Marketing Research - a curtain raiser

what do we mean by the term marketing research?

any probing to get an insight into the market, may be customers, may be retailers, may be competitors or even the market place can be termed marketing research; however, when such an exercise is done by a customer, with an intention of market sieving and shortlisting a set of probable purchases, it becomes a highly personal exercise and one doesn't address it as marketing research. When the same exercise is done by an organisation, either to know about the existing market players, their offerings and;  their strengths and weaknesses or to know what the customer is looking for and what is being offered, what is the gap between needs and offerings, it takes the shape and gains the name of being marketing research. However, even this activity is not nearer to what is commonly termed as MR.  So, what is it?

If I choose to word it as nearer to what appears in any marketing text book, the task of learning about customers, products, markets, competitors and related aspects, by a marketing firm, with the intention of either planning for a market launch or for the rejig of a marketing strategy or even to learn how a given marketing strategy is actually faring, either through its own efforts or by employing a professional team or organisation to do this job for its decision making purposes, it gets fit into a nomenclature of Marketing Research.

Broadly stated, Marketing Research is done for three purposes:
a. Strategy Formulation or Business Development
b. Marketing Planning or building an approach to reach the market; and thirdly,
c. Monitoring the market activity.

Of all the three above, most notable happens to be the second one, which offers an array of research activities to be undertaken and also poses some of the trickiest scenarios to deal with, in order to get the right insight into the issue being probed at.  We will deal some amount of time in discussing these, so as to set stage for learning the nuances of handling these.

What is a Marketing Plan?

Stated in common words, the series of steps involved in developing a product offering, with a name, a price tag, packed in and sold at a retailer, at a given location and meant for a certain category of people, with an ardent hope and belief that it will be bought and becomes popular in due course of time, is termed Marketing Plan.  

Whether done in a sequence or otherwise, putting together this plan requires understanding of the market, competition, consumer and retailer, without which the marketing plan doesn't get underway to the actual sales moment!

What is Marketing Research?

Gathering information about each of these elements that comprise of the marketing plan and making reasonable inferences from the information obtained, is what one terms Marketing Research.

Some of the interesting aspects of this profession include, Test Marketing, Focus Groups, Surveys and developing both professional and clandestine market intelligence mechanisms.

While these terms appear to be glamorous and exciting on one-side and as wayside and common to the MBA students, especially to those pursuing Marketing Specialisation, an attempt is made to de-glamorise this profession and also unfold the complexities of organising Marketing Research, through this series of blog posts, beginning with the current one.

A snapshot of the kind of Marketing Research assignments that are being addressed in present times, and how they are being serviced.

a dipstick study of the summer internship projects that are obtained at my B School reveals, out of 177 projects, there were 41 marketing research projects, offered by 28 corporate concerns. Further analysis reveals that of these 28 companies, five digital/ technology/internet based companies; five service businesses, five automobile sector businesses, five FMCG firms, two from banking, two from telecom/TV and two from IT hardware sector and  one each from power and heavy industries. 
These firms offered market research projects that focused on the below aspects:
- consumer behavior -  buyer and user preferences; 
- digital marketing plans
- sales promotion components and sales pitch development
- industry profiling
- user needs and expectations for technology products
- brand development plans and brand building initiatives
- mapping consumer interface and consumption patterns and 
- competitor analysis for a brand launch and acceptance
- potential customers and their expectations from a proposed digital service offer
- product knowledge and utility levels for a technology centric entertainment service in DTH sector and 
- components for Customer Loyalty Management through CRM

The above indicates that the marketing research requirements did not change  over the years, rather  became more intense and focused in areas that are cross-disciplinary as well as multi-layered, due to the flow of technology from operations backbone to service provision and product feature definition.
At a core level, the market research requirements of a firm revolve around knowing its customers better, knowing its products better, knowing its channel partners better and knowing the competitors better.

whichever is the goal of a marketing research project, few essentials remain unchanged and need to be followed systematically.  I will be laying these out periodically and discuss them in terms of the intricacies and nuances as they are brought to discussion forum.

what's in digital marketing? a teacher's selfie

A Selfie exercise in Blogging?

