Vancouver business events

The company founded by Steve (“We don’t do market research”) Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched “Apple Customer Pulse” earlier this year with the aim of helping the company “get the complete picture” through targeted customer feedback. One more nail in the coffin of the Myth of No Market Research at Apple.

• (Download our Market Research Toolbox. Just $9.95 for a PowerPoint 47-slide product showing you how to conduct market research)

Thinks Different. Identify Your Customers’ Needs

Let’s give Jobs credit where it is due: customers may not be able to identify the revolutionary products and innovations that would make their lives so much better. That responsibility is for the “crazy ones”, as Jobs put it – the people who think they can change the world. The people who “think different”.

No Apple customer ever wrote in to Apple in the 1990s and said, “What I really need is a touch-screen phone that allows me to conveniently check my email, search the Internet, record podcasts, play games and, uh, call people.” Nobody was asking for that. (more…)

Investors and entrepreneurs ignore demographics at their peril. Studying demographics is a key part of market research. If you don’t understand who your target customers are, you have no customers (Cue the flailing entrepreneur who shouts “But my product is aimed at everyone!”). You need to look at key markers like age, sex, ethnicity and more when examining buying behavior. If your customers are businesses you need to look at where they are in the value chain, how much of the product do they buy and when  and who makes the decision within the company to buy these products.

Using Demographic Data Strategically to Capitalize on Buying Behavior

• (Check out our Industry and Competitive Market Research eBook. Download for just $19.95)

For instance, development companies for the mobile app industry would be very interested in a new Pew Internet survey that shows 50 percent of all US adults have apps on their cellphones. When you break it down further, you see that 62 percent of adults aged 25-44 have smartphones. As Dan Rowinsky notes on ReadWriteMobile,  if you were thinking of aiming a new app at teens on the go, you might want to adapt your product knowing that only 38 percent of teens have smartphones – and their parents aged 45-54 only have a marginally higher adoption rate.

The restaurant industry pays very close attention to demographic data – at least, the restaurants that stay in business do. Take for example, the case detailed in Inc. magazine of an Italian Lebanese pizzeria owner named Antonio Swad.

In 1986, he moved from Ohio to Dallas to open a traditional pizzeria. Realizing that  he was located in an area with a large concentration of Hispanic consumers, he changed his eatery’s name to Pizza Patrón and focused his marketing efforts on the Latino community.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make. Swad–who is of Italian and Lebanese descent–says he was completely unversed in Latino culture when he made the strategic decision to pursue that market. To attract Latino customers to his stores, he hired bilingual employees for customer interaction positions, dedicated time and money to developing a large community service presence and, most controversially, allowed customers to pay in pesos. The shift in focus paid off. Today, Pizza Patrón operates 95 stores in six states, with 13 more in the works.

When collecting data, it is perfectly reasonable to take into account the demographics and buying behavior of past customers. However, past behavior is no guarantor of future results. A careful study of the demographics of your target market will not only help you develop products and sales processes to cater to your current customers, but also help you adapt to the marketplace of tomorrow.

Want to learn more about market research? Register for my workshop happening at SFU Harbour Centre on December 7, Accelerating Business Value with Market Research

I’m giving a workshop on Accelerating Business Value with Market Research on Wednesday, December 7 at SFU Harbour Centre in downtown Vancouver. This is an ideal workshop for managers at all levels. Bonus: sign up by November 15  and you’ll get a  $80 discount off the regular price.

Effective Market Research Techniques for Entrepreneurs, Market Segmentation, Business Decision-Making and More

What will you learn? You’ll get tools and insights on how to use research techniques to accelerate business growth. Learn how to:

• Scope the market size of your market using 7 highly effective techniques.
• Segment your markets and position your products or services.
• Generate new product ideas, test concepts and products and measure market performance.
• Gather competitor information.
• Do market research to help you make better decisions.

The workshop’s speakers will include:

• Lyn Blanchard of Creekstone Consulting Inc.
• Matt Shepherd , Mustel Research Group (questionnaire design)
• David Humphrey, Jostle Corporation (usability studies)
• James Mazur, President, GoneFishing Consulting Inc. (consumer market research)
• Dean Prelazzi, VP BC Innovation Council (research for decision-making)
• Jason Cyr, President Tiipz (Social Media Research).

Need more reasons to come to the workshop? Participants receive a 100 page booklet on market research, hear from expert speakers, learn from case studies and much, much more.

Register today for Accelerating Business Value with Market Research

A dangerous myth that has developed particularly among technology industry entrepreneurs is that market research is a waste of time; they point to Apple icons Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. They’re wrong – even though Jobs practically evangelized on this point:

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple’s retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”

The cult of personality and Apple’s unquestioned success has led many companies, not only in the tech sector, to think that they can do without market research. Even worse, some have deduced wrongly from Jobs’ insight that market research can actually harm more than it helps.

• (Special Offer. Download our Market Research PowerPoint Toolbox, giving you critical tips for conducting market research on your industry and competitors so you can win over investors.)

Market Research Leads to Business Success and Attracts Investors

Sorry to burst some bubbles, but Apple does do market research. As a result, they have had more business success, according to Forbes magazine:

The reality is that Apple listens very closely and systematically to its customers. Apple is one of the premier exponents of the Net Promoter Score for systematically listening to customers and managing its business in response to what they hear. Fortunately, with the wonderful new book being published in September 2011, The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World by Fred Reichheld with Rob Markey, we have a blow-by-blow account of exactly how Apple does listen to its customers. Listening to customers is at the center of Apple’s business processes.

Fred Reichheld’s The Ultimate Question, which was published in 2006, was a comprehensive account of best available expertise on measuring customer delight—the new bottom line of 21st Century businesses. It showed how asking a single question, “How likely is it that you will recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?” on a 0-10 point scale, and tracking the ratio of “promoters” to detractors—the Net Promoter Score or NPS—was the best and most practical single measure of customer delight.

NPS is critical for the daily management of Apple’s 300-plus stores and translates into very measurable ROI: “Where a typical electronics store averages $1,200 per square foot in sales, mature Apple stores exceed $6,000 per square foot—the highest productivity in retailing of any kind.” That doesn’t just come from Apple being Apple; it comes from listening to customers and adapting their business processes so they can keep those customers happy – and sell more Apple products.

Want to learn more about market research? Register for the Market Research v2.0 workshop happening December 7 at SFU Harbour Centre