Yellowwood has recently published a white paper on the topic entitled 'How to Know More About your Market than Anyone Else - The Guide to Relevance', which explores what it takes for an organisation to be relevant.
The foundation for relevance is learning more about your customers. However, research and customer insights teams are often stuck in a dark back office with little interaction with the business, marketing and brand teams. With such a vast and valuable array of information to provide and potential to unlock, it's perplexing that marketers aren't utilising what is literally under their noses.
It's therefore time for marketers to drive learning in their organisations. Marketers have to learn to get insight out of the back office and embed it across the business.
Given this, how do marketers build learning organisations? In developing the white paper, Yellowwood identified five easy ways to do this. Marketers need to remember to L.E.A.R.N!
Listen to your customers, as well as those who interact with your brand. For example, Unilever has a number of initiatives in place to ensure that market insights are relayed across the organisation. These include workshop interventions with the trade market and authentic customer immersion sessions.
Empower everyone to share insight regularly. Companies often forget about the powerful insights that are available under their noses - insights from their own staff! Red Bull has realised the value of having an internal 'insight bank' and explained that 90% of their ideas come from their people and they therefore run regular cross-functional insight sharing and ideas sessions internally.
Ask why. We have to seek to understand what motivates our customers; it's not only about what they are doing. Domino's was an example used in the Yellowwood white paper. After Domino's experienced declining sales, they embarked on a qualitative research initiative to understand why their customers were not choosing to buy their pizza. The research yielded a number of negative product issues such as 'cardboard bases'; 'cheese that tasted like plastic' and 'tomato sauce void of all flavour'. Domino's went on to address each of these consumer concerns; and in doing this they improved the product and subsequently improved their sales.
Risk it. You have to experiment and create continuous feedback loops. Essentially, if your offering is based on a great insight, it actually can't go too horribly wrong if you risk it. KFC's campaigns are highly relevant, localised and as a result are therefore realistically 'gritty'. The white paper highlights KFC's Sithi Salute Kleva campaign that is an ode to the natural born hustlers in South Africa. Although the campaign borders on being risqué, it's based on real life customer eco-systems, great insight and thus has been well received.
No dead slides. How often do we conduct customer studies and they only live in a PowerPoint deck? To build learning organisations, it's critical that these studies are brought to life across the business in the form of visuals, tangible and digestible customer profiles. For example, a few years back MTN developed a Pan'"African segmentation model. To bring the segments alive, they created table talkers, posters, used multimedia and held workshops with all staff from leadership to front line employees. So if a customer in a particular segment walks in the door, staff can immediately identify who they are and what they are most likely to need.
Marketers understand the value of insight and learning, but the statistical jargon, numbers and raw data behind the insight scares many and simply puts them off. This shouldn't be the case - some of the greatest campaigns and marketing initiatives are born from the simplest of customer insights which can come from anyone in the organisation! Marketers need to think about customer insight generation as a critical part of on-the-job learning and it shouldn't be limited to those in the research areas. It's therefore time for marketers to drive learning in their organisations - it's essential that they bring the 'in' back into insights.
For more information, please contact Yellowwood on +27 (0)11 268 5211, email az.oc.doowy@ofni or visit our website: www.ywood.co.za.
