A Marketer’s Guide To Agile Development – Survey Says…

The customer base was shrinking, revenues were falling. Sales reps feared their product was losing relevance in the marketplace. Company executives reassured them it wasn’t true, market research indicated product usage was steady, even increasing in some areas!

But the research was wrong. The decline was real, and permanent. Why such a huge disconnect between the market research results and reality?

They surveyed consumers with publicly listed landlines,  at home during weekdays, with the time and willingness to take a long survey. This method had been used for decades, and could be reliably extrapolated over the general population. But the world had changed.  Those folks now skewed older, and were not a representative sample of the marketplace.

In the case above, the product was phone books. Older consumers were still using them at the same rate. But younger consumers weren’t – and were also less likely to have landlines, publicly list their phone numbers, spend weekdays at home, and agree to take a long survey. That’s why the surveys (which were otherwise conducted with scientifically accepted methodology) let the executives keep believing they didn’t have a problem. They told their sales reps to defend the product by explaining to prospects that their perception about product relevance was wrong – they had the surveys to prove it. That did not turn out well.

When the real world indicators don’t look anything like the marketing research, defending the research is usually NOT a winning strategy. Unearth the worrying trends and inconvenient truths about your products. Then develop a roadmap to deal with them.