Well, the year 2013 has become trendsetting for "selfies", what with the gadgets of sorts providing range of cameras and encouraging people to indulge in taking personal snaps, aptly titled selfies!
While the fine distinction is being made about how celebrities' indulgence in selfies to be condemned while an aam admi's forays into selfies be encouraged, I am not very sure if this post gets either of the treatments! i am sure this post  is no less than a selfie, as the whole episode my thoughts are lingered around reflecting what "i" should do... and what not!

Fine, let me come to grips of posting a selfie, and see if and if its really gets taken kindly by my readers....

What's in digital marketing?

Almost every one who is familiar with either or both or any one of these words will brush aside and move away from reading remaining part of this monologue,,,,, if one is  still persistent to glance through the remaining of this post, that reader should get an award of sorts... i can say that you - as a blog reader -  are being very courteous to me and i can even presume that you have pardoned my this attempt of posting a selfie. Thanks so much.  Now let me try and say few saner words....

Simply stated, this is an elective on Digital Marketing for those specialising in Marketing. Why am i making so much noise about it? Isn't it being offered by anybody else? May be my present affiliation and my last few months' experiences lead to a high flow of adrenaline! Hmm, hoping to contain it on the eve of the curtain raiser.

This task is on hand for almost a fortnight now, and the design of this course has gone through already a half-dozen avatars, and the dilemmas abound! May be i should speak these out.

Dilemmas of a new course teacher...

Dilemmas as a developer of a new course as to what must be offered in what form are on one-side while what gets picked up by a student community thats one step already into the larger world from their alma mater, and a set of students who want something concrete to be brought to the board besides the quintessential 4ps and a c on a virtual world etc.etc.

A nerd's point of view - to go by the book and teach whats already packaged as part of "digital marketing" in a range of text books -  pulls me to a direction that appears safe, while realizing that most of these text books are tending to become stale, due to their treatment of the issues in a technological world that was vastly different even a year back and that anything to offer as a freshly baked bread from 2013/2014 becomes a spine chilling thought in the present day ultra dynamic market and technology baking/cooking fields...

Another haunting view comes from the ever-intriguing technology students, who look at the electronic aspects of the entire exercise, mainly as java, dotnet, and many other acronyms that can make a sense only in a techy world and not so much in a marketing surface!

well, it so appears that the only way to make a headway, is to list out what all can be encompassed in the term digital marketing. Should one deal with all these listed below?

An ambitious set of goals for a tepid course...

• to learn the nitty-gritty of using electronic mail - emails in short - as carriers of promotional materials along with the mails and as the media of marcom (marketing communication) - are we talking of spamming innocent mail box holders or really trying to reach some one interested and expecting to get an email on interesting brands and the drive they bring in to motivate one to blow the pockets empty?!;
• to understand what goes in the design of web pages and sites of companies that are marketing products and services - does any marketing executive ever really come to grips of how much of that understanding is really needed to develop a website for a brand or sub-brand?
• learning how web sites become e-tailers and take over the virtual world as the retailing giants in the virtual market place - is there a game plan other than convincing PE investors or angel investors to keep pouring investments without any inkling of when and how the bottomline gets created and turned black by a company?
• how to bring the millions of mobile phone users into thinking that there is no better way than to engage with it for all and sundry purchases in a daily life - whether its is booking movies tickets or placing an order for a pizza, and keep them fully busy - and disconnect the phone calls as they disturb one from completing the mobile transaction - are we forgetting why a phone and why a mobile phone has come into the market place? Is it worth deciphering the value proposition that an "app" can bring to its subscriber and make sure that more and more of these apps get populated in a thicker density than ur metros on each mobile phone? 
• One more ambitious goal is in front of me - to unfold the secrets of how social media platforms are becoming the new mouthpieces of every brand thats worth it salt and what makes them the most sought after forums to fight over the number of likes and number of followers - I dont remember the names of all the great tech savvy entrepreneurs who discovered and popularised the social media networking sites, but we (means me and me alone, no offence meant to any other respected marketing professor anywhere in the world) marketing teachers are sure that they are our most cherished weapons to teach and make our students fall for them as godsend boons to resurrect their cgpa graphs, and in later periods, to boost their marketing careers with one more facebook page of the chosen brand and a couple of thousands of like buttons!

