Why Are Surveys Important?
by John Eberhard

Surveys are vital in order to effectively market a product or service. You have to know which public is going to buy that product or service, what they want, their general attitudes, and their likes and dislikes.

Yet despite the importance of surveying the public, I find that many small, medium, and even large companies do not do any market research. In a recent informal survey I conducted on Marketing Directors for medium-sized software companies, I found that the majority had never conducted any market research on their buying public. Most did not think it was very important.

It's easy to get into thinking that you already know the public, know who buys your product, what they want, and what their attitudes are. And of course, to a degree this is true. Anybody who is in business, has been around for a while and is making money, does know their buying public. After all, they are in contact with them, probably every day. Salesmen have a particularly good level of contact with the public.

The danger of this approach, not surveying but just getting your information from customer contact, is that you can get to a point where you assume you fully know the public you're dealing with. Invariably you will have some unpleasant surprises, as the bright ideas that you come up with, do not pan out when you try them out in the marketplace.

When originating a new marketing campaign, it is vital to base the campaign on survey results. It is wise to survey and find out who exactly buys your product, what they need and want (their "buttons," so-called because you can "press" them and get a reaction), and develop a positioning for your product (positioning is a technology to quickly communicate an item to the public). Then once you have all that, it is wise to develop your pictures, and then show them to the public and see what they communicate to them. You'd be amazed at how often a picture you might think perfectly communicates your message, would turn out to be incomprehensible to the public, or communicate something entirely different. I can say that because I've surveyed quite a few.

Then once you have all that done, and you have good results from the public - they get what you're trying to communicate and they like your campaign idea - you can be assured of good results from your campaign. And you're not taking such a huge risk with all that money. Last time I checked, promotion and advertising were fairly expensive.

Over the years I have seen quite a few companies originate promotional campaigns based solely on bright ideas, i.e. somebody got an idea and assumed it would work, without basing it on any survey buttons and without surveying the idea on the public. With very few exceptions, the "bright idea" campaigns were not successful. And with very few exceptions, the campaigns that I have seen that were based completely on market research, were very successful. And the few that weren't, weren't because the surveys weren't done well enough or completely enough.

It is even more vital to survey the public concerned with a new company, a new product, or when moving into a new market (a new geographical area, a new type of business, or a new specific type of potential customer). Surveying will tell you how the public would react to the new company or product, what name would create the best desire for the product, what you should charge for it, and what type of media (newspapers, direct mail, TV, etc.) would work best.

In summary, surveys are a vital part of marketing today (have I said the word "vital" enough?). In a world that is increasingly complex, with a high level of competition, with the level of communication overload that we have today, you can't afford to market without them. Surveys provide you with the competitive edge.

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