A few weeks ago, a colleague and I attended some market research in Florida. We learned a lot, had a few good meals, and then made our way home with a bunch of new ideas about how to communicate the right way with our new target audience.
Simple, right?
We wish. As communications professionals, we’re trained to look at everything skeptically—and market research always brings that trait out in me. In fact, every time I attend market research, I have the same feelings and am left with the same questions.
In my mind, market research (especially with physicians and other highly trained professionals) brings out the audience’s “inner performance artist.” We (the industry) ask physicians about particular disease states or therapeutic approaches. They, in turn, seek to demonstrate their knowledge with the “right” answers to our questions, or reinforce their ivory-tower professionalism.
Hence the phrase we’ve all heard physicians declare countless times: “I don’t look at advertising,” while they carefully sip their Coke Zero prop up their Ermenegildo Zegna shoes on the table, check their Palm Treo for messages, and finger the keys to their Audi S4—all of which they have apparently chosen randomly, without any marketing influence whatsoever.
Ultimately, parsing through market research findings becomes a trick of interpretation. Did they really mean that? What were they trying to say? Are we factually wrong or is that just their opinion?
Of course, that’s not to say there’s nothing to learn from market research. It’s a good fail-safe that keeps us from doing something absolutely wrong or completely offensive. It’s great for finding the right language or phrasing. It also helps us identify broad trends across materials.
Simply said: if I hear something said over and over again by the audience, chances are it’s what they truly believe.
But if I hear something said articulately, forcefully, and memorably (but only once), how true is that? It’s hard to know. Can one person’s powerful conviction overturn three other people?
One of my favorite quotes about market research comes from Oliviero Toscani, the photographer for the controversial Benetton work in the 1980s.
“I look at what marketing research says, and if you want to have success, you do the opposite,” he said.
Granted, Toscani is an Italian photographer, not a pharmaceutical marketing executive. But there’s one thing you can’t argue with: When he left Benetton after 10 years of executing his “United Colors of Benetton” campaign, annual sales were more than 20 times greater than when he arrived.
I’m not advocating doing the opposite of what research says—far from it. But I think Toscani’s example shows us that there’s something just as powerful as getting inside our target audience’s minds: our own gut instincts.
-Mike
