What Questions Will Be Asked?

As the dust settles around the financial crisis and perhaps as election fever begins to die next month, I think it may be important to understand what questions consumers will ask of our society, marketers and themselves. Perhaps just as important are the answers they will default to - in absence of good answers provided by those with the power to provide ideas.

Who is - and will be held responsible for the financial debacle taxpayers are footing the bill for?

More importantly, when will it be safe to spend what money we have on hand or have access to?

What trade-offs must be made in the meantime?

I have spent a big portion of my career asking consumer questions in qualitative and quantitative research, as well as in the company of smart minds. In what context does a category or brand play within a consumer's life? How does this consumer think about the category and the brand? Often there appears to be no simple or obvious answer. Often what appears might be the obvious answer - is not the correct one. A deeper insight is required. I've also seen cases where a deeper insight was desperately sought, but the answer was somewhat more obvious (parties will remain nameless on this blog).

Regardless of the specific answer, I believe it is even more important that we ask the appropriate questions - to which there may be more than one answer.

I took a very quick look for some statistics on how much money is spent on marketing research in this country. I suppose it is somewhat ironic, but I could find no research on the subject in the AMA, ARF, The Association of Consumer Research, or even Quirks or Greenbook and academic Marketing Research Institute International web sites.

Even the Marketing Research Association, 20o7 Annual Reports provides their own Net Assets of $2,475,530 in 2007 (bravo for managing your affairs much better than the independent Account Planning Association ever did before being rescued by the AAAA). But they do not indicate how much the U.S. market spends on marketing research. This would probably be very difficult to figure out - and perhaps some academic institution has done so somewhere along the line. But I believe it is fairly safe to say it is in the $billions.

My preference has often been to consider the broadest or contextual questions first and then narrow down to the more specific - although my experience is that not everyone has the time or patience (or funding) for this approach. But ethnographic research has grown in popularity over the past decade or so. I particularly admire the work done by my fellow countryman, Grant McCracken, having known people who have worked with him. But I confess that I have not read all of his books (I owned "Big Hair" at one point but have no idea where it is these days).

I'll bet that "Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace" is a good one to pick up right now.

Ultimately, consumers themselves appear to be doing more research than ever before (albeit often unsophisticated) - given the access that the internet provides. Heck, Google (who is set to report third-quarter earnings after the market closes today) with a global market cap of $106.25 Billion (and falling), based on a simple search page.

I would contend that there are segments of consumers who, by there nature -or connectivity to the web, ask a lot of questions and research a lot on the web. Even more consumers conduct research based on their level of involvement in a topic. But ultimately many of the questions that consumers might like to have answered are never properly articulated. Or people are simply too busy to go find an answer. But they will always default to some answer - even if they do this unconsciously.

The real marketing opportunity is not simply asking the questions we have, but figuring out what our target's questions might be and answering them for these consumers.