Sitting in an office poring over customer survey results in order to develop the next great product or service idea is no longer considered sufficient marketing methodology. Successful marketing today calls for a more active, applied approach. Moreover, it often requires going beyond traditional marketing research and undertaking some alternative measures.

The goal of marketing research, quite simply, is to determine what people want so that you can give it to them. The tried and true techniques designed to gather such customer insights work fine when customers know what they want and can clearly communicate their needs. The biggest obstacle, however, is that often customers don’t always realize what their needs are or know how to express them.

This dilemma likewise presents the biggest marketing opportunities. If your organization can uncover an obscure or indistinct customer understanding and crystallize it to become a breakthrough product or service, it stands to gain a highly competitive market advantage. The key to discovery is to take some unconventional marketing steps to uncover those important radical insights.

Out-of-the-box research

There are several methods for unearthing customer insights and most of them fall outside conventional marketing textbooks. The overall mission is to find a piece of understanding that your competitors may not have recognized or have yet to find value in. A great place to start is by questioning the norm.

Marketing opportunities have long presented themselves when companies buck the system and ask “why.” For instance, when Henry Ford built the first automobiles, drivers could have any color they wanted so long as it was black. The first company to question that logic surely created a competitive advantage. By challenging the status quo within your industry, your organization may discover an obvious but overlooked opportunity to break through.

While the drive to deviate from the norm can result in new insights, so can tapping into diverse perspectives as a way to cull ideas. To broaden the view, an organization may need to expand its surveyors. Recruit individuals with different roles, backgrounds, and experiences, and set them to work at exploring new opportunities. For instance, send your engineers out for face-to-face meetings with your customers. Your chances of uncovering something unseen or undervalued will exponentially improve when both “insiders” and “outsiders” are part of the marketing team. Often, an outsider can be the first to recognize an obvious insight or spot an opportunity your insiders have taken for granted. 

Another effective method of zeroing in on a customer insight is through observation. While a survey reflects what individuals say, an entirely different thing altogether can be what they actually do. Therefore, send a team out to observe people consuming your product or using your services. Watch consumers make choices about what products to purchase. Shedding light on actual customer consumption versus simply acknowledging customer attributes can result in highly illuminating insights.  

There are also tools of understanding that marketers should consider which complement and enrich customer observation practices. Research that includes elements of human psychology, behavioral science, societal attitudes, and cultural or ethnic awareness add to the likelihood of better customer insights.

Dial in to the dialogue

The information age can be a boon to any company wanting to discover new insights, and the Internet is fertile ground for marketers, giving them access to customer conversations. Newsgroups, chat rooms, blogs, and a host of discussion lists can be tapped for ideas, trends, and insights. Indeed, some of the biggest “aha” moments can result from an inadvertently overheard conversation or from a seemingly inconsequential remark.

Magazine interviews and articles can also be mined for inspiration. Take special note of readers’ letters or editorials for clues into what consumers need or want, like or dislike.

Primed for success

Discovering customer insights, however practical or radical, is frequently the key to developing a new or better competitive advantage. By supplementing traditional marketing research with tactics that are more in line with guerrilla marketing, your company will be better positioned to find and leverage what your competitors only find to be elusive.