In 2014, we tested the first version of our market research software Placedise with many potential clients and partners.
There were many interesting insights and also new discoveries, which pushed us to some pivoting and the next version.
However, those very early learning were quite special and could help others — especially within the market research industry.
I somehow pointed them out in the more complex article about Placedise (you might want to read this one first), but I want to share some more details here.
💄 Brands want to be deceived
Initially, we evaluated the quality of a measure on a scale from 0 to 100 %.
As stated by Dr. Ferdinand Froning to us, that is basically not usable.
Not because it would be wrong, but because no one wants quality below 100 %.
Since the top was the absolute maximum, which also was quite hard to achieve, all managers would constanly question, whether our users make a good job.
As a result, we extended the scale to 140 %, so the probability of being above the 100 % increased. This was somehow a life-saving advice (thanks for that), but stayed one of our major problems.
We built a market research solution to measure quality.
No matter the scale, users would almost always fail to achieve the maximum. And this type of transparency is only wanted by the CEO. Everybody else loves a higher degree of intransparency.
Because, let’s face it, most managers always want the 100 % — not matter the underlying logic and background.
Therefore, companies rather focus on empty KPI over valuable ones.
With “empty“ I mean, for example, explicit numbers like reach of a measure (could be clicks).
This is a nice KPI, because it is usually (in detail) not directly connectable to any action.
At the same time, it is more or less useless. You can reach 1 billion people. If they all hate your message, you would kill your company. Reach 100 with the right story and you might already earn a fortune.
See the problem?
This brings me to the conclusion, that brands (meaning their marketing managers here) in most cases cannot be interested in any quality measurement.
And this applies even more for media agencies.
🤡 Brands don’t do serious market research
But what about market research?
Don’t big corporates pay a lot of money for market research, which is basically the same — quality evaluation?
Yes and no.
Yes, market research is expensive and companies pay for it. But usually only if it benefits the personal mission of the people buying the study.
We asked all of this explicitly when talking to the responsible manager at a leading car manufacturer and one of the biggest product placement spenders.
They did market research once every 3–4 years, while nobody was interested in the results.
It got rather done to somehow keep internal budgets — so they did everything to make it look shiny.
And since everybody knew this, market research constantly lost even more trust.
Learning: Almost no one does market research to really understand the market. If done at all, it is done to support a specific agenda.
Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.
(Winston Churchill)
🧩 There is no 1 “decision maker” in B2B
In my consulting internship and at a sales training, I once learned that you always need to find and talk to the decision maker.
The one person, who makes the call in the end. Everybody else is useless.
Please do not believe this — especially not when working in big corporate B2B sales!
Of course, it depends on your product or service.
If you only sell fancy PowerPoint slides to the C-Level (aka being a management consultant), it is enough convincing the CEO to pay the huge bill.
However, if your product gets used by other people, it is way more complicated.
The final decision maker might be the CEO (or other higher management) and, in our case, this person also was always excited about Placedise.
However, he/she does not need to deal with the product directly and (worse) cannot evaluate whether the solution is good or not.
So, he/she sent this down to the Head of Marketing (or Research).
This person now had a completely different agenda, and if you targeted the CEO first, your pitch is lost now.
This person reports to the CEO, that your product is useless and the CEO has no other chance than to trust that opinion.
Putting it in a nutshell, there is not 1 decision maker, but rather at least 3 levels, which you need to convince at the same time:
- The users: Does it help their daily work (should be less work without risk of being replaced)?
- Their manager: Does it support his/her goals (getting promoted) and processes (deliver more with less)?
- The big boss: Does it bring value to the company and therefore his/her goals (aka profit)?
They all listen to and trust on each other, while everybody has his/her own agenda.
We have learned this here and also seen it in all later steps, while I also experienced that in my later corporate career from the other side.
👶 Keep it simple
This sounds obvious, but there is a big difference whether you build a weather app or re-invent Excel.
Since our initial case was placed within a scientific market research environment, our “product competitor” somehow maybe was SPSS.
We had already simplified this by a big lot!
However, we learned that this might have been wrong right from the beginning.
But when we are not building for market researchers, but marketing managers and sales agents, we would need to re-think our product from scratch.
And if the big asset and USP, our algorithm, required specific data to work — how could we make the application simple without killing the algorithm?
The less data you provide to a machine, the worse its ability to solve the problem.
Therefore, KISS, but mind your target audience.
Simple for one, usually is not simple for the other!
Well, we made way more observations along the way.
It’s been a ride.
If you want to read more about it, check the full story at the respective article:
My full Movie-like Founder Story — without the Happy End
Enjoy!
