Listen to me! Part 2

Larry Bodine and I published an article on measuring the effectiveness of branding ("Branding: Let's Not get Fooled Again!") (Download smps_marketer_june_06_research_.pdf) in the June issue of the Society for Marketing Professional Services magazine, Marketer. 

One of our readers, Bruce asked:  "How does listening to the client get manifested in a way that is objective, fact based, and produces tangible outcomes?" 

The first part of the answer involves having skills in qualitative research.  People can be trained to find and analyze critical themes in qualitative research that, if outlined and agreed upon amongst a group of qualitative analysts, can then be turned into an objective, fact-based analysis.

I’ll give you an example of how this is done. For our 2006 study “Increasing Marketing Effectiveness in Professional Firms,” we asked the open-ended question, “What are your measurement approaches?”  For our first review of the answers, we looked for and grouped common themes. My statistician and I reviewed those common themes, and found that they fell into seven categories.  (This kind of collaborative analysis increases the possibility of objectivity).

From there, we reviewed the open-ended answers again, and assigned numbers from one through seven to each open-ended answer.  When we were done, we were able to see the relative frequency of use amongst each of the seven categories. From there, we were able to cross reference these 1-through-7 numbers with a whole host of other open-ended questions, some of which were also assigned objectively-based numbers. With this kind of analysis, we were able to correlate “competitive effectiveness” with the kinds of measurement tools being used.

I realize this may sound somewhat pointy-headed. It’s actually not that difficult, and I’ve seen an increasing number of professional service marketers using qualitative research and analysis to achieve more objectivity and more factual bases for making strategic decisions.

As for the “produces tangible outcomes” issue, this also perhaps requires a longer answer, but I’ll give it a try: I encourage professional service firms, when asking clients for feedback or perceptions, not to simply ask an opinion-oriented question.

Instead, client-listening initiatives should be pre-screened for their ability to tell the company what it should “do” next!  For example, why would it be important to ask a client what his perceptions might be of your firm, when there is no possible change you might make as a result of learning the information?  Instead, wouldn’t it make sense to ask clients a perception-oriented question whose answer gives you guidance on an activity that you can take next?

Too many professional service firms embark on client-listening initiatives, and pat themselves on the back for doing so, only to find out later that the client was hoping they would do something differently after answering the questions.  I think client listening is entirely too static in today’s professional service firms.  The “tangible outcomes” should be built-in to the listening activities from the beginning!

To learn more about the qualitative, motivational research techniques, take a look at the following link:  http://www.qrca.org/whatis_QR.asp, which might help you learn more.