Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

If you do market research, such as tracking studies, they are easy to adjust so you can measure the impact of overall campaigns. Any decent market research company could do this easily, and can help you measure how much awareness, interest, trial, loyalty, etc., you have.

If you have a new product, you need awareness, so put your emphasis there. If you have an old product, you are most interested in knowing if you are keeping your customers, so focus on loyalty, and how fast it may be dropping. Your campaign objectives will follow pretty logically.

It seems like a better investment to spend market research dollars on the overall impact of your communications program.

You can use simple productivity yard sticks for individual elements -- readership scores for ads, coverage analysis for PR, response rates for DM, unique visitors for web sites, the list goes on. Low cost monitoring tools to give you confidence that that particular element is doing its job.

Unless you are spending mega budgets, it is usually a waste of money to use market research to measure the impact of an individual tactic. If you are worried about, say a large print or broadcast campaign, you can pretest it for a lower cost.

So many things influence the customer buying decision, using research to measure a tactic or campaign element in isolation doesn't tell you much, but it does cost a lot. The campaign could be great, but issues in the market channel so bad, and you end up spending money looking at the wrong things.

Don Schultz and his crew at Northwestern are gurus at this and have some interesting metrics on marcom measurements.