Now What?

Considerations as your business reemerges into a new normal in the U.S. 

The real-time count of US covid-19 infections are: confirmed cases 1,928,142, untimely deaths 110,347, recovered patients 712,437

As young as our country is on the world stage, we’ve still experienced some significant health (Spanish Flu of 1918) and economic impacts (The Great Depression and multiple recessions).  This is unprecedented in the modern global sense.  One of the biggest lessons businesses learned from the Great Depression was being smarter with their marketing investments: product development, pricing, promotional and distribution strategies. As a result, the marketing research industry was born from the original founders of Daniel Starch, A. C. Nielsen, and George Gallup.

If your business is going to consider marketing research in a new era, what should be on the radar? 

• Take stock in truly understanding your customer base.  Knowing your customers is knowing your brand, or at least what it should be.  Not just demographically, but behaviorally. How do they use media, what they value in life, how do they use digital resources, and where you’re most likely to find them?  This type of detailed portrait can help your business be more efficient in communications; what you say and where you should be saying it.  

• It may be time to quantify how much your customers value the products and services you already offer or are considering offering.  Pinpointing these in your communications will maximize the effectiveness of communications.  Consumers are reassessing what’s valuable to them as we speak, so businesses will need to consider doing the same.   

• Lastly, consider testing different messaging approaches before locking yourself in.  Use lessons from the test to develop the most effective approaches that will maximize your investments. 

Virginia Media offers marketing research capabilities like this through our CraniumTap business unit.  Don’t hesitate to reach out to your Virginia Media representative for questions about their services as we reemerge into a new business climate or visit CraniumTap.com to learn more.