|
Strategic Sample Tracking =
Continuous High Values Insights
Summary
Upheaval. Revolution. Transformation. Change.
We know that significant change is occurring (financial
crisis, green preferences, new media niches), what we don’t
know is the quantum of the impact and the timing of it on the
brands we represent. The simple world of supermarkets and
Neilson is gone forever. What’s a marketing executive to do?
How can she keep track of the effects of marketing actions?
The answer is to track a Strategic Sample. This investigation
explores the details of a straightforward approach.
In
contrast to answering a specific research question, tracking
customers, employees, defecting customers and prospective
customers has fundamental strategic benefits. They deliver a
specific information flow on market effects; the cosmic
confusion of changing media, changing technology, and changing
competitive forces. They are an essential investment for your
client to have and smart business for researchers to initiate.
Importance
Tracking a
Strategic Sample of consumer awareness, perceptions, and
behaviour delivers essential marketing intelligence to help
guide marketers through the turbulence and helter-skelter of
rapid changes in marketing technology, media, and distribution
channels. The ultimate goal of marketing is to influence and
control the ultimate consumer. Therefore, if the perceptions,
attitudes and behavior of that ultimate consumer are monitored
over time, we will know if the cumulative force of all
marketing activities is influencing the ultimate
consumer. If we track consistently, it is possible to monitor
the effects of specific marketing programs as they are
introduced. Contrast these outcomes against not tracking at
all.
Tracking a
Strategic Sample answers a number of important questions:
-
How is your brand’s awareness trending over time,
relative to competition? Awareness is the single most
important marketing variable in many product categories.
-
How is your brand’s image evolving over time?
Think of “image” as the character or personality of a
brand’s awareness. The strategic management of brand image
is one of the most important goals of marketing.
-
What advertising messages do your consumers
remember about your brand, and how do these messages change
over time? Advertising messages tend to undergo learning and
memory “distortion” as they are interpreted and remembered
by consumers. Therefore, the only way to know for sure your
communication impact is to track advertising message recall.
-
What variables define your optimum target market?
Who are your brand’s heavy users, nonusers, light users? The
identification and monitoring of your brand’s optimum target
market is one of the easily calculated outputs of good
tracking research. What are the demographics (and the
correlates) that define the optimal target market for your
brand? Which market segments should you focus upon?
-
What impact are your competitors having in the
marketplace, and how are competitive activities influencing
your brand? Overreaction and underreaction to competitive
initiatives historically constitute some of the greatest
marketing mistakes. It’s really important to know, as early
as possible, whether a new competitive product or new
competitive advertising campaign is a real threat, or just
smoke and vapors. Good tracking research allows you to
monitor and assess competitive threats—before it’s too late
to react.
Fundamentals of
Sampling
If you should decide to pursue Strategic Sample tracking
research for your brands, here are some suggestions to keep in
mind. Tracking research, like everything else, can be good or
bad depending upon how you design and execute it.
-
Telephone
surveys are typically the best way to track awareness,
image, and advertising message recall.
These telephone surveys can be continuous (i.e., conducted
every month) or pulsed (conducted at a point in time, such
as the last week of each quarter). Tracking that requires
imagery can be integrated using the web.
-
Strategic
Sampling Quality is essential. The greatest (and often least visible) mistakes in tracking
research are usually sampling errors. The sampling plan and
management of the sample are absolutely crucial to
consistently accurate tracking data. The samples from month
to month and year to year must be identical in every way or
else the resulting data will not be comparable. Here are
some common sampling errors to avoid:
-
Sample
definition too narrow.
If your target audience is females aged 21 to 29, that’s
fine for guiding media placement. All too often, however,
the target audience becomes the specification for the
sampling plan for tracking. Therefore, only females 21 to
29 are interviewed in the tracking research. Suppose your
advertising turns out to be really effective among women
34 to 54 instead of women 21 to 29. You might have
cancelled a very effective campaign because it appeared to
be failing among the target audience. Also, it’s possible
your advertising is working among 21- to 29-year-olds, but
driving all other age groups away. If we were only
sampling the 21 to 29 segment, we would have overlooked
this critical failing.
Remember, always define the sample for tracking research
very broadly and inclusively. The purpose of tracking is
to tell us what’s happening in the marketplace, and a
too-narrow sample almost always defeats this objective.
-
Variable
definition of sample.
Never allow the things you want to measure to be a part of
the screening criteria that admits someone into the
survey. For example, you would never want awareness of a
product category or awareness of a brand to be part of the
screening criteria for a tracking survey if one of the
purposes of the tracking research is to measure awareness.