While i was thrilled with the highly decorated goals list i lined up for my course, not withstanding my one derisive side comments (don't take those stupid comments into account at all, you know, all my students vouchsafe how the original goals are worth pursuing struggles for the next three months) 

Now, come, come, come again.... am I killing my golden goose while i say these words? Hmm, a thought thats spine chilling, given the fact that I am eternally in jobs that put me on probation, even when i am inching my days to retirement in real terms. Well, let me take that if that probation that I am living through now is not completed and am asked to close my innings, i can at least sigh and  say that I am retired....

Sorry, I drifted off. Let me come back to the issues in finalzing the course plan and contents. While one looks at the above, a highly blurred picture crops up in the mind, as I am unable to separate out the tools that come with internet and related technologies from its step-cousin - the television and its much neglected step brother, the radio, as these two are no less digital now-a-days than the other gadgets. What should I do?

How do I tackle the Convergence of technologies?

Just to make my thoughts clearer, let me put my dilemma in simpler terms.  For example, how could one exclude television from the digital marketing, especially after the 2011-12 transformation of satellite tv broadcasting into a digital business; and subsequently the mandate made by the GOI that seeks to enlist every cable subscriber to become part of the digital network and resultant database! How can one ignore  the  silently working CRM software - linked to the beaming of satellite and cable television  that captures millions of viewers' watching habits or media consumption habits and bill them, account them and sieve through these details to dish-out (literally) what each of our family members can view and to what volumes do they account for on a channel by channel basis or program by program basis or by event by event basis - umm! it goes beyond the geo-tagging and device tagging concepts....as one teaches digital marketing?

Forget dear professor, your job is customer centric, and don''t waste your time in loading the course with boring contents, what is more important is to understand and address your customers' needs... my inner voice kept on telling me for over a week, after  recovering from the indigestion of the previous course feedback given by the very same set of students for the earlier courses. So, I went on pondering over, what suits the requirements in real terms....

What does a typical sixth term MBA student look for in an elective course?

Our - the teacher as well the students - world is somewhat lesser developed than the world of top ranking b schools, for a simple reason that placement is a struggle every year, irrespective of the colours of the students and teachers as well, and one has to trod the path of completing placement for all those graduating, in a turn by turn basis - with as many hiccups as one could pass through, while ticking the score over a month or two before they all leave the campus with an offer in hand. Well, I am not going to talk here about the travails of placement season, let me preserve that selfie to some other time.

I am aware that a course offered at the fag-end of a two year MBA Program, holds very little interest among the outgoing students, except for adding the course credits to their profiles and pitch it for the placement exercises. Am I not correct in my study of students? So making sure that their attention is drawn to some level of learning pitch and ensure that it excites them, motivates them and captivates through the six or seven weeks of negotiation - and make them attend thirty odd sessions - i find it an ambitious project, and therefore, am sounding through this forum for practical suggestions and views on what becomes a compelling value proposition for students to allow me to live through this course!!!

In my note to the aspiring students, i mentioned that the course intends to bring to the table four key outputs:

a. develop an email based marketing campaign and run it for a brand for a definite time;
b. develop a blog and if possible, a web site and come out with a steady flow of visitors to it;
c. develop a process flow for creating a digital advertising campaign and make at least an offline run of the same; and
d. develop a e-commerce site and attempt making sale-purchase transactions happen, at least in an intranet, if not on the internet.

Do we need to work on them, all of them? I don't know! at this moment, I can only keep swallowing bile till the class actually opens and then, chug my way through. Am I alone in such foolish thoughts and anxieties, how are you all resolving them, without gulping hazmolas and Anacins and Digenes in dozens. Please, please please tell me the secret, I will surely follow and click a like button promptly on your facebook walls for all thats jotted.

Looking forward to Google pluses, facebook followers and all others to drown me with your valueable spamments, err, comments. Thanks for helping me finish my selfie!

