DIY Recruiting Market Research

DIY Market Research 1/5 by David Kippen

Last modified on 2012-02-17 17:08:56 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Dr. David Kippen, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board

This week, we’re trying something different. David Kippen, the genius behind Evviva Brands is going to take us on a tour of Market Research. David is a powerful advocate for the idea that you have to learn about the markets you serve.  So, one step at a time, we’ll go through the basics of doing your own work to get a ‘dirt under the fingernails’ look at the market. – John Sumser

Dr. Kippen is CEO and Chief Strategist of Evviva Brands. With a background spanning advertising and communications and a client base spanning the globe, Dr. Kippen is recognized as among the top thought leaders in brand strategy. David has held leadership roles in several top associations that support the HR and communications professions. He is currently a member of SHRM’s Performance Management Task Force and an active member of the Council of Communication Management. Full Bio »

DIY Market Research 1/5

by David Kippen

Over the past ten years I’ve had the opportunity to work on brand positions for organizations of almost every size and kind imaginable. In every case, the brand work has relied heavily on market insight. However, we usually had to try to persuade the organization to do market research. When we haven’t succeeded, the branding has suffered.

It’s hard not to sympathize with the client perspective. Market research is expensive. And it’s uncertain until it’s done how much value will be unlocked by new insights. There are always other important initiatives to fund.

So why do market research? Because you don’t live there. And it’s a big, big world. Even if you’re well travelled and well informed, it’s stunning how easy it is to make assumptions that are totally wrong and will fundamentally undermine your work.

If you want to connect with talent in places you don’t know in languages you don’t speak and navigate local issues you don’t understand, you have two choices:

• Throw money at your agency–they’ll take it–and ask them to figure it out (they’ll fake it);
• Do market research. Your agency doesn’t need nearly as much for media as they insist they do. (Remember, they’re faking it.)

If you can afford to, hire a firm that gathers market insight professionally and has experience in the markets you want to understand. The more they know about the markets you’re interested in, the more you’ll get out of your investment. If you can’t get budget to hire a partner, but you can get budget to visit the markets you’re interested in, you can tell a lot from a little, if you know where to look.

Assuming your budget doesn’t allow for focus groups, consider ethnography, or field observation, in emerging markets. Ethnography is an essential component of any serious market research project, but it’s hard to explain and takes real skill to do. As a result, it’s generally overlooked by agencies.  If you don’t have a budget for fieldwork, try to squeak in a trip to an emerging market.

Here is a tool set you can use if you don’t have the budget to commission market research. It’s not rocket science, but it’s not checkers, either, because good market research combines anthropology, psychology, ethnography and geography.

What should you look at on a trip to a new market? There are many points of entry but three telltale signs are universal among emerging markets: civic infrastructure; individual expenditure; private investment. Over the next couple of days, I’ll tell you what I look for in each category:

DIY Market Research 2/5: Infrastructure David Kippen

Last modified on 2012-02-21 15:47:36 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Dr. David Kippen, HRExaminer.com Editorial Advisory Board Contributor

Dr. Kippen is CEO and Chief Strategist of Evviva Brands. With a background spanning advertising and communications and a client base spanning the globe, Dr. Kippen is recognized as among the top thought leaders in brand strategy. David has held leadership roles in several top associations that support the HR and communications professions. He is currently a member of SHRM’s Performance Management Task Force and an active member of the Council of Communication Management. Full Bio »

DIY Market Research