Mindlance的动态

Transcript

Hi, my name is Elizabeth Clinard and I am a Director of Insights at Capital One. My team provides more traditional primary research to our organization. So think quantitative methodologies like online surveys, advanced analytics and qualitative approaches like focus groups, one on ones, online communities in home ethnographies, things like that. I have always been a lover of people. I actually came to research from kind of a more non traditional background where I was sort of obsessed with people's stories, how they became who they became, what drove their decision making, which actually sort of trans parlayed perfectly into into market research because that's really what's at the heart of it, the customer and what drives them. There are lots of different research related functions that can live within an organization. I think the the scope of the market research landscape has really expanded, particularly with the advent of human centered design and design thinking. And so there are often you know, design researchers or perhaps more focused on sort of the customer experience and the UX and the UI. There are more traditional market researchers. Like my job function, who may come up through more of an analyst type of background, stats, advanced analytics, etcetera. But some people just have more of a sort of obsession with human behavior and come from a psychology background and end up doing more of a qualitative function where they're talking to customers and consumers day in and day out. Our job as researchers is to obsess over the customer and to bring the customer to the forefront of any kinds of key strategic decision making that's happening within the organization. So it's really a critical tool that every organization, regardless of vertical, should be using to collect deep insight into their target market and into their industry. So I think market research is really critical in terms of helping companies gather insight into things like consumer needs, their attitudes, their behaviors, market sizing. I'd also say it's particularly important in more kind of complex or volatile environments where you have to be keeping a finger on the pulse of of what consumers are feeling and how it might be impacting or shifting their day-to-day decision making. One company that I think is interesting is Peloton, right? Whoever thought that there would be a market for stationary bikes that people rode at home and that they were digitally able to engage with this broad community And then we had completely unexpected COVID, which essentially made Pelotons relevance kind of skyrocket. I think they were able to capitalize on like what their core target needed and felt and even expand their target in that environment because everybody was stuck at home and needed a way to feel connected to a community, needed a way to move their body. And so I think what they've done and cultivated has been really, really interesting. Another really interesting example is products that were born essentially from things that were observed in research. That's part of why I love actually ethnographic research, which if you're not familiar is when you are traveling and going into consumers homes, looking in their pantries, understanding how they do the things that they do, how they shop, how they organize, what their home environments look like, how their needs sort of evolve against the backdrop of the context of their lives. And one great example of product innovation from a methodology like that is Swiffer was actually born out of observation and ethnographic research. So people saw, researchers rather saw that consumers were like folding paper towels over mop type things in order to clean their floor. And so that's where the idea for that product was actually born out of a observation of a consumer behavior and consumer need in the real world. My favorite type of project to work on is actually product innovation. It's really, really exciting to me to build and launch new products because it feels like that is a place where business partners and marketing partners are really dialed into research because they need to deeply understand the target market in order to create something that will meet their needs and I feel super satisfied when I see things in market that have actually launched that I've had a hand in shaping and creating- that is super fulfilling for me. When the consumer voice is not at the heart of your strategic planning and your strategic decision making, I think you're essentially flying blind. How can you build products and marketing that resonate with your target if you don't know what matters to them? And so I think if, if a company doesn't have market research at the heart of their organization, they can end up making ill informed decisions that are kind of based on gut or hypothesis rather than data and insight. So that might look like releasing creative out into the wild that's completely out of touch with your target market. That can obviously lead to issues and PR disasters and things like that. When thinking about introducing market research or building a market research function in your organization, I think it's really important to move beyond sort of the, the What to the So what? So you know, you can do research and you can uncover data points. 56% of people said X and 24% of people said Y. But what's actually really critical is the conversation around what those data points mean for the business and the strategic impact of the insight. And so I would just urge anyone who's bringing market research into their organization to figure out how to give your researchers a seat at the table so that they deeply understand your your business context, and to give them the runway to to deeply partner with their stakeholders so that they can work together to to translate that learning into actual action.