The science of analytics for social media

A short sketch of history of social networks

The last few years had been a revolution of sorts when all those connected to internet started becoming subscribers of one social media or the other. The initial years, i.e., before 2006, it was more of a quest to decipher what is a web site and what the dot coms are all about and how one can  create a web presence for one self and see what could be done with that. while in the west, people were more in the know of the power and capabilities of a dotcom, in the emerging networked societies such as India, the inquisitiveness was multifold - on one side, the entrepreneurial zeal of people to unlock the secret of a dot com promoted many a business to hit on the web and create a web site, for people like me, it was all about having a personal web page that showcases a simple profile and allow me to present myself to all - known and unknown and keep on boasting about or rather, bragging about the small and irrelevant accomplishments. That was the time when the concept of social network sites came into popularity and people started creating personal webpages as part of a larger website and make it become viewable to others.


Social Networks and their connect with common people

The initial networking sites promoted their services in one or the other ways, where individuals were encouraged to create and provide personal profiles, with the options of giving their photograph, email id, and most cases, their work place's web url as the bare minimal information tags to start with. some of the pioneering networking sites like Hi5, multiply started offering the services of profile based micro web pages as early as 2005, and some of the specialised networking sites like academia.edu began to offer their services by 2006/07.  However, the advent of Facebook, and soon joined by the Linkedin  and Twitter changed the way social networks operate. Here, I am not attempting at documenting the growth of these sites, lets do it in a different post or visit some interesting blogs on the same elsewhere, for an update.

Increasing importance of social media networks

The last five years have seen the technologies taking these social network sites services to grow from basic profile and connectivity link providers to develop avenues for sharing and interacting with individuals, organisations, brands, services, causes and many other purposes, through their service offers. most important among them all, had been the service of engaging of brands with their customers, fans and followers, taking the concept of marketing to a new level.

Today, no marketing firm can afford to ignore the role of facebook or twitter, in brand building and cultivating customers. While this essay is not to deal with the intricacies of how to build a social media based marketing strategy, it attempts to look at other services that have emerged as supportive and complimentary to social media marketing.

Social Media Analytics

business analytics in physical and overall sense deals with the domain of assessing the competitiveness of a firm in its industry and functions as a support tool for strategy and business model evolution for its market goals. similarly, internet based analytics - especially, the search engine analytics, advertising analytics help in analysis of effectiveness of firms in their web presence and online advertising. taking these competencies further ahead, social media analytics have emerged, that assess the effectiveness and impact of brands in the internet based social media and offer insights to marketers about the strategy monitoring and revision.

One such service is offered by a website called social bakers, who are working on continuous analysis of brands in various social media  and offer statistics and analysed results. Visiting their site on the early hours of 11th Jan, 2014, i was surprised to find the details of top 100 brands on twitter, facebook, youtube and google, not just for the leading markets like USA, or UK, but for almost every country which has an internet presence. My curiosity to know who figure in the top 100 brands on facebook for India, led to some surprising details cropping up. This site throws the names of LIC of India Forever, Harley Davidson, Junglee.com, Aircel and amazon.com as the top five fastest growing pages in India, on facebook.  And a little below, is the list of top hundred brands of India, on Facebook, along with the numbers of fans internationally and within India.

The moment these details come up on the website, several questions came in mind.  Looking at the fastest growing pages on Facebook, these are the lingering questions:

Why is LIC of India on top of the list of fastest growing pages? Was it because, the newly emerging fifty plus age population is in the throes of redeeming their matured LIC policies? Was it because, facebook helps such policy processing happen in a seamless manner?

How come a  bike which not even a fraction of percentage of bike market volume register such a huge addition of fan following? Was the popularity of Harley Davidsons a result of the aspirational model of consumption getting manifest on the Facebook page growth rate?

How come a country, whose book buying and reading habits are reflected by sunday morning footpath spread-out book pedlars suddenly show a reversal in the trends for book buying?  Was it because amazon and its indian arm, are revving up their retailing presence through some path-breaking service models? Was it because one can lay hands on their choice books as easily as they can browse the books on footpath and after gleaning them, leave them out without buying  - online too?

Why is Aircel suddenly showing a surge in its Facebook page fan growth, when the most popular mobile service providers are some other brands? Was it because, Aircel is in a position to address the needs of its fans differently through Facebook?

Or, am i in the midst of a different phenomena with regard to how people connect to their choice service providers or brand deliverers?

