Turning Information Into Insight
Talent Spotlight
You launch a new product and it doesn't perform as you hoped. What do you do? Well, you could turn to someone like Irma Salinas for answers.
Irma is represented by Aquent's Connecticut office and is currently working on the "Marketing Insights" Team at a large non-alcoholic beverages company (as it turns out, she actually started her career at an international spirits company importing beer from Latin America). She got involved in doing product reviews when working for a research company where she was very involved in reviewing and reporting on the performance of non-carbonated beverages (water, teas, juices, etc.). "I started working in this area when it was really getting competitive. It was a very exciting time. The market for beverages was changing and I learned a lot."
Irma was frequently involved in reviewing the performance of new products. I asked her both why new products don't perform well, but also how companies go about setting sales goals for new products in the first place. "Of course, there is a very extensive process that large companies go through to develop and launch new products," Irma assures me, "and since they have tested it with consumers, etc., you soon discover that the reasons for poor performance are not usually to be found in the product itself."
"You need to look at a lot of different factors to figure out what's going wrong. You start with looking at sales trending to find out if there is a regional or channel component. If the problem isn't in the product, though, then you have to look at the other '4Ps.'"
"For many products where strong brand loyalty doesn't play a big role, the consumer will just grab the first thing they see. So, of course, you evaluate the presence of the product in the store. Where is it on the shelf? How many 'faces' do you have? How many units can you display? Market researchers have ways of measuring this 'presence' using syndicated data.
"Similarly, there is syndicated data on price. How do your prices compare with those of your competitors. Also, since a lot of products are discounted or sold at promotional prices, sometimes as frequently as half the year, you need to make sure that these discount strategies are delivering results. You also have to take into account the fact that, sometimes, the delivery channels do not charge the suggested price.
"Finally, there is the issue of promotion. You need to be promoting your discounts, and ensure that the programs are being implemented as planned or you may not see improved performance based on price. For this purpose, there are several companies that conduct audits to see the level of promotion that was actually implemented in store.
"After gathering the data, you need to interpret it, which is what a 'marketing insights' person such as myself does. The other thing we do is make recommendations to the managers we work with regarding the types of data or the data products that they will need to buy that will be suitable for their particular business question. 'Marketing insights' really sits in between the researchers, the statisticians who are crunching the numbers, and the product or category people who rely on the numbers to make their decisions."
Although she has a strong background on the research and insight side of things, Irma hopes to do more customer marketing in the future. "I have worked with consumer behavior data in the past, mainly what we call 'panel data,' or data collected from a panel of consumers whose purchasing behavior gets tracked and aggregated, but I would really like to work with consumers more directly, running actual marketing programs."
"People don't like to be sold to in general," she says, "and yet they are being sold to, often successfully, all the time. I'd like to be doing research at that level, at the consumer level, and find what works, what doesn't, and why."
Image Courtesy of d'n'c.
