From: dlhpfm.uucp!dlh@abvax.icd.ab.com (daniel lance herrick)
Newsgroups: misc.entrepreneurs
Subject: Re: Market research - a missing ingredient?
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 92 23:23:03 EDT
Organization: dlh Performance Marketing

paradis@sousa.ltn.dec.com (Jim Paradis) writes:

>Simply asking a few hundred people
> "Would you buy XXX?" isn't effective... what people *say* they'll buy and
> what they'll *actually* buy are two different things!  

Yes, Jim, this is exactly right.  They will tell you what they think
you want to hear.  One of Jay Abraham's homilies is:

If you are writing an ad to sell something to truck drivers and want to
know how you are doing, take it to a place where truck drivers gather
(some bar somewhere) and show it to them and ask their opinion.  If
they say, "Hey, this is great.  You'll make a million." tear it up and
start over.  If they say, "Where can I get one of these?" you're making
progress and may actually sell something.

>By the same token,
> looking at people's *current* buying habits doesn't work if you want to
> find *new* opportunities (i.e. if you notice that a lot of people buy
> XYZ, then getting into the XYZ business may *not* be a good idea because
> the market is likely to be crowded and competition fierce).

This particular idea makes for a lot of hard work with little reward.

A lot of small companies can make a very comfortable living off the
crumbs that fall under WordPerfect's table.  Everyone already knows
what the product line is and does, understands the words used to
describe it.

If you have a new idea nobody ever heard of before, you have to teach
people what it is, what it is good for, what it does, how their lives
will be better if they have one.  It is much easier to let someone else
do that hard work and only concentrate on showing a few true believers
how their lives will be better if they use your version instead of
another.  (Have I made the distinction clear?  Creating a market that
did not exist before is HARD compared with carving a little bit off the
corner of a market that already exists.)

> Any other good ideas?  I get the feeling that market research is the
> "missing ingredient" in all those business opportunities out there...
> it's the one piece that doesn't seem to come with *any* of the computer
> portrait setups, bumper-sticker kits, locksmithing courses, or 
> vinyl-repair kits... and yet it seems to me that it's the most crucial
> to survival!

The best market research is market research that separates some money
from the target market.  Take a (possibly primitive) version of the
product out and sell it.  Face to face, direct mail, classified
advertisement, some other direct response medium....  If your marketing
documents don't bring in money there is no need to develop fancier
packaging or a better user manual.  If they do, use some of that money
to finance a nicer version of the product and give a free upgrade to
all the people who financed your market research by buying copies of
the prototype.

dan  of dlh Performance Marketing  POBox 1419  Mentor Ohio 44061
       NCoast.org!dlhpfm!dlh or ab.com!dlhpfm.uucp!dlh   (216)974-9637
"Even a child is known by his doings, 
 whether his work be pure and whether it be right." Proverbs 20:11
Newsgroups: misc.entrepreneurs