need market traction - get it with attitude!

Michael Ziviani : Sunday, December 18, 2011

Understanding attitudes is the next step. Traditionally this has been done by market research and in particular qualitative research. A semi-structured exploration of thoughts, feelings and ideas is an incredibly valuable reality check for marketers and communicators. It enables you to test and explore in an organic way with rich insights resulting. In the social media, many of these opportunities exist already in the conversation stream. Whilst you don’t get to select your respondents, the feedback could be nonetheless valuable. On the upside it is a ‘clean read’ by observation in a ‘natural’ environment. On the downside, strong opinions may crowd out others and Distance bias may also inflate persona’s. The bottom line is that understanding is created from a unbiased position and assembled in a systematic way. By either method, the resulting insights should contribute to a structured set of frameworks and guidelines.  


Armed with this valuable understanding, we then set out to change attitudes with appropriate communications. But how do we know that we have succeeded? And there is no common currency to measure communications anyway, is there? Yes, there is! The problem is many don’t get to see that currency measured properly or at all. So there is no accurate yardstick. No diagnostic if things don’t come out as expected. And thats the topic for next time!