Understanding customer behavior is key to creating marketing campaigns that generate high response and revenue.

One of the best ways to understand customer behavior is to study customer migration patterns—to learn when and why a customer ends up in a segment different from the one he or she had been in.

The starting point for those studies is your customer-segmentation model. After you decide which approach to use to measure migration, the process is a virtuous circle of analyze, segment, campaign, and analyze again.

The next task, requiring strong analysis skills, is to tie the observed migrations to company activities, such as a marketing stream, and to customer purchase behavior.

The final task is to apply the results of that analysis to your marketing campaigns to generate revenue and boost customer retention.

What happens immediately after a customer uses your product? Knowing the before and after around how your products are used will help you sell more -- and build better future products.

Five practical approaches to get closer to your buyers.

Ask any statistician and they’ll reel off a list of reasons why two surveys can give completely opposite results.

But whether it’s differences in the sample, the questionnaire or the interpretation, the fact is that many businesses, especially large ones, put significant store by their customer measures.

But are we just kidding ourselves? Can we really measure customer experience objectively? In short, that depends on the questions — the most important being those that you ask before you even put pen to paper.

Here are the three important questions to ask before you start planning that next customer survey.

Most companies use a crude approach to gathering vital customer data. Does this describe you?

Many new products fail – far too many. Failures occur regularly in both the manufacturing and service sectors. By failure we mean that these new products both fail to excite customers and fail to reach the sales and market-share goals set by the companies that develop them.

In the 1980s and 1990s, major advances in new product development (NPD) were achieved through the use of StageGate processes. Such processes define the tasks of each of the functions involved in NPD (e.g. R&D, marketing and operations) at each of the stages, from product concept to market introduction. However, as more companies have adopted formal processes for NPD, the competitive advantage that can be achieved by process excellence alone has eroded. Put another way, just because your organisation is good at implementation does not mean that it will bring the best new products to market. Creativity is also required to identify customers’ problems and to develop breakthrough features to address them.

In this article we will discuss an approach to dealing with market uncertainty. This applies new techniques for market research and uses a model to ensure than new products excite the customer.

Talk may be cheap, but listening to what people are saying about your product can be a valuable method of improving corporate performance. According to recent research, there is a measurable connection between what is being said about a product in online posts and real-time customer behavior. Becoming aware of online comments and learning how to use the information can avert potential downturns in sales and can help companies fine-tune their marketing.

Whenever I can, I include telemarketing as part of a comprehensive lead-generation program. When it comes to setting sales appointments, populating a database with decision-maker names, or filling seats at an event, there's no contact method that's more direct or more effective. The results of telemarketing are usually measurable, too, which is also a rare benefit for any campaign tactic.

But, actually, you can expect more from your telemarketing programs than appointment-setting and seat-filling. In fact, telemarketing can lend tremendous support to helping you achieve other aspects sales and marketing initiatives.

By now, your marketing goals are clearly defined and you're ready to run a multivariate test. Which elements, or factors, should you test?

Bringing a new product to market is one of the most costly and risky activities that any GM faces.

Voice-of-the-customer research and stage gate reviews have improved the odds of achieving success. But do they go far enough?

Three important tasks are frequently overlooked even though they offer the ability to identify weak links early on.

So, how can you overcome the odds? Arm your team with a three-step commercialization insurance policy designed to identify and assess risks.

The folks at Future Now are skeptical of surveys. They can annoy customers. The questions themselves tend to reflect the bias of the person or company asking them. At best, they offer directionally-correct information, which is often taken out of context and used to replace an old assumption with some shiny new (and equally dangerous) one.

The great thing about Web Analytics is that it allows you to see how people are using your site — without surveying them. But there are things your Web Analytics can’t tell you. That’s when a survey can help. When handled correctly, surveys can provide a good starting point for gathering qualitative data about the customer experience.

As web marketers seek new ways to boost conversion rates and improve their visitors' site experience, interest in multivariate testing is on a feverish rise. But those unfamiliar with the techniques are often unclear about where to start, or how to ensure success.

Today, the product choices available to consumers are more numerous than ever, and competition for customers is downright fierce. In this environment it is extremely difficult for products to standout. So, what can a company do to enhance the competitiveness of its products?

One thing is certain: relying on old methods for maximizing a product’s competitiveness is no longer sufficient. The key to offering highly competitive products is delivering exceptional value. But how does a company develop products with exceptional value, and what exactly does “value” mean to the consumer? That’s where “Marketnomics” comes in, says Charles F. Goetz, an adjunct professor of organization and management and a distinguished lecturer in entrepreneurship at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and the developer of “Marketnomics.”

“Marketnomics” enables users to precisely measure and prioritize the value of a varying list of product features and benefit options relative to two critical product development issues—their target market’s perceptions and the effective cost to the company of these features and benefits. Armed with this information, companies are able to determine the optimal combination of features and benefits to maximize product value.

So many products, so many brands, so many prices - consumers today are almost blinded by all the choices at the supermarket. Marketers draw consumers’ eyes to their products through point-of-purchase (P-O-P) marketing. Researchers use eye-tracking studies to measure how successful marketers are at zoning consumers in on their products on the store shelves. Scott Young and Professors Pierre Chandon and Wesley Hutchinson examine the validity of these studies and suggest a way to improve them.

Researchers have found that "those with negative opinions of [a] product were likely to become even more negative if asked to participate in a group discussion." Marketers beware this truth in the age of MySpace, blogging and general hyper communication!

