Don't Make My Mom Your Marketing Director - Small Agency Diary - Advertising Age

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Don't Make My Mom Your Marketing Director
Study What Consumers Do, Not What They Say

Posted by Tom Denari on 12.14.09 @ 10:41 AM



Tom Denari
I love my mom. I really do. But I don't want her making decisions about the work my agency creates -- even if she's the target audience. And frankly, I don't want my dad, or my brothers or sisters doing it either. Not even my wife.
But our industry does it every day. Millions of dollars are spent every year, doing just that, asking untrained people what they think of the work we create. We call them the "voice of the consumer." The industry calls it research. Directors of innovation call it testing.

I call it malpractice.

Strong word, I'll admit, but the simple message is this. We have to stop asking consumers to evaluate work. On the face of it, "getting consumer validation" seems like a really good idea. "Let's see what consumers say." Getting consumer feedback appears to be an objective process that will guarantee a solid prediction of how consumers will respond when it's rolled out into the marketplace.

Not surprisingly, plenty of ads test well and don't succeed. Others test badly, and do succeed, if there's a visionary CMO. There are storied examples of TV shows that were deemed to be failures when "tested" with an audience. Had NBC chosen not to air the "biggest bunch of losers we've seen in audience research," we would have never seen the best sitcom of all time, Seinfeld.

It's not that research is bad. But, misunderstanding how humans receive and process information creates bad methodologies and, more important, useless results. Just last week a very reputable research firm sent out a press release reporting that a majority of consumers stated that ads don't motivate them to switch brands of a ...

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