Well, each of these can be answered using a well developed marketing case study and gain some valueble insights on these brands.

The questions were highly academic on one side and highly intriguing from industry point of view. While their answers could pave way to a different understanding the emerging customer behaviour, the current discussion that i am raising is to underline the role that advanced service providers like social bakers provide, in a technology centred virtual social life booming in today's life.

Meta-Analysis as the new order of marketing research

It will be interesting to understand the model that such websites offer, and also to understand the science involved in developing a new science that i may call, virtual marketing research and meta-analysis of social media habits. How valuable will learning such a science be and how could it be applied by a business analyst for a brand or for a social networking site?

How does  a website offering such services operate? what is its business model? who are its customers? What is the revenue model? How should it develop its in-bound marketing and link it to its out-bound marketing efforts? do these depend upon technology or innovative thinking on the part of such analysis service providers?

Today, online marketing has a lot to do with learning the skills and art of digital media manifestations of brands and their service on one-side and approaching the strategy makers with services of meta-analysis. which one should be the cup of an upcoming marketing professional?


   

creative social theorization and emerging digital era

Prologue

Realising that the basic tenets of ethicality were built on the fundamentals of transparency and accountability gives me a breezy sense of euphoria as I stand in the dunes of sifting times, dissolving timelines and disappearing physical boundaries. The euphoria  that the world is unwittingly moving to a state of ethical society, when the individual greed and ambition is pushing people to the extremes of unethical behaviour is chilling on one side and exhilarating on the other - albeit simultaneously.  Whether it is time for people to dump the concepts of ethics and morals in recycle bin and move on unabashedly to pursue their personal goals or to introspect and move around, the signals that the society beams today tell very clearly that time has come for ethical conduct and behaviour,  ethical leadership,  ethical businesses and ethical strategies.  It may not be fashionable as yet,  to claim one is ethical and/or moral, but it surely is an in-thing for the youth of the country to claim that a time has come when one can fearlessly practice the same using digital platforms and connected networks of yore.

Move towards ethical businesses – a social change driven by technology*

India is a conflicting story when it comes to ethical business conduct; on one side, it grew over traditional family businesses which devoted their earnings for charity and society’s welfare, subsequently moving to a voluntary and in the recent times to mandatory spending on CSR; while on the other side, government as well as corporate sector increasingly pulled itself into corruption and  malpractices.

The emergence of voluntary sector in the 80s was a direct fall-out of the increasing failure of government and corporate sector from being ethical and responsible entities to deliver their services, where intervention in education, health, poverty alleviation, supporting the marginalised sections of the society became their  key agenda. Addressing the issues of being ethical ; committed to a cause and addressing the inequalities,  today the NGO sector has  become part of the development value chain.

The processes of globalisation led to emergence of technology driven businesses, especially IT, which, together with the privatisation of education sector brought a revolution in middle class’ economic mobility and increased connectivity between rural and urban India.

The emergence of   information technology  brought in  revolution in connecting people and offering access to service delivery   in the country. The promise of IT as a key medium for delivery of Government to citizen (G2C) services led to the emergence of e-Governance models. The e-governance models led to creation and service of business delivery models, which, by design, secure people from the clutches of corruption and servicing of service delivery channels where not necessary, with almost 1/6^th of the villages of this country getting covered.

The IT driven social change – through G2C; and through a converged social media based networked information channels – is now catalysing not just social and economic development issues, but political development of the country too, as demonstrated by the emergence of Anna Hazare Movement and its political off-shoot – the  AAP in the last few months -  to address the increasing need of people for ethical and responsive forms of civil organisations. This I find the most potent of all the movements that this 21^st century is becoming mother of, and would change the face of Indian society in the coming periods.

An incomplete timeline of development initiatives - and its relevance to the world

1900-1915s - the early years of the 20th century witnessed the advent of cooperatives in our country, through state intervention and the enactment of the first law on cooperatives. The British India paved way for the establishment of cooperatives as a collective action and organizing them as social organizations with a business intent.

1915-1950s - the famines and collective action to address hunger witnessed the emergence of grain banks in various states of the country, notable among them Maharashtra and Deccan, where people came together to pool food grains and share them across the communities, in different ways and manners that they deemed fit in those circumstances. Formalizing the operations of these collectives lead to some of the note worthy cooperatives such as Paisa Fund Bank in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra and Paddy Grain Banks in Deccan and other parts of the country, which alter transformed as Cooperative Rural Banks.

