Mike Hall - Partner, Development, Verve Mike was the founder, Creative Director and Chairman of Hall and Partners, which he developed into a $100m business prior to its sale to Omnicom in 2005. Hall & Partners created a new philosophy about the different way advertising works to build brand relationships and was instrumental in changing the way in which advertising research is done. Now at Verve, Mike is working on a new model looking at how online brand communities work. Read the full biography here.

Let’s play nice with Marketing
The commercial importance to the whole organization of online brand communities.

By Mike Hall - 16th December, 2010

The market research industry has excelled in being at the forefront in adopting the exciting new medium of online brand communities. Even those clients who have yet to set up one of their own are not just aware of the need to find out about their potential but positively keen to discover and explore the opportunities they offer.

But........there’s always a but. I am ever so slightly disappointed by the reluctance – occasionally even resistance – of many researchers towards sharing their innovative thinking and action with their marketing colleagues in terms of what the community could do for marketing, not just research. It’s as if, having crossed off a couple of items from the Departmental Objectives list (Make substantial budget savings – tick; Find new ways to get to the heart of how customers feel – tick), the Consumer Insight Department closes the book, when it’s much more rewarding to embark on the next chapter.

Perhaps it’s because most businesses are task-driven rather than vision-led. Or maybe it remains sadly true that Market Research or Consumer Insight is still regarded – even by themselves – as a separate, and somehow subsidiary, department rather than a truly integrated part of a company’s marketing operation. I think, for example, of the many client-side researchers who refer to their “internal clients”. This is quite a change from the bad old days when research was treated as a back-room function, but it still suggests a business culture of separatism rather than integration. An unfortunate side-effect of the requirements for ‘accountability’ perhaps?

Most companies profess a vision; most CEOs make public statements of them. There has been a welcome shift in business from inward-looking to outward-looking objectives, which inevitably and increasingly place the need to understand the consumer at the heart of the optimistic and determined vision of successful growth. It’s the sort of understanding that comes not just from asking consumers about their attitudes, behaviours and responses (the traditional MR function), but from getting genuinely closer to them in all that the company does. This is the kind of vision that demands that internal departmental boundaries be freely crossed or even, ideally, removed.

There are important roles here for online brand communities, where members are free to engage with all aspects of a company’s business, and also for company market researchers who can play a central role in shaping this new company/brand relationship with consumers and in ensuring that the stimulus it provides for a business is well-used.

Few of the companies we at Verve have spoken to, either in preparing our paper ‘How online brand communities work’ (available to download from: http://tinyurl.com/357wqo9) or in commercial business meetings, match the determination of Coca-Cola, whose Insight people initiated shared goals and behaviours with their marketing department as well as broader stakeholder audiences (e.g. the bottlers and branding teams) when setting up a community to understand the real language and priorities of their target consumer. The marketing people, let it be noted, were very happy for the Insight people to lead and run the project, given how well the control issue was managed.¹

It’s an approach that would be great for others to practise. Your community members need varied stimulus to be fully engaged – greater stimulus than an unremitting diet of surveys provides. New product concepts, competitive initiatives, communications ideas, company plans and points of view can not only be shared, discussed and responded to by the same people who fill in the surveys for you, but would be welcomed by community members. And the people to suggest this idea to the marketing department are the researchers, whose jobs would be greatly enriched and valued by doing so.

Being a pioneer in your specialist field of market research is a laudable achievement and we’re unfailingly impressed by those who grasp the new opportunity; but being a pioneer for the good of your whole company is a bolder ambition still, which brings a far greater prize. Time to get out of the silo and into the centre.

¹ You can read more about how Coca-Cola GB used a community to better understand the older teen audience in their ESOMAR paper, presented at this year’s ESOMAR Congress: http://www.esomar.org/web/publication/paper.php?page=1&id=2145&keyword=Coca-Cola

This is a paid for ESOMAR paper

Mike Hall

Comments on this article

Want to share your thoughts...?

Want to share your thoughts?

NOTE: Please note that this board is moderated, and comments are published at the discretion of the site owner.