Here’s what I learned this week

Kindness wins out in the end.

As much as I sometimes come off a bit rough, at the end of the day all everyone’s trying to do should be to help each other out and improve the way we leave the world even if just in a small way.

Sometimes business is more about connection than just making money.

This is a response we got from our weekly email for the Underwear Brand -

Customer Research is Ongoing

I heard from a few past clients through post mortems that they felt like they got enough data and they didn’t need our software anymore as a result.

This is actually a larger issue with how we currently do market research.

We commission a study, collect data, analyze the data, then build strategy around it.

But customer research is actually an ongoing, everchanging, living, breathing, thing.

Yet we treat is as if it has a short lifespan capable of being figured out then trusted for the next 12+ months before we do another survey.

This is just plain wrong and not the way things work in the field.

Opinions change, just look at all this political polling right now in the US.

Guess what these brands didn’t do?

Ask different questions.

Place different forms by different sources.

Logic map differently based on different data trends.

This confuses me, as an inquisitive person, sometimes I find myself just asking visitors to our websites different questions.

In truth, I need to do more of it, but the insights I’ve gained from running even small market research projects have influenced top performing creatives that have generated tons of revenue.

Marketers are bad at asking questions that might undermine their underlying biases

This came out in a conversation I had with Sam McNerney the other day.

People just don’t really understand what questions to ask or how to ask them.

Sam’s built an entire business on helping companies do customer research and works really hard on helping companies ask the right questions.

The problem with most of the clients we work with is that they aren’t sure what to ask or why to ask it, they aren’t sure how collecting data can influence their marketing strategy or provide them with greater insights to grow their business.

They just don’t know because no one taught them how to ask questions, gain feedback, and apply the feedback.

We can’t fix this as a software company, we can fix this as a consulting company that leverages out software to do market research.

There is also fear…

When software connects answers to revenue, it shines light on existing marketing approaches.

While other software just collects data and generalizes an impact, we provide contextualized data matched with revenue.

Everyone at a business is responsible for creating value, that value is revenue.

When an existing strategy that has had substantial budget spent on it turns out to not be producing results and has conflicting data most of the time a brand should want to see that data, but in reality what it really does is force the marketing team to re-evaluate the work they’ve been doing.

I’ve run into this multiple times in my career.

Top marketers hire externally to push agendas that they can’t get buy in from internally.

If your higher ups don’t like a marketing strategy, you get a second opinion from an outside agency that you’re essentially paying to tell your company your idea.

When it’s brought from an outside opinion it comes with more sway.

So then the project starts, the agency looks for you to provide the strategy for them to execute on and if it’s a success, you look great, if it’s a failure, you throw the agency under the bus and keep your job.

That’s the way that marketing works, it’s the dirty secret that no one readily admits to but it’s the way things go.

Why transparency matters now more than ever

The truth is most businesses aren’t transparent with their employees.

Most employees don’t have access to the financials of the business, in fact, most businesses don’t even post the salaries they are paying people.

Roles, responsibilities, salaries, all these things are shrouded in secrecy.

It doesn’t benefit anyone.

When employees see how much a business spends on ads in a given time period, they start asking a lot of questions.

When businesses at scale are looking for 1x ROAS it really puts things into perspective with how they value the work of an individual employee’s contribution to the business v. the perceived value in advertising spend.

It doesn’t feel good.

The over reliance on digital advertising is slowly eroding the self worth of employees generally.

The Takeaway

We’re fast approaching an age where follower count is the only thing that will matter and the need to constantly be producing content to gain more followers will be the only thing that creates your wealth as an employee.

If you are not a content creator, then your perceived value will be reduced over time because we are officially in an attention economy.

-Jon

Catch up on past posts: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com