The New Market Research

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More to the point for small-company owners, surveys and focus groups are tremendously costly and time-consuming. A single focus group can run as high as $20,000, and it can take months--even a year--to collect data and crunch numbers from a massive survey. "By the time you 'know the market,' the market has already changed," says Raymond R. Burke, a market-research expert and a professor of business at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. "We are in the midst of watching a real shift away from survey-based research."

The shift is toward a vastly different breed of innovative--and sometimes outlandish--approaches that seek to unveil the consumer's hidden thoughts. Today's methods borrow liberally from anthropology, cognitive psychology, and--through role-playing--even the performing arts. Rather than invite consumers into artificial testing situations, marketers now charge out into the field to observe and examine consumers at work, in stores, and even at home. And then they analyze their observations.

Taken at their highest level, those methods demand the skills of a thoroughly trained professional marketer. But company owners can appropriate many of the new techniques to uncover an enormous amount of market information on the cheap. Best of all, unlike survey-based studies, that research doesn't require massive numbers of people. The object is to uncover an array of ideas that might help you improve your product. "You don't necessarily care if 20% feel one way and 80% think another," says consumer-behavior specialist Roger D. Blackwell, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio. "You want a range of views."

But don't expect your discoveries to dictate your company's direction. Rather, that sort of research should gently guide product-development and marketing efforts. Oh, there's another catch: to gain a new perspective on your product or service, you must cast aside your own biases--and your divine intuition--about your product or service. If the consumer is to teach you anything, you must be open to the lesson. "Entrepreneurs often mistakenly try to 'fix' the consumer's faulty point of view," explains Blackwell. "But that's not research, that's selling."

For Shamir, it was a breeze. Having been away so long, he couldn't assume much about the American shopper. And that's precisely how the curious entrepreneur must approach market research: detach yourself from the intimate knowledge you have of your product or service. Although it might sound like heresy, try to forget what makes your product irresistible.

Of course, that's far easier to say than do, as Julia Knight, founder of Growing Healthy Inc., a Minneapolis maker of frozen baby food, discovered. Knight had worked as a vice-president of marketing for Minnetonka, a fragrance and cosmetics designer in Minneapolis. When she held her baby-food package in her hands, she couldn't help recalling the hours of toil spent on the most minute design elements. "As a marketer you can spend hours on something that consumers barely even see," she says. "The hardest thing is to become an innocent consumer again."

When Knight began her foray into frozen baby food, in 1989, she was a newly married 31-year-old. To capture the consumer's perspective, Knight would dress in a blue-jeans shirt and leg warmers (it was Minnesota, after all) and then roll through the aisles of local supermarkets. "The dress was critical because you feel much different in casual clothes than if you're wearing high heels and carrying a clipboard," says Knight. "I was literally trying to shake off my marketing self."

But initially, her in-store vigilance led to frustration--even agony. "It's painful to watch consumers pick up your product and then not buy it," warns Knight. It wasn't always easy for her to listen to dissenting consumers. The tendency was to explain to each customer why her baby food should be a best-seller. But she soon learned that "you can't convince customers one at a time to buy your product."

Instead, she immersed herself further in the role of the consumer. Not yet a parent herself, Knight enlisted friends who would go with her on shopping runs, taking their children along. With kids in tow, she began to see why so many parents dread the supermarket: one child screams while the other lurches for the chocolate bars. The research also revealed a potentially fatal flaw: kids don't like the frozen-food section; it's too cold, and parents are under pressure to move speedily through the icy aisles. So Knight sought a warmer climate for her product. She lobbied supermarket managers to place cutaway freezers in the baby-food section.

By 1996, when Growing Healthy was sold, the company had climbed to $2.8 million in revenues. But it had been a constant struggle, and one that reaffirmed the breach between the customer's words and their actions. Now it all makes sense to Knight. "What mother, especially in front of other mothers, would really tell you that she spent more on cat food than on baby food?" she asks. But her observations had shown her otherwise.

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