Ask questions first - market surveys don’t work
I know a little about many things, and a lot about a few of them. When I need to learn about a product’s benefits, nothing takes the place of interviews. Surveys may give you general trends, but they won’t tell you why your customer needed your product, or what it does for him. Conversations with customers will tell you that.
In fact, most people are eager to tell you why they like a good product.
But first, you need to figure out what to ask. Then you need to talk to experts and customers (not always the same thing).
If you’re working in a company, your management will help with the people to ask. If you’re a consultant, your clients will do it. Heck, they may even help with the questions. But the best source of questions may be your own brain cells.
I haven’t found any magic bullet for choosing questions. I usually focus my practice on areas like semiconductor electronics that I know from career experience. But when I’m faced with a subject I don’t know well, there’s no substitute for online research and actually using the product. I just follow my nose.
When I wrote web copy for Boinx Software’s FotoMagico, a digital image slideshow program, I knew a little about the market. I’d already suffered with PowerPoint, and I knew how put together a quick slideshow with FotoMagico. For the fine points, I read everything on the Boinx web site, and played with the program for a couple days.
Then I thought about why a customer chose the program, what competitive advantages it gave, and what features made it a must-have product.
Boinx put me in touch with their technical support engineer and five professional-level customers. I got some great answers. But I also got information I hadn’t expected.
Everyone mentioned how fast a show could be assembled, so I knew what the primary advantage was. But the emotional impact of smooth transitions with perfectly-synched music, the pan and zoom capabilities rivaling professional video editing suites - those responses were sparked by the original questions.
I always get something I don’t explicitly ask for. That’s what makes interviews so powerful.
In a blog exchange about marketing to engineers with advertising/PR agency McClenahan Bruer last February [2007], I made the point that surveys would never tell you what the customer values most. I acknowledged the agency’s point about interviews being limited to a few customers. I just couldn’t agree with their methods.
If you’re mounting an advertising campaign with mass-market techniques, surveys may tell you how old your customers are, their interests, and what they read.
But specifics - their special job challenges, biggest career problems, what gets them out of bed to go to work - won’t come from surveys. You need to ask them.
The best way around the one-on-one interview limitation may be a blog. Before a blog will work, you need to have readership. But it will be a targeted audience, through readers’ own self-selection. And you’ll get answers from more than a few people.