The case for Experience Research.

As someone in the line of experience planning, I know how, over the years, hard it has always been to convince companies to pay a little more to learn more about their customers. Even if you get them to pay for research, it is usually limited to research on perceptions and messaging in line with traditional market and consumer research methods, while the methods of user or shopper research such as shadowing, task analysis, user testing, etc have been even harder to sell.

Most of these insight generating practices aren’t even that expensive and bring truck-loads of new insights you wouldn’t have even imagined when you designed your product or service. In the end, this saves a lot of money when you market a product that has usability faults, or when your marketing does not conquer the “last stretch” into the customer’s life-style.

In my opinion, marketing can’t be about awareness and campaign-thinking only. In order to build long-lasting repeated product usage, you need to invest in this type of stategic planning. After all, the product or service your customer buys stays with them longer and/or has a more immediate effect on their opinion of your brand than the advertising you do. It is certainly as, if not more, important than to pretest your print ad on whether that caucasian male in the key visual looks urban enough to the target audience.

Maybe because some of the methodologies come out of software engineering and user experience design, brand and marketing clients have been slow to pick up. However, as the success of brands depends more and more on how relevant they communicate in the context of the touchpoints of today’s empowered digital customer, it’s a good idea to ask your agency whether or not they have capabilities in this line of research, regardless of how digital your product or service is.

It’s good to hear that some companies do invest in this sort of research and allow the customer help build their business. After all, it the an effective way to help brands communicate in a relevant fashion.

http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2007/07/03/let-your-customers-build-your-business/