Need for Consumer Research Services in Advertising

1. Need for Consumer Research Services in Advertising Consumer research services are an indispensable part of advertising. Understanding your consumer is the key to create a successful campaign, evaluating and improving it.

2. CONSUMER RESEARCH SERVICES The consumer is the king in advertising. Your business may be dependent on how successful you are in peddling your campaign to a prospective client, but ultimately it is the consumer who decides your fate. Recent trends show that client retention is getting harder today. Understanding your consumer is the only way to ensure long-running successful campaigns. The trick to achieve that is hiring consumer research services. Consumer research explores consumers’ attitudes, preferences, loyalties, behaviour and usage. This is particularly important for foreign ad companies from UK and Singapore trying to establish base in India. Without understanding your audience, you cannot develop a successful campaign.

3. To further describe its advantages in advertising, here are some benefits: Understanding your consumer: the first step of any advertising campaign is to understand your consumer. This comes even before anyone can come up with a glimmer of an idea. After all, before you create a message, you must know the viewer. Research is usually conducted to know the buying demographic, their motivations, needs, desires and behaviour. The advertising campaign is then created to appeal to these needs. Ad testing: Advertisers like most artists are often pretty blind to exactly how effective they are. Often their own prejudices, perceptions and sensibilities that shape their creativity may be completely different from their audience. Consumer qualitative research will focus on how people actually see the campaign. Does it make them happy, sad, excited or angry? Do they understand the message conveyed? Ad testing is crucial to understand its effectiveness and bring in any changes. Trends analysis: More than any other industry, advertising cannot afford to be out of sync with ongoing trends and fashions. Boring, outdated and outmoded ideas are the death knell of any industry. In an age when trends sometimes change day by day, consumer research is often the only way to keep track of and predict new trends. Some of the most successful campaigns are based on trends that are yet to come, that introduce an idea. Often these are based on solid research that tell advertisers on turning public perceptions and attitudes. Competition and Industry analysis: Since the purpose of adverting is to pitch your client’s products above its competition, you must at least know how the competition’s campaign is faring. You cannot afford to create an elaborate campaign only to find out later that your USP is an industry standard or your campaign seems like a poor copy of a rival’s. Consumer research services here focus on the industry trends and your competitor’s campaigns. Which is the most commonly recalled brand in your industry? Which campaign do people recall readily?

4. Communication Communication: No advertiser can afford to sound like somebody’s grandfather unless they are the demographic. Advertising has to relate to its viewers and that means speaking in their language. For instance, if your consumer is in the 18-24 age group, you need to understand how young people speak to each other, what are the so-called ‘cool’ terms and what is considered ‘uncool’. This can make a huge difference because this demographic is usually extremely resistant to anything considered ‘uncool’. Brand evaluation and development: One of the most important aims of any advertising campaign is to build up the client’s brand. This is not a short-term project and cannot be achieved through a single advertisement. It requires a sustained campaign, carried over multiple mediums. Consumer research services focus on the performance of the brand and then decide on improvements. The most successful brands are those which become synonymous with the product. Can people recognise the brand instantly? What is its trust quotient? Does your ad campaign reflect the brand philosophy? Finding the USP: In qualitative research, respondents are often observed while they use a product. Then a feedback is taken. The researcher passively observes the respondents while they are using the product. This exposes the qualities as well as the defects in its usage. What do the respondents find attractive? When asked to explain the usage, how do the they describe it? This tells us the USP of the product — an important part of any ad strategy.

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