Need marketplace insights? The answer is obvious.

Ask the right questions of the right people then take a little time to think, ponder and discuss and… voila!

You’d be surprised how much money and effort gets spent before getting some clear insights into what you’re looking to achieve.

While larger scale organisations can invest in research and gathering marketplace intelligence, cost is a major hurdle for SMEs, who numerically-speaking form the majority of the New Zealand landscape, and who seemingly rely on generic demographics, sales data and a lot of gut-feel.

To tease this out a little further… in our experience, a lot of the briefs we get for branding and/or advertising assignments are based on internal reports. These have gathered information intended for other purposes (often ‘sales’ focused), and have then been tweaked before being pushed across the table as a ‘creative’ or ‘strategic’ brief. For example, sales data that’s used to define prime customers typically has little to say about behaviours, motivations or attitudes held by those customers.

True, it’s not possible to intimately know every customer, but there is a lot that can be done to gather ‘enough’ information to provide greater confidence for marketing investments.

In 1916, the author Robert R. Updegraff wrote a short story entitled ‘Obvious Adams’. The story of a young man working his way up in the advertising business, it was hailed by gurus such as David Olgivy for presenting basic practices in a fresh way. The practices it highlighted focused on minimalism – Obvious Adams had a knack for finding insights that had been missed by others because they were too … well … obvious. Obvious Adams may have been a fictional character but the underlying issues are still very real.

Over the years we’ve consistently deployed a ‘reconnaissance’ step at the start of almost every assignment. And it never fails to enlighten the project in some way… sometimes radically!
Given that we’re somewhat removed from client core management, we connect informally with key stakeholders, influencers and sample audiences – being light on our feet, our methodologies are quick, streamlined and focused. Believing that good questions lead to good answers, the rest tends to start falling into place.

So, the next time you’re about to take the plunge and invest in: an advertising campaign; branding; sales-promotion; social-marketing; product development; direct-marketing; internal team communications… take a breath and let us run a quick reconnaissance on your behalf. The benefits should be obvious!