Effective advertising that increases sales, profits, and awareness is based on customer research. It's important to know who the very specific target audience is, what message they are listening for, and where they are looking for that message.

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	Robert Gordman is the author of Secrets of the Super Sweet Spot: Building Sustained, Profitable Growth and The Must-Have Customer: 7 Steps to Winning the Customer You Haven't Got.

The only problem facing advertising professionals is there’s a huge difference between ordinary research and great research. Ordinary research yields ''nice-to-know'' information but nothing relevant that can guide decisions. Great research is insightful and provides the basis for effective action. No matter the industry or the size of the company, research must follow four rules in order to be effective.

Rule 1: Ask the Right People.

Research must be confined to a company’s core customers and must-have customers. (Core customers are a company’s most loyal customers, the ones who love the services or products sold by the company and are willing to pay a fair price. Must-have customers are people who could become core customers, but they currently do business with the competition.) Asking anyone other than core and must-have customers will taint the data and could send the company down a completely
wrong — and potentially very dangerous — path.

The researcher should start the survey by asking “knockout” questions. Getting all the way through the survey only to find out that the person isn’t a core or must-have is a tremendous waste of time and resources.

For instance, let’s say your national grocery-store client wants to know if it should increase its selection of fresh, frozen, and boxed organic foods and advertise those brands in its weekly advertising circular. You’ll only want to talk to people who already purchase organic food or who intend to begin buying organic brands. Questioning people who don’t care about organic food won’t give you the information you need. In this instance good “knockout” questions would include:

• Do you currently buy organic food?
• If so, where do you buy it?
• If you don’t buy organic food now, do you intend to begin purchasing it within the next 90 days?

If any of the answers is “no,” the researcher should say “thank you very much” and go on to the next call.

Rule 2: Ask the Right Questions.

In order to formulate the questions, you need to have a good idea of the kind of answers you’re looking for. As an example, a local high-end electronics company wants to know where people who purchase products similar to the ones it sells are buying now and why. This will enable it to study the competition and steal away customers who are its must-have customers.

With that as the goal, the research questions can be structured in a way that will provide the information. To generate the least biased results, blind surveys are the best. After qualifying that the respondent has purchased high-end electronics in the past six months, questions to ask should include:

• Where did you make your purchases?
• What other stores did you shop at before buying?
• Why did you select the store you did?
• If that store didn’t have what you were looking for, where would you go next?
• If you wanted better-quality electronics, where would you shop?
• Did you shop at our store?
• Why did you decide not to purchase there?

Rule 3: Use Questions that Are Precisely Framed.

Always adapt questions to the company’s specific advertising. Only the right questions asked the right way will get core customers to tell you if your client’s advertising is compelling them to buy. Specific questions will reveal exactly why core customers are buying from the company but must-have customers aren’t. This will help you understand how to create effective advertising aimed at the target audience. Look at the chart below to see the difference between questions that provided clear-cut facts for an electronics client and questions that gave nice-to-know but not actionable information.

Nice-to-Know Information	Clear-Cut Facts
Asked consumers where they shopped for electronics	Asked must-have customers specifically where they recently bought electronics
Asked consumers, ''What's important to you when you shop for electronics?''	Asked recent purchasers, ''What was the main reason you made your purchase where you did?''
Asked consumers to describe their most recent experience in a store that sold electronics	Asked must-haves about their experiences at specifically named retailers that were the client's direct competitors

Rule 4: Do Focus Groups the Right Way.

Focus groups are one of the most misused and overused research tools in the business. Typically, they’re small groups of people who are randomly selected and brought together to discuss a topic. Theoretically, the focus group is supposed to provide a good cross-section of the likely consumers that the group’s sponsor is trying to reach.

Done right, focus groups can generate powerful insights that can help a company increase sales. But done wrong — which is the way it happens in most cases — the downside risks far outweigh the possible benefits.

Robert Gordman is president of The Gordman Group.

Focus groups should consist only of core and must-have customers. The moderator’s guide should be carefully written to focus on recent, actual shopping and purchasing experiences. The final discussion should require the group to prioritize the answers they have previously provided.

One client of mine, a national department-store chain, hired me to figure out why its sales had dropped significantly two years in a row. I suggested that we conduct focus groups with core customers (whom we could identify from my client’s credit card database) in several markets.

In all six groups there was a definite pattern of purchases being triggered by a major event, such as a wedding or the birth of a baby. This exciting finding opened up a wonderful opportunity to learn about customers’ life-cycle events in advance and then develop appropriate advertising strategies to capture a larger share of these special expenditures.

Unfortunately, the vice president of marketing observed one group where an extremely outspoken customer presented a very good case for a loyalty program that would give customers rewards based on their purchases. Coincidentally, the marketing VP had been lobbying for a loyalty program for some time, and this was all he needed to hear. He moved the research-based life-cycle strategy to the back burner and focused the company’s energies on the loyalty program. Sadly, that program was never implemented, and the company’s sales remained weak.

About the Author

Robert Gordman is president of The Gordman Group. He is the author of Secrets of the Super Sweet Spot: Building Sustained, Profitable Growth and The Must-Have Customer: 7 Steps to Winning the Customer You Haven’t Got, which was named one of the “10 books you should have read in 2006” by Ad Age magazine. His clients have included senior management of Fortune 500 companies including Berkshire-Hathaway Retail, IBM PC Company US, IBM PC Company Canada, Kmart Corporation, KPMG, Saks Inc., VF Corporation, Weight Watchers International, and Whirlpool Corporation.

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