Wordsworth & Company
  • Home
  • Approach
    • Defining
    • Differentiating
    • Creating >
      • Creating... in detail
      • Content
    • Integrating
    • Stretching
    • Maintaining
  • Successes
    • Ads
    • Broadcast
    • Direct
    • Web
  • Contact
  • About
    • Blog
    • Clients
thoughts that come
out of our minds

Marketing Research Is Not Customer Research...and Why It Must Be

6/8/2015

1 Comment

 
Averages are horrible things. They smooth out both the highs and lows, make everything look like the middle, and tend to make it all seem homogeneous. That’s never the case. And it’s especially not the case when doing marketing.

Who’s Really Who
Today, one among many hot things is personas – biographies of people who don’t really exist.
  • The stay-at-home mom who has two kids involved in afterschool activities and spends her days doing yoga and laundry while managing the housekeeper, gardener, and volunteering as a docent at the local museum.
  • The middle manager who’s recently married and wants to find more effective ways to handle his work tasks in order to get home and spend time with his new bride, do his assignments for his online MBA, ride his ATV on weekends, and watch football on his 55” 4G TV.
If only. That’s the kind of picture that emerges from market research. Taken to extremes, those imaginary portraits might also tap into aspirations, political leanings, risk tolerance, and multiple other criteria that, really...mean nothing (or close to it).

The other latest-best-shiniest-thing is Big Data which, for reasons unknown, is always capitalized. But searching through an infinite number of variables to find patterns one wants to find is very (very) different than applying fuzzy logic to discover relationships you never considered. Yet whether that’s useful in marketing, rather than in fraud detection or medical research or cybersecurity, is uncertain.

​READ MORE

1 Comment

    Author

    We don't make things irresistible in a vacuum. We follow the same advice that we give to our clients.

    Archives

    February 2021
    June 2018
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    January 2014
    July 2013
    April 2010

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Wordsworth Logo
Copyright   ©2016, 2020    Wordsworth & Company
All rights reserved  |  Santa Monica, California
info@wordsworthandco.com    310.452.1022

  • Home
  • Approach
    • Defining
    • Differentiating
    • Creating >
      • Creating... in detail
      • Content
    • Integrating
    • Stretching
    • Maintaining
  • Successes
    • Ads
    • Broadcast
    • Direct
    • Web
  • Contact
  • About
    • Blog
    • Clients