There are many ways you can conduct market research, and each of the various methods has its own benefits and drawbacks. So which is the best method for you? This will depend on many factors, among them the type of information you are seeking and your research budget. Below are tips to help you carry out the most meaningful and cost-effective research project possible for your situation.

Marketing practitioners regard forecasting as an important part of their jobs. This paper discuss methods to forecast demand.

So you need to develop new products or services. And several questions puzzle you.
* Which new product ideas should you develop?
* What features should you include?
* What positioning messages should you use?
* What marketing tactics will be effective?
* How do you raise chances for success and reduce risk?

These questions continually challenge product, marketing, and research managers. And the stakes are big. New product failure rates are high. Lack of information and faulty assumptions are often culprits. The good news is that qualitative marketing research can help you make better new product and marketing decisions. Qualitative marketing research makes managers smarter. This paper's objective is to guide you in applying qualitative marketing research to develop new products and services.

Mohanbir Sawhney's thought leadership in the marketing arena continues with this ManyWorlds' exclusive presentation. The basis for this 52 slide presentation is in exploring how a corporation can transform its research organization from "producing research" to "generating insights". By asking some fundamental questions about the nature of insights and the process that produce them, we are taken on an exploration through the definition, creation and management of customer insights.

arket segmentation has become a popular topic in marketing, marketing research and strategic planning. Market segmentation allows sellers to identify unique segments in the market so that they can tailor product features, services, distribution, pricing, and marketing communication messages specifically to each segment. Segmentation research allows sellers of products and services to quantify the sizes and potential economic/volumetric opportunities of the segments, describe the composition of each segment, and evaluate alternative segment-level marketing strategies. This document will discuss how segmentation can increase the effectiveness of a company's marketing and communication efforts. Its purpose is to explain the uses of market segmentation and the basic steps for executing segmentation research. [BNET Annotation]

Writing an effective questionnaire is not a task for novices. At the very least, it requires an understanding of four basic issues:
1. Considering the differences between a questionnaire that respondents fill out themselves and one that a professional interviewer administers
2. Knowing what questions should be asked early on in the questionnaire, in the middle, and toward the end
3. Understanding how to phrase questions
4. Being sensitive to questionnaire length

After conducting thousands of marketing research studies and asking hundreds of thousands of questions, the author has come to understand one thing: There are no bad questions, only irrelevant ones.

In other words, the majority of questions asked are irrelevant. That is, they don't result in answers that lead to actions.

Most new products fail and most high-volume marketing campaigns generate slim returns. Companies trip up when they try to estimate customer demand through weak market research, extrapolation from the past, or plain instinct. Fortunately, the science of discrete choice modeling is a powerful antidote to ignorance. It allows companies to estimate demand and know exactly how and why customers will make decisions, minimizing the business risk and positioning the product for success.

Editor's Note: a bit of self-promotion on the part of Mercer, discussing their Strategic Choice Analysis (SCA)®, but still of general value...

If you've ever agonized over whether it's the right time to replace an old gadget with a spiffy new model-knowing that the new one may well become obsolete in a few months-you probably have an inkling of the kinds of decisions high-tech marketers must make in planning their products. And if you're marketing such products yourself, you probably have puzzled over when to time each release. Which bells and whistles should you introduce first? And how do you price the upgrade to make it attractive to existing users?

To help planners of high-tech consumer products make these sorts of decisions, V. "Seenu" Srinivasan and Sang-Hoon Kim created a mathematical model that forecasts the sales path of a new version of an existing product.

Several studies have shown that asking people questions about their intentions leads them to overstate the likelihood that they will engage in a certain behavior; more surprisingly, it appears that simply asking the questions can actually change people's behavior.

This phenomenon, termed the "mere-measurement effect," is explored by Patti Williams, the James G. Campbell, Jr. Memorial Term Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Gavan J. Fitzsimons, associate professor of marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University; and Lauren G. Block, associate professor of marketing at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College. The authors hypothesize that answering a straightforward question about future intentions, a question outwardly viewed as innocent and non-manipulative, registers in people's unconscious minds and influences their future choices, increasing socially desirable behaviors and decreasing socially undesirable behaviors.

To test this, the professors asked 232 students one of two questions, either "How likely are you to floss your teeth in the next week?" or "How likely are you to eat fatty foods in the next week?" The researchers presented the two questions one of three ways: with no survey sponsor; with the name of an objective survey sponsor; and with the name of an obviously self-interested sponsor (the Association of Dental Products Manufacturers [ADPM] and the American Fruit Growers Association).

One week later, respondents were given a follow-up questionnaire that measured the number of times they had flossed their teeth and eaten fatty foods over the previous week. As expected, the flossing question led to an increase in flossing, and the fatty foods question led to a decrease in the consumption of high-fat foods. However, in both instances, when the question appeared to come from a self-interested sponsor, the mere-measurement effect was lessened, suggesting that students' manipulation alarm was activated. In the case of flossing, knowing the ADPM was behind the question created a backlash: Not only did flossing not increase, it actually decreased.

The results support the idea that mere-measurement effects occur only when people believe there is no hidden agenda or self-interested party doing the questioning. Once they are aware of a possible commercial intent to persuade them to perform a specific activity, they are more likely to do the opposite. This finding suggests that most people answer questions about their intentions unconsciously - or "mindlessly," as the authors put it - without knowing how it might affect their behavior. It is only when they detect an intention to manipulate them that they engage in what the authors call mindful processing.

Market research firms often wrestle with the potential reactions of respondents in determining whether to identify the sponsors of their surveys. These studies indicate that it's probably a bad idea.
[strategy+business annotation]