StupidMarketingStudies
I have never been a great believer in marketing
studies ever since a marketing study we had done for the Sens showed that we
could sell 100,000 season tickets in
It turns out that if you ask people whether they
would buy Season Tickets before you get the team, pretty much everybody agrees
that they would purchase them at (almost) any price. Actually reaching into
your pocket and taking cash out is a quite different thing though.
Well, at yesterday's IM meeting for Exploriem.org
members, I asked the attendees what's a good time for this kind of forum and,
guess what, they all said that 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EST on Fridays was pretty
good. We were worried that a lot of members can't make it during the day.
Immediately after I hit the enter button, I realized it was a pretty stupid
question/survey.
It reminds me of a CFL (Canadian Football League)
marketing survey done a few years ago by the BC Lions. They were concerned
about doing Saturday games during the summer when lots of folks go off to their
cottages. So they asked people who attended the game what they thought and, by
golly, the survey showed that the folks at Saturday games during the summer
were pretty happy about it.
Duh.
Clearly, both the BC Lions and Exploriem.org need to
ask people who weren't there the question. So, can the people who
weren't there tell brittaherrmann@exploriem.org
what the best times are for you to participate in open IM sessions lasting 90
minutes; the choices are:
Early AM,
PM,
Evenings,
M-F,
S-S.
In WWII, the Ops Research guys looked at where
returning planes had been hit by flak so they would know where to reinforce the
fuselage. After a while they realized how dumb that was—they needed to be
examining their downed planes (a lot harder since most of them were in the sea
or in Nazi controlled territory) not the returning ones.
I am not saying market research isn't worthwhile;
what I am saying is a lot of market research isn't worthwhile.
I detest marketing research that says things like,
"Geez, if we can just get 1% of this market, why, we'll be a $100m a year
business!" Now that's crap. Sales are built one sale at a time, one client
at a time.
Most marketing research can not predict what your sales are going to be. You create sales in the
trenches and not by looking at graphs and spreadsheets.
One guerrilla marketing study we did a long time ago
worked pretty well for us. We were thinking of going into the mini office
business in the 1980s (which we eventually did becoming the largest supplier of
mini offices in eastern
Bruce Firestone,
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/GuerrillaMarketingAndFinance/GuerrillaMarketing.htm