Race for real-time research

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what your customers are thinking right now?

By Craig Phillips

Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law helps to form the basis of classical mechanics and may seem a million miles away from anything to do with finance. But conceptually it has resonance when it comes to the marketing of financial products and services.

Companies market their products and services, and consumers react – be it positively, negatively or indifferently. Having access to solid consumer intelligence and reliable data prior to and after embarking on any sales or marketing campaign is fundamental to understanding how a company’s actions impact on existing and potential clients.

Before forking out hundreds of thousands of dollars on new products, companies will look to existing market intelligence and usually conduct new research to better understand emerging opportunities, true customer needs and the optimum medium for interacting with their market and best conveying their messages.

Once this is done and the subsequent advertising campaign is in full swing or finished, companies invariably collect more information to measure the effectiveness of a specific marketing promotion - beyond monitoring spikes in sales and business activity or jumps in profit levels.

There is one major problem with this common scenario though, speed, and more specifically, the lack thereof. In a competitive market, the ability to react to events quickly is critical for maintaining and increasing market share and outperforming your peers.  

Financial institutions spend millions of dollars year after year on advertising and the ensuing analytics that go with it. Yet for institutions that have high levels of interaction with consumers, there may be a more “real-time” way of gauging sentiment and gathering consumer intelligence.

Australian consumer research consultancy CoreData has developed a new analytics tool called minipoll, which allows companies to gather rapid feedback and insight from customers in a real-time fashion.

One of the drawbacks of conducting consumer research in a dynamic and shifting market, where global events can change market sentiment at the flick of a switch, is that much of the research commissioned in financial services becomes outdated as soon as it is gathered.

This isn’t to say that such research is bad – the more information the better. It’s just that retrospective research has been the only meal on the menu for years. And so that’s what institutions have been dining on.

If you add the fact that it takes time to analyse and interpret gathered data before manufacturing it into a report that is optimum for communicating the findings to the client in a useful manner, it could take months before companies are able to digest information that may impact heavily on being successful in their respective markets.

Nobody can see into the future with full certainty, but the next best thing may be having the ability to ascertain from existing and potential customers what they think, for example, about a newspaper or television advertisement the very same day the ad runs. minipoll has the potential to do this.

It is a real-time focused opinion polling application that embeds in a company’s website and provides senior management with the ability to gauge the sentiment of a cross-section of their client base or market.

For mass consumer financial services brands, companies can even utilise a virtual map of Australia that delivers a sentiment heat map down to local postcode level.

So what does this mean? Companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on blanket advertising on billboards and bus stop shelters around the country will now be able to gather market intelligence at a much lower level, allowing them to be far more targeted in their campaigns.

Purists may argue that such an application may not reflect all of a given market’s opinions or attitudes. However, in an increasingly competitive financial services market where the first-to-market-advantage rule is likely to become more and more pertinent, knowing today what might take your competitors several months to establish certainly brings us back to Sir Isaac Newton.

Newton’s second law of motion states that force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. And an institution with a leading market position is often a hard beast to catch.

Craig Phillips is head of market intelligence with financial services research group brandmanagement