Know Who You're Dealing With

In the competitive environment of a down economy, you should be focused on two very volatile groups:

1. the travelers you’d like to court; and
2. those really competing for their time and money

Tools like consumer market research and competitive analysis can help in understanding those two groups. In a perfect world, we’d leverage sophisticated segmentation systems, enhance CRM data, and build tight models of the market and competitive environment. In lean times, it’s not easy to win the fight for those dollars, so research simply HAS to take a backseat. Right?

Not if you’re smart about it. Staying on top of your competitive framework and target consumer should never take a back seat. In fact, it is exactly this knowledge that should DRIVE your strategies, and help you build a higher quality marketing operation. Fortunately, the right process and approach can answer a lot of your questions.

Competitively speaking, we want to know who’s doing what: Who am I really competing with? How are my competitors positioned? What strategies do they employ? What does the consumer think about their approach? How can I shift from monkey-see-monkey-do to a more proactive mindset that will make gains against the market?

To understand the consumers, we have another set of questions: Who are our best prospects, really? How do I leverage the information I have to reveal insight into the consumers we want? What can make us more relevant, to “push their buyer button?”

A lot of questions can be answered by following a few basic steps:

• Assemble your knowledge base – past marketing plans, creative materials, industry research, sales data – anything that can inform decisions about your consumer or competitors.
• Mine your key management team for “institutional intelligence” via a focused, guided discussion, and understand what you all know, collectively.
• Undertake a comprehensive secondary research program. Internet research can provide helpful market segmentation, market structure, and market sizing information BEFORE we decide to commission expensive primary research.
• Identify any syndicated or industry reports that can provide baseline market and consumer data, and explore purchasing it (usually for a fraction of doing it yourself). At the least, you’ll begin to identify key performance indicators, and learn who’s measuring what.
• Really analyze your destination, it’s origins, perceived equities, core values, and how you’ve tried to position your brand in the minds of consumers. Getting to the “truth” of this issue is one of the most important steps in developing a quality brand position for the future.
• Talk to your customers. Before you determine that you need a quantitative study with consumers, talk to a few dozen real people first (key staff, profitably customers, non-customers, even detractors.) Develop a structured discussion guide, be prepared to take copious notes, and call them. You’d be surprised how much insight you can get from this simple undertaking.

Following this approach will yield significant glimpses into your competitive environment and the heart of the consumers you want to reach. Those insights really drive major improvements in your positioning, messages, and media strategy, and go a long way towards improving the quality of your marketing program. But stay focused. Tangents are dangerous, and tend to drag the process out, and generate distractions.