Likewise, you would never want “past 30 day usage” of a
category or brand to be a part of the sampling criteria,
if the purpose of the study is to measure changes in usage
over time. Awareness and product usage are variables that
can change as a result of your marketing activities or
competitive initiatives, and that can change from season
to season. As these variables change, they can change the
composition of the tracking sample and destroy the
comparability of the survey data across time.
-
Sampling
without replacement.
If the universe is limited (say you are tracking attitudes
among your 1000 dealers), and you take dealers out of the
sample as they are interviewed, then the composition of
your sample is gradually changing as interviewing
progresses—and this makes the interviews from one time
period incomparable to interviews in another time period.
Remember, if the universe is small and limited, then
sample with replacement. That is, once a respondent is
interviewed, put that respondent back into the sample for
the next wave of interviewing (or if you must, quarantine
them for only a short period). An alternative solution is
to divide the original sample into discrete, matched
sub-samples, and then use one of these-sub samples for each
subsequent wave of interviewing.
-
Randomize
sample within quota groups.
Even though most projects begin with a random sample,
things can happen which destroy randomness. For example,
most samples are organized by geography. As a final
quality-control procedure, always randomise the final
sample within each quota group. Then, no matter how the
sample is worked, you will end up with a random sample.
-
Limit
sample to force callbacks. The research company must limit the size of the original sample,
so that the callback cycle is properly triggered. If too
many telephone numbers are put in the initial sample, then
it is likely that no callbacks will ever be made. The
study is completed before the interviewers ever work
through the original sample. The recommended policy is to
release 70% of the planned sample, and then gradually
introduce the remaining 30% of the sample as the callback
cycle is completed on the initial sample. Typically, a
primary number in the sample should receive a minimum
total of three calls (an original call and two
callbacks). AFS is often asked to make six calls.
-
The
questionnaire must remain the same from month to month and
year to year.
Changes in the questionnaire (even something as seemingly
innocent as a change in question order) can create
unexpected changes in the results. Simply changing one word
in a question can change the results. Therefore, keep the
questionnaire constant over time. If you want to modify,
add, or delete questions in a tracking study, do it toward
the end of the questionnaire—so that the changes will not
distort the key measures in the first 80% of the
questionnaire.
-
All
interviewing procedures and controls must remain constant
over time.
Changes in the minutia of training, scheduling, monitoring,
and supervising interviewers can inject unplanned changes in
tracking study results. The briefing and training
instructions for each specific tracking study must remain
unchanged over time.
-
Editing,
coding, data cleaning, and tabulation must remain constant
over time.
Changes in the way “no answers” or “blanks” are handled,
changes in how many multiple responses are accepted, and a
hundred other “minor” tabulation details can change tracking
results over time.
A great
long-term threat to the accuracy and integrity of a strategic
tracking study is
gradualism. That is, small incremental
changes in methods and procedures accumulate over time and
gradually destroy the comparability of the tracking data. For
ongoing tracking studies, it is recommended that monthly
meetings be held with everyone in operations working on the
project, to review and reinforce exactly how the study is to
be executed. Likewise, specific quality-control guidelines and
standards must be developed and maintained for each long-term
tracking project.
Needless
to say, once you choose a research company to do a tracking
project, you should stick with that one company (unless that
company’s performance is unsatisfactory). Changing research
companies every year or two on a long-term project almost
always guarantees that the data will not be comparable.
The true
strategic value of tracking research is fully realised only
after several years of consistent measurement of your ultimate
consumers. Several years of longitudinal data really tell a
story, but it’s a
strategic story, a grand panorama of your
performance in the marketplace compared to your competitors,
as played out during the different phases of the business
cycle. With this strategic road map, it is possible to plot
strategy, and monitor your successes and failures in pursuing
that strategy, regardless of the day-to-day confusion and
chaos in the quicksand world of upheaval, revolution, and
transformation.
A
Challenge for Now - I
As the New
Year dawns, you have the chance to leverage off past work –
what was once a stable environment is now on the cusp of
potentially wild change. This may have the impact of
invalidating important past work and subsequent strategic
decisions made by your clients. Turning past projects into
repeat or tracking projects can be a low input, high value,
avenue to pursue.
Can you
see the value in repeating past projects? From a data
collection view they are less expensive to run (AFS can
guarantee this, just ask – Ed.) they fit the strategic mould
known to you and your client (report formats, paradigms) and
lead to further client consultation/deeper strategic
interaction.
A Challenge
for Now - II
Given the
value that Strategic Sample Tracking delivers, consider how
you can develop Strategic Samples for you and your clients to
monitor.
Enjoy your Week, Drew.
See Face 2
Face Project Management Article
Return to
Article Library
See a further
Article on Building Brand Advocates
|
