Better ROI from Your Marketing Research Investments: The Deep-Wide-Long Approach

Med device and health IT companies are constantly investing in new ideas, hoping to discover and bring to market the next game-changing product or service. That requires lots of market intelligence and customer research to get it right and avoid relying on risky guesswork and hunches.

A problem we see, especially with the larger companies that sell hundreds of products into numerous care areas in hospitals, is fragmentation. Even within a care unit, many research projects involving the same target audience and addressing similar needs are not coordinated and not taking advantage of cross-investigation.

For example, a company offering a range of cardiology products may have one business unit doing discovery research for new product ideas for stents and catheters, another BU validating value propositions for their special ECG monitor, and yet another BU getting reactions to messaging for a groundbreaking ultrasound device. Or all three BUs may be simultaneously doing research to answer the same business question, e.g. how to position their particular line of new cardiology products for launch. In either case, it’s likely – unfortunately - that none of the BUs are talking to one another.

The good news is that there are good strategic opportunities for collaboration that would benefit all the BUs, the company, and the customers they serve. Here is a framework we developed to help med tech companies leverage their investment in any and every customer research project for a better ROI. We call it Deep-Wide-Long.

Typically, a customer research project will go deep on the main topic, whether it’s understanding a specific set of problems customers are facing, getting reactions to new product concepts, or shaping marketing messages. With careful planning, the project can also go wide by investigating adjacent areas. And it can go long, by strategically reinforcing within the company the benefit of taking a customer-centric approach to product innovation and marketing. The incremental cost of doing so is small compared to the knowledge gain and its value.

For example, if we're interviewing cardiologists to mainly gain insights into what they want ultrasound devices to do for them (deep), we can secondarily allow time to also investigate their use of ECG monitors as well as their reactions to new ideas for device integration (wide). Plus we can engage the other relevant BUs to understand their information needs as we shape the project, and then facilitate integration of the results across BUs (long).

The bottom line of Deep-Wide-Long is improving the bottom line by getting as much mileage as possible from every marketing research project, in a way that strengthens the company’s commitment to put the customer first.

For more thought-provoking insights and articles by Moshe, you can follow him on LinkedIn here, subscribe to his blog here, and read his practical “Your Marketing Minute” e-newsletter here.