Does your company economize on market insight?

Unvarnished market insight is vitally important to our industrial manufacturing clients. This was atypical during our previous ad agency days, before my partner and I launched Centrifuge. Back then, clients always seemed to value big advertising ideas over big customer insights. Back then, "outside" market research was a threatening concept, especially to VPs of Sales and Marketing.

In this more enlightened age, an aversion to market intelligence sounds counter intelligent, doesn't it? It seems almost disloyal that a VP of Marketing, who is accountable for his or her company's growth, could be adverse to gathering essential, new market insights. Yet some corporate cultures still suffer from this constraint, and here is one theory as to why:

Market research is by definition exploratory, it is an admission from the outset that a company doesn't have all the answers, and in many small to mid-size industrial-manufacturing cultures, that's a deadly admission.

In a growing enterprise, market knowledge is gathered and leveraged by many; but in a stunted enterprise, market knowledge is sheltered and governed by a few. Try this experiment at your next managers' meeting: Raise the question of market research. Innocently suggest the need for deeper segment insight during your next sales and marketing meeting. Watch the reaction among those who were hired to care about such things, the VP of Sales, the VP of Marketing, the product-marketing managers. In a healthy organization, the question will be openly and honestly considered. But in a closed organization, the discussion will be reactionary and soon default to the need for economizing. The discussion will turn from one of collective business opportunity to the question of individual job protection: Why should we pay someone from the outside to bring us more market knowledge? Don't we already know what we need to know? Why else did the company hire us sales and marketing people?

Nowadays, Centrifuge is privileged to work with industrial manufacturing leaders, VPs of sales and VPs of marketing who are confident in what they know and need to know, and who understand the value of deeper market insights. These are leaders who can and will change the fortunes of their organizations, because they will not economize on market insights.

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com