1950s - 1980s - The independent India witnessed the emergence of primary agricultural coopeatives in various formats and frameworks, basically to meet the rural agricultural credit needs, and some cases, to integrate the agricultural credit with marketing of farm produce. This period also witnessed the cooperatives becoming state subject and laws being framed to govern them by various states, besides the central government re-shaping the central law to address the cooperqative businesses spanning more than one state.  

This period also witnessed the emergence of International Cooperative Alliance and several countries, including India recognising the core principles of cooperation as the basis for promoting cooperative movement. 1964, the ICA formally comes into existence and commence its operations to promote cooperative organizations.

The later part of this period also witnessed the proliferation of cooperative businesses in almost every domain of society and business, with varying levels of success, in our country.

1980s - 2000s - this period witnessed the  decline of cooperatives - aptly described by Dr. V Kurien as the era of politicisation, beaurocratisation and commercialization of cooperatives, through blatant flouting of cooperative principles, and laws  to suit the political and beaurocracy's requirements  as well as movements that resisted such abuse. the last decade of the 20th century saw a silent revolution, where new formats of cooperatives emerged under new forms of cooperative laws, supportive business laws on one side and market changes under globalization bringing new sets of challenges in terms of competitive sphere of business. It is also noteworthy to mention here that the period also witnessed the emergence of women's thrift and credit movement under self-help groups, silently paving way for emergence of micro-finance institutions - supporting new age cooperatives as micro-organizations of collective action and enterprise in rural India.

2000 - 2010s - the new found discovery of a term called inclusive growth and a focused term called financial inclusion, where the micro-finance institutions, banks and technology firms coming together to develop new platforms for inclusive growth on one side and developing new business formats for collective as well as individual action in entrepreneurial direction. A notable development that has commenced was in shaping up a concept of developing and supporting rural service delivery institutions that are business centric, service delivery oriented and focused towards financial sustainability, by multiple stakeholders of the country and attempting to find meaningful solutions towards these objectives. 

Advent of Digital formats of business and service delivery concept

the mid 2000s - especially during 2008-09, the concept of common service centres had taken shape and it was promoted through public-private partnership mode by the government of India, in various states, to offer a model of electronic governance for the citizens of the country. Initially, these CSCs are to act as the last mile delivery channels of government services, taking them beyond the district revenue offices, Taluk offices and even the informal village level functionary, called Village Assistant or Gram Patwari or Village Karanam and/or other such nomenclatures prevalent in different parts of the country, and use the internet connected computer centre to offer the most basic services of a revenue department unit in a village.  These CSCs were designed and established by training a village level entrepreneur, with some aptitude and training in operating a computer and accessing internet is willing to run the center and eke out a living from the service charges paid by the users of the village. 

The last four years have seen evolution of such CSCs and have become popular and highly patronised business enterprises at a village level, leading them to become full-fledged IT centred service delivery units, prompting Government of India, Reserve Bank of India, IT firms and both nationalised as well as private banks to start thinking of co-opting them as banking agents at village level. Besides the potential they have with regard to operating as banking agents, these CSCs have already started working as agents for various commercial businesses, as their last mile delivery agents or in other words, as rural retailing points for hitherto rural marketing firms.

Examination of Digital Enterprise as an alternative for Development Delivery Organisation

In this blog and the few forthcoming ones, an attempt will be made to argue that the 21st century looks forward to convergence of development theories, to roll-out the services through integration of last mile delivery institutions of social change. 

For this purpose, few arguments will be made, with limited conceptual framework, one that analyses the rural credit and marketing delivery system, another that analyses the banking delivery system and the third that deals with e-governance and G2C as retailing of citizen services. Only when these three are understood from the development point of view, it will become appropriate to place the zig-saw puzzle of addressing sustainability in various contexts and relating it to social theories of change.

(*views originally shared in a cryptic and brief manner in a  workshop titled "Creative Social Theorizing", held at Indus Business Academy, Bangalore on 26 Dec, 2013)