Week 2: Finding, Evaluating, and Processing Information

In this section, the processes of performing effective business research. When you support your message with reliable, accurate information you establish credibility, and your reader trusts your conclusions or recommendation. Primary data collection, like surveys and interviews, are one method many companies employ to support their messages. Secondary data, like print materials, are also helpful, and reliable sources of support. Of course there is a wealth of information on the Internet. But how do you wade through the myriad sources online? And once you find something relevant, how do you verify its accuracy? Let’s see how MELT, a leading consulting company focusing in marketing, entertainment, lifestyle, and trends, approaches these theories in practice.

VINCE THOMPSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO, MELT “The main thing in our business, a creative business, in any business, is obviously make sure that the source of your research and references are clear and resourced appropriately. Most resources that are free in nature? We’re going to assume are biased. Now with Internet, with technology, with Google especially, there’s a ton of resources but you gotta make sure that it’s not a, you know, a search engine optimization going on where a reliable or trusted source has a lot to gain or not a lot to gain. In our industry we like to say that ‘everybody’s a talk show host now.’ The ability for billions of people worldwide to share and express their opinions make it even more important that these sources be codified, be referenced, and annotated in anything that we do. Well, typically we would subscribe to a lot of graphics-based research: Scarborough is a—Lexis Nexus, Nielsen. We like to back up that research; we like to have two sources of a research. There’s a lot of places where you can hear what you need to hear, or you can take—you can lead an answer where you want that answer led to. The main thing is the validity of the research because we use a lot of research to ideate against, to make assumptions against a demographic, to make claims of how a certain product would impact consumer behavior as well. What we’re seeing is that the research needs and demands are shifting rapidly because consumers’ taste and influence and judgment about a product or a personality can be shifted within a nanosecond. We do think that the social media space is very, very ripe for gauging and understanding consumer response in a rapid-fire manner. And also the targetization and the geography of how you can test different messages pretty rapid, is far greater than you could do it in the old days with a 30-second spot where you tested it in a certain region or certain cable market versus now knowing that we can break down the profile or the zip code or the demographics of anybody within Facebook. The fascinating thing about a Facebook or a YouTube or a Hulu, or sites such as that, is just that sort of the masses of people that are there have never existed. When you look at a hundred million people gathered to Facebook that’s the size of a large cable television network. If you looked at 600 million people, you know, worldwide I mean that’s a fifth of the population or a sixth of the population. It’ll be a billion in 2012. It’s the most target-rich, barrier-free environment for marketers to understand their consumer, their customers and the demographics and the reactions and behavior more so than has ever existed. Location-based behavior was a foreign term a year ago. Now our understanding what drives people to an environment through Foursquare; we know what their behavior patterns are, we know what different types of things we can do to drive their behavior in there. In the past that option did not exist. So we’re very excited about the opportunity for a lot of small businesses in the country to compete with a lot of other people that heretofore they’ve not been able to compete with by being able to push a consumer into an environment and then use that push to influence their other friends to move into that environment as well. And know what offers work and don’t work.”