Marketing Tools Within Your Reach

Take off the designer sunglasses, get out of the car, remove the ear buds and put on your best walking shoes. This month, our marketing insight strategist helps you to beam into your extrasensory talents for valuable marketing insight.

To See Clearly, Listen Up: The Best Secret Marketing Tools Are Your Eyes and Your Ears

By N.L. Hohns

Contrary to popular belief, marketing does not begin with a great idea or a unique product. It begins with observation: what does your audience want or think they want, what does your audience need or think they need. The most innovative ideas, the most spectacular products, the most extraordinary services will not succeed unless you discover who your potential customers are and how best to reach them. And surprise, surprise — the answers to those questions are not as obvious as you may think.

We rely on market research to help shed light on our perceptions, put everything we think to be so in context, and provide the raison d’être for our marketing plan. Quite simply, market research takes what has happened in the past to predict what will happen in the future. But market research, even in its most sophisticated quantitative and qualitative forms does not always tell the whole story. The disparity between what people say they do and what they really do can be enormous. That’s why the best marketing tools may very well be your own eyes and your own ears!

Here are three suggestions to maximize the benefits of your marketing efforts:

• Stretch your comfort zone, mingle! In order to observe public behavior, you need to be in the public: places and events where people congregate.
• Inquire. One person’s response may, in fact, reflect the sentiment of many.
• Shift your paradigm (Thank you Stephen R. Covey!). Empathic listening allows you to get inside another person’s frame of reference; hence, “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Reposition yourself on the other side of the desk, phone or monitor in order to fully diagnose before you prescribe or pursue a course of action.

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