Getting Close to the Customer: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Approaches (page 3 of 3)

"I don't think consumers always know what they want," says Williams. "With these experiential brand communities you don't have to ask them anything directly. You can just observe. It's more of an anthropological approach." At the same time, there are limits on the kind of products that lend themselves to a brand community, she says, pointing to toilet paper as an example. Also, building brand communities is expensive and sometimes verges on being fashionable. "A lot of people are jumping on this [even though] it's hard to do it well. Saturn has [used this approach] from the beginning. Jeep does Jeep Jamborees but could Hyundai?"

Williams, too, stresses a need for both hard numbers and more qualitative insights. "The best brand managers are open to whatever way gets the best answers. I don't think the qualitative approaches are necessarily better, but I do think they have largely been neglected and are increasingly popular."

According to Wharton marketing professor Wes Hutchinson, the popularity of qualitative and quantitative techniques falls along a continuum. "With the quantitative approaches the big news is how much information there is to be mined," he says, but "in industrial markets and in business-to-business, getting to know your customer still means a sales force."

In a sense, "this all started with computer automation. Customer Relationship Marketing is a mass version of what good sales forces have always done." The real question is whether the marketing efforts are cost effective. Reaching Six Sigma quality, in which a process generates no more than 3.4 defects per million, is an admirable goal, but at what price? "You can have high quality but if you can't cut costs to achieve that, then you have lost money," Hutchinson says. "There's a limit to where it's actually profitable to continue to delight your customer ... There has even been a small backlash," with some people questioning the idea that more is always preferable. "Your profits might have been better at Five Sigma."

Customer Advisory Boards
Some companies are creating customer advisory boards to help them find out what their customers really want. "What we have learned is that qualitative information is very powerful to the executives," says Sean Geehan, president of Geehan Advisory Boards in Dayton, Ohio, which builds and manages customer boards. "They want trends. They want to identify broad strokes from profitable customer segments that can help them establish a sustainable competitive advantage." Geehan's clients have told him that when they set out to use more quantitative measures in market research, the data is often manipulated by a third party that does not fully grasp the firm's own needs and strategies.

To be worthwhile, customer advisory boards need to be structured carefully, says Geehan. The company seeking advice needs to commit top managers to the meetings if they expect to draw similarly high-ranking decision-makers from their customers. The meetings should be no more than a day or two, once or twice a year, to remain focused. It does not hurt attendance to hold the meetings at a comfortable resort. The boards must also provide some upside to the customer members. "An advisory board is more of a think tank," says Geehan. "We ask the customers, 'What will the landscape look like in five years? What are your pains? What can we do to help you fix them?'"