressed them the most, and some details or things that consumers don’t even know they care about will be ignored, and this process is precisely the most important.

Therefore, we need to observe on-site. Using the example in “Super Symbols Are Super Creativity”, we need to observe every consumption action of consumers in the entire consumption process, which will give us a deeper understanding of consumers’ consumption behavior.

Taking the example of the Joyoung rice cooker, Joyoung product staff went to the site and observed that when consumers were choosing rice cookers, they would take out the inner pot of the rice cooker, weigh it in their hands and then put it back.

Subsequent inquiries revealed that consumers believed that a heavy inner pot was a sign of good quality of the rice cooker. So Joyoung designed an electric rice cooker with an inner pot weighing 1,550 grams, and a hit product was born. (This case comes from the official account: I'll try again Zhou Dave - Like Luo Yonghao, 90% of marketing is doomed to fail from the beginning of research)

Observe the scene carefully, take notes, and keep them for easy questioning during the next interview. If it is really urgent, you can also ask directly at the appropriate time.

3. Face-to-face interviews and research

After conducting a large number of questionnaire surveys and on-site observations, marketers will have more in-depth questions and creative solutions based on the data.

At this time, you can optimize and adjust the questionnaire questions. On the other hand, consumers can be directly selected for face-to-face interviews.

When interviewing consumers face to face, there are several key points:

1. Careful screening: Screen suitable consumers who can be helpful and inspiring to the marketing plan based on the user’s basic information, consumption habits, suggestions and other answers.

2. Telephone invitation: Invite consumers to a location for a face-to-face interview. The invitation script is "Dear ***, we are **. Do you remember that you filled out a consumption questionnaire with us last time?" "Congratulations. Because of your valuable suggestions, we now invite you to our store to enjoy ***'s free bill. By the way, we have some questions to ask you, just like last time, very quickly." This not only meets the consumers' material needs, but also achieves their spiritual satisfaction and respect for their personality.

3. In-store interview: After arriving at the store, greet each other, arrange the interview, ask questions, listen carefully and take notes, and then release the next steps for the company appropriately to see their reactions and suggestions.

This completes the survey.

■ Over■

Conclusion

Research is a long process of execution, optimization and testing. It’s not like there’s nothing to do once the questionnaire is created or the survey is completed.

We must always keep an eye on and pay attention to consumers, and conduct research when consumer demands, trends, and cognitions change or when new competitors emerge. As 7-Eleven founder Toshifumi Suzuki said, "The real competitor is the ever-changing user demands."

Author: Chen Wei

Source: Marketing Culture