Measuring Marketing

August 17, 2010

In our recent survey of shopping centre managers, we found that 80% of shopping centres were commissioning advertising to promote themselves. What surprised us was that only 50% of shopping centres were measuring how effective their advertising was.

Marketing budgets can be enormous, with huge TV ad campaigns, but without market research it is impossible to tell if your message is getting to the right people and if it is influencing their behaviour.

Lord Leverhulme famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half.” Without this type of feedback on marketing campaigns some shopping centres will never know.

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Posted by Jacob Collins

It all Ads up

August 3, 2010

It’s good to see ITV back in the black, benefitting from a general increase in advertising spend.  As the economy has been recovering, firms are reinvesting in their marketing budgets, but are very much conscious of getting value for money.

We at Business Blueprints offer an independent assessment of how effective marketing campaigns are.  A clear indication of the penetration, awareness and relevance of a campaign that is not prejudiced by self-interest, gives you the information you need to judge the performance of your marketing budgets.

In a recent survey, we found that whilst 8-out-of-10 respondents were spending money on advertising, only 50% were conducting any research about the effect of their advertising, and only 35% were getting any customer feedback at all.

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Posted by Jacob Collins

Don’t just do it

July 30, 2010

I read with interest in Retail Week a piece on B&Q and how they had embraced the internet for their on line research.

Using their own social media application ‘B&Q Voice’ they had generated their own panel of 80,000 customers which had allowed them to generate 2-way dialogue with their shoppers in the form of both quant surveys and through focus groups.

It is encouraging to see the research aspects of on line communities being made use of in addition to the ‘one to many’ broadcasting which seems to be the norm from many retailers.

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Posted by Paul Latimer

Whatever next? It’s PyjamaGate

January 29, 2010

In amongst all the doom and gloom in our world it is great to see we still have a sense of perspective and the ability to focus on the real issues.

It seems that the wearing of pyjamas has become a hot topic for one supermarket in South Wales where customers have been pushing their trolleys dressed in their finest sleepwear. This of course raises a good question. Should shoppers be able to dress as they like or does Tesco have the right to dictate what their customers do or do not wear? Where does this lead on to? Banning football shirts but allowing rugby shirts, allowing jeans but not if they are too low slung?

Thankfully once again research comes to the rescue with the clarification that footwear must be worn and and nightwear is not permitted – a decision arrived at (according to the Tesco’s spokesperson) by “listening to customer feedback”.

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Posted by Paul Latimer

The Power of Facebook

December 21, 2009

Anybody who had any doubt of the power of marketing on Facebook has had an object lesson this week from a couple from Essex. Jon and Tracy Morter successfully campaigned using only a single medium, gathering nearly half a million fans on their Facebook page. Taking a song originally released 17 years ago and beating the 4-month long marketing campaign driven single from Joe McElderry shows the real power of reaching people. Taken in conjunction with the fact that this campaign was only one week long, and had no budget at all the results are truly remarkable.

This may now mark a true shift in UK businesses perceptions about online and social media. As we’ve already said in other blogs, more and more companies are using social media to reach and understand their customers. This is what research has always been designed to do, but the advantage of social media is that it enables the possibility of personalised two-way feedback between a brand and their customers. 2010 will be a year that using social media will become a mainstream business strategy, with more brands realising the huge potential that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter bring.

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Posted by Jacob Collins

Are those my numbers?

June 30, 2009

It is always pleasing when a client actually quotes us, and in the Daily Telegraph recently we read just that. In an article about Liverpool, Iain MacGillivray, Centre Manager for St Johns Shopping Centre, quoted some average spend figures directly from surveys that we have undertaken in his centre. This helped to show that even in the midst of a recession and with the recent opening of Liverpool One, the new 42-acre shopping centre on their doorstep, average spend per shopper party had risen by around £2 per trip from £24.96 in Spring 08 to £27.05 in Spring 09. This is great for Iain and St Johns since it proves independently of anything he thinks what has actually been going on. It is critical at this time with only footfall as an indicator of performance which has a +/- accuracy of 10% and random feedback from retailers that you know how well you are performing – especially when the pressure from underperforming retailers is probably at its peak. There is nothing more effective and powerful than being able to confidently talk about your business and be able to quantify your customers behaviour and their opinions and thus help the retailers in your centre to understand their context and their potential.

No hunches, no gut feel, no finger in the air, just good solid facts direct from your own shoppers. On a personal level it is particularly pleasing to see just exactly what insights we can bring through our unique brand of shopping centre research. I can’t think of a better advert for us, thank you Iain.

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Posted by Paul Latimer

Top 10 tips for Market Research

May 7, 2009

One of the events of our month is the arrival of Management Today magazine, within which they never fail to deliver a list of top tips.  On the basis of if you can’t beat them join them, here is a top 10 to do list for marketing research projects:

  1. Understand the client’s needs: sounds simple but it is important to recognise the needs of different stakeholders and to be aware of the demands on them. 
  2. Play back the brief: the brief may not always be written down, yes really, so it is vital to confirm back to the client and/or budget owner exactly what you will be doing.
  3. Clarify deliverables: whilst you may visualise the output, this may not be as clear to all parties, so confirming what everyone will get is vital.
  4. Develop a step-by-step plan: all the clichés about planning are true and none more so in research, and there probably can never be too much detail.
  5. Remain objective: the purpose of market research is to deliver an independent, expert opinion based on credible, rigorous  questioning and analysis of your customers. 
  6. Track the whole process: regular updates are vital to the successful management of the project.
  7. Clarify who does what: make sure everyone involved knows exactly what is expected of them.
  8. Accept that things can go wrong: stuff goes wrong, don’t be surprised by it, but do ensure that you have alternatives in place.
  9. Keep your client informed: we’re all inquisitive, so  make sure there is a mechanism for keeping the brand owner aware of progress.
  10. Learn from it: A de-brief at the end of the project is a must to ensure constant improvement.

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Posted by Paul Latimer

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