Measure What Matters Chapter 2

This week we have a break of discussing our book so I’ve decided to push my thoughts on chapter 2 of Measure What Matters from last week. It is describing how to get started when new to measurement. The first part lists ten questions that you must be able to answer before starting measurement.

• What are your objectives

               You cannot get to a destination if you are not sure what you want. Find your end goals first then work towards them.

• Who are your program’s target audience?

               You want to hit your market to get an accurate result. Not everyone will help when answering your questions.

• What is important to your audience?

               You must understand your market to understand why they chose to purchase a good or service from you.

• What motivates them to buy your products?

               They can buy any product out on the market. It is important to know why they chose yours so you can use your brand and build relationships.

• What are your key messages?

               Your message should show why people buy your product or service. This is what will separate you from your competition.

• Who influences your audience?

               Take every condition in the marketing mix and determine which make it so people buy your product or service.

How do you distribute your product or service?

               Is it the same route your market prefers? If you are in retail stores while most your market is in wholesale stores you are missing sales.

• What are you going to do with the information you get from your research?

               Be sure to make changes and improvements with the information you gather.

• What other departments or areas will be affected?

               If the changes that need to be made impact other departments they need to be involved in the changes. If they do not understand why things are being done, they will not follow through resulting in no change.

• What other measurement programs are currently underway?

               If you have other data as well, use it. You can also compare results across different programs.

The last part of this chapter is how to ensure accurate data. I know this to be hard from my market research class. As a project, we helped one of our professor’s friends who owns their own business. When we were surveying their clients, we had many issues and comments about the survey. The major lesson I learned was not everyone is taught what a proper survey looks like. There are several steps that need to be done and a survey cannot be thrown together and sent out. I was shocked that one of the more common critiques was about the site the survey was conducted. We use Qualtrics because the university has memberships for us to use it. The clients were upset that it was not Survey Monkey because they were used to that site.  It was a lesson for me to take surveys seriously and understand the amount of background work put into designing them. Measure What Matters gives four reasons why we get bad data and all were discussed in my market research class.

• Incomplete assessment of variables.

               You never 100% know why a person does something. We are all so different that we assume that what we hypothesis is correct. Do not block people from being able to give their answer. It can limit your research and make it invalid. When in doubt add an option as other.

• Relevancy of content

               Humans and computers are not perfect. Some data that is found may not be relevant to your measurement. Even with a computer system reviewing data it helps to have humans go over the information as well after.

• Commercial services omit results

               Services do not pick up every post on social sites and it is best to conduct your own search as well to solidify your results.

• The (in)accuracy of content analysis

               You get what you pay for. Cheaper analysis systems will not be as accurate. It is important to put more funds in the beginning to get better results and a better outlook.