What Happened?
Successful Strategies, Marketing Misdeeds,
and the Brands that Loved Them
There are a lot of questions CMOs, brand planners, and strategists should be asking about their research. Predictions regarding real engagement and loyalty, and consumers’ in-market behaviors, can be a risky business if you don’t ask the right questions before you commission the research.
Questions like, “Is the research predictive?” “Is it validated?” “Does it really measure emotion? And “does it go beyond check-lists of imagery items and simple correlations?”
Asking those questions up front can help when the time comes to check the research predictions against market results. In short, to answer the ultimate question: What happened?
Winston Churchill wisely noted, “however beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” So as 2012 came to an end, we took his advice and examined how closely what we had said during the year in our Tuesday and Thursday blogs in The Keyhole, actually matched up with the marketplace. In short, to see what happened.
The risk in predicting consumer behavior becomes remarkably less so when one stops relying on brand brainstorming sessions and direct Q&A and employs instead emotionally-based metrics that point the direction to what people will actually do, instead of what they say they are going to do.
Want to know what happened? Then pick a blog and let us tell you a story.
Click a title below to listen to the stories. Additionally, once you have selected a file you may download an MP3 file for each segment, by clicking the download link in the player control bar as shown opposite.
