02 May How newfocus Uses Innovation to Drive Market Engagement

HOW NEWFOCUS USES INNOVATION TO DRIVE MARKET ENGAGEMENT

THE PROBLEM

In our experience, current approaches to tracking brand and customer experience are not hitting the mark and often the value for money equation is not stacking up.

In an increasingly complex and evolving market where stakeholders expect providers to deliver leading customer experiences, brand and consumer tracking has become essential in understanding and improving service delivery.   However, we know that many so called tracking studies:

• don’t always provide usable insights
• don’t help organisations understand the WHY question
• are largely data driven, overly complex and hard to understand
• don’t link results with organisational change programs
• are not delivering the expected value for money
• are not communicating results, insights and changes needed in a timely and efficient way

The world is changing, and will continue to do so. The change in question?  Speed.  Technology has propelled the speed at which innovation and, in turn, the speed at which competition can catch up or progress, or take a downward plunge. Now, the upturn and downfall of a business can seemingly occur back-to-back. What’s worse is that as quickly as a brand climbs, it can fall – and that fall can be fatal.

Here are some of the key trends and challenges with current methods that we need to address in our new and developing tracking solution:

1. Uni-dimensional static methodology. The methodologies often employed are unilateral and use only traditional quantitative methods. The resulting effect is that it is a methodology that provides a limited perspective and little or no flexibility or freedom for the approach to evolve relative to the changing data. This can cause businesses to be blind-sided when data quickly evolves or when qualitative methods are needed in order for the business to survive.

2. Focusing only on indicators. Trackers tend to focus only on hard, factual ‘data’. Although data shows movements along key indicators, it often limits trackers in their ability to explain ‘why’ the data has shown movement – or remained static – over time. As data changes occur more rapidly, trackers are made vulnerable to being left behind.

3. Backward-looking reaction: Scheduled data roll-ups cause market intelligence to come at a delay. Therefore, businesses are forced to act reactively, rather than proactively, and are constantly behind market trends. And, as the shift from trend to trend picks up speed, businesses become more and more prone to being completely left in the dark.

The challenges will vary depending upon where the study is in its lifecycle.  Tracking not only needs to better account for complexities in brand execution and customer experience but also needs to better forecast these complexities ahead of time. In short, the key to a more holistic approach to brands is future-focused insights.

THE NEWFOCUS SOLUTION

Future-focused insights lead us
to our solution to the current tracking methods, which fall short of the needs of thriving brands. The solution is to keep up.  Address the issue before it has the chance to arise. How?  Know your audience, your customers, and your market inside and out. Then, with our critical high-speed, agile, high-quality insights, your company can avoid market adversity.

We believe in the need to evolve how tracking research is both approached and implemented. So we evolved it. newfocus tracking applies a multi-dimensional approach to tracking research, enabling a more strategic and holistic perspective on brands and markets.

There are various opportunities through which your business can evolve tracking research:

1. Understanding what’s valued. Understanding what’s valued is essential to meeting future needs. What’s valued changes and shapes over time, and tracking research needs to understand what’s valued, and how that is changing in order to foresee future trends. If what’s claimed matches what’s valued then sales inquiries increase, and if what’s delivered matches or exceeds what’s claimed then this will have a positive effect on what’s perceived.

2. Incorporation of a future-focused perspective. Actively monitoring market trends more proactively and less reactively is a sure way to breed corporate success. Business can achieve a bespoke outlook both by gleaning an ongoing understanding of customer drivers and by tracking important motivational data changes.

With this future-focused approach, businesses will more easily perceive target markets as people, not as ‘indicators’, allowing them to better relate to and understand their audiences. Further, forecasting trends enables business to focus on uncovering insight and strategic perspectives, rather than dumping data. All these factors work together to keep participating organisations ahead of the game (namely, in the top quartile of trends, or the first 25%).

2. Developing multi-dimensional, dynamic methods. Evolving tracking research requires a certain expansion away from strictly quantitative data towards the deliberate and calculated integration of agile qualitative components. With a healthy mix of numerical and insightful data, trackers will have the ability to provide both the explanatory ‘why’ and the agile ‘future- and people-focused’ perspectives.

3. Highlighting communication. On the one hand, use of live, interactive dashboards for ongoing tracking of lead and lag KPIs is great in terms of collecting data. On the other hand, push-button reporting provides instant insight as it happens – giving a more rounded perspective on the data changes as they occur and facilitating faster responses to these changes.

4. Turning insight into impact. The missing ingredient of bespoke perspectives and data tracking is often linking the results with a clear actionable implementation program. Turning insights into action, linking organisational change with training, and communication programs enable companies to structure their strategy according to the current and future data. More important is the need to explain, communicate, and implement changes quickly and effectively with key stakeholders.

In short, the newfocus perspective to tracking research engages all the evolving aspects of dynamic data, and approaches this agility with successful strategy and unique insights. These are the ingredients for evolving data tracking and in turn, booming businesses and community engagement.

Get in touch with us today and see how your business could benefit our innovative tracking research.

newfocus is a national market research company, specialising in strategic market research and social research, with offices in Melbourne, Sydney & Adelaide.

By Graham Bean, Managing Director