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

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.

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