Strategic planning for the real world - Module Two

In part two of a series, Nicholine Hayward, planner, brand storyteller and digital evangelist, explains how strategic planning can benefit your business.

Friday, 19 June 2009

Last week we looked at the tools and techniques freely available online for strategic planning insights. In this next module, I’ll look at the first stage in a typical strategic development process, namely ‘Where are we now and how did we get here?’ and explore ways we can gain a new understanding of markets, categories and consumers using my online research methodology.

From insight to strategy

If we take a typical strategy flow, we can apply the online research methodology at every stage, to give us insights that will help us understand the market, the category and the consumer, the problems that the brand is facing, and how communications might be best deployed, and later, evaluated, to meet the brief and measure the results.

Step One: Where are we now and how did we get here?

To help us understand the context, the environment, the market forces and competitive pressures, online research can give us a wealth of insight into:

• The market/category

• The consumer

• The brand

We’ll cover the brand in the next module as it is worth having one all to itself, so let’s start with the market and category and then look at the consumer.

1. The market/category

What shape and size is it? Is it growing or declining? What’s happening? Where might it be going? And where could it potentially end up?

We can start with Google Insights for Search to give us a snapshot of awareness and demand, and see which issues and events might be driving the market dynamics. For example, if we take a search term that denotes purchasing intent, say, for ‘stamp duty’ as a marker of growth or decline in the property market, we see that demand basically fell off a cliff, starting in late 2007. We also see the events that drove consumer interest – in this case, the annual Budget and changes in Government policy.

Although 2009 has followed the same overall annual pattern, with a slight jump in the New Year and growing interest as the summer approaches, relative demand for the service is considerably lower. People are staying put.

Identifying key players in a market

To help us understand the competitive landscape in a market, we can use the Google Keyword tool to identify the brands with the biggest mindshare and quantify that demand to some extent.

If we take the laptop market as an example, once we’ve identified the key players, we can use Google Insights for Search to look at relative demand over time. So when we examine the most popular laptop brands over time, we see that 2008 and early 2009, despite the economic climate, is actually quite a healthy time in terms of consumer interest.

Last Christmas was the best ever year for Acer, Toshiba and challenger brand Asus, but poor old IBM seems to be continuing a gentle slide into oblivion. It’s also interesting to note the dynamics between Acer and Toshiba. For the last two years or so, search demand for the two brands has grown closer together, which could suggest that their product and marketing strategies have become more closely aligned, or that laptop demand is market, rather than brand driven. We can see another good example of the relationship between brand demand and market dynamics if we compare searches for the three banks, Barclays, NatWest and HSBC.

We can see that firstly, HSBC generates the most search demand and that NatWest and Barclays enjoy almost exactly the same as each other. We can also see that all three brands follow a similar pattern throughout the year, which indicates the search demand is to a large extent market, rather than brand driven. In other words, people are being prompted to search on a particular bank in response to news and events in the overall banking category, such as a change in interest rates, and how it might affect their mortgages and savings.

Segmenting the market

We can also use online tools to look at market segmentations. If we take a lively, multi-faceted market such as Fairtrade, we can compare relative demand for a wide range of Fairtrade events, products and issues.

The first observation is that you can see that the term ‘fair trade’ and ‘fairtrade’ have about the same level of mindshare at the moment, but ‘fair trade’ gets the most searches over the year, so that’s the phrase that defines the issue most in consumers’ minds.

Next, let’s focus on Fairtrade products – chocolate and suchlike. If we export the data to Excel (there is a facility to do this), we can create a chart to show how the Fairtrade product market is segmented in terms of search demand. So if you’re wondering whether to add tea or coffee to your Fair trade portfolio, there is greater demand for coffee, and, if we look at the search trends on the keyword data chart, demand peaks for it in October, presumably as people are bedding in for a long, cold winter.

What else is out there?

You can sense-check this data by cross referencing it with information that has been gathered by more traditional means. A good way to find out market information that is in the public domain, such as reports, industry news and research findings is via exact searches on Goole. For example:

"The greetings card market is worth"

"In 2008, the construction sector declined by *%"

Make it an advanced search, and in the preferences you can narrow it down to only the most recent entries. If you use the wildcard function, Google will fill in the gap for you. This technique is also a good way of identifying the most visible and influential news and community sites in the category and bookmarking them for later.

2. The consumer

Next, let’s have a look at the consumer. Who are they? What are they like? And why are we talking to them? We can use our online tools to create detailed pen portraits of our audience. We can find out about their age, gender, lifestage, social dynamics, preferences, attitudes and behaviour.

The first thing to do is set up some Google alerts on an attitude or behaviour that defines your audience. The next is to do an exact search. Both of these will lead you to the online communities and individual web spaces where your audience lives, and where you can get to know them better. For example, here are the results for “I’ve just had a baby”.

As you’ll see if you scroll through the search results, you’ll find the personal stories of women who have just had a baby, who they are, how they think and feel, the language they use and, importantly, the places where they are having these conversations.

In this instance, something that comes through very clearly, and which brands aimed at new parents might like to tap into, is the pride and sense of achievement that women feel after having a baby and their need to be recognised, praised and rewarded for it. It’s not all about the baby.

You can also do an exact search on Boardreader
or look at Twitter Search, in this case for the slightly broader term ‘just had a baby’, to get the stories of people connected to, or with a personal interest in the subject, but not necessarily the parents themselves.

You can also go directly to the online communities that house your consumer, either defined by demographic or by interest. For example, if your audience is the over 50s, looking at the forums in a community like Saga Zone will show you what they’re like, how they talk, their interests and motivations and what’s hot in their world at the moment.

If you come across a rich source of insight, such as a forum or a blog, join up, sign up and subscribe. I’m not a big fan of initiating conversations, because this can upset the group dynamic if you’re not careful and the insights won’t be as authentic. But if you do, make sure you’re clear on who you are and why you need to know.

OK, we’ve covered what online research can tell us about categories and consumers. In Module Three, we’ll look at brands, and what online research can tell us about online equity and assets, brand personality, brand advocates and rejectors, what brands say about themselves and what they don’t say – all of which are an essential step in understanding where we are now and how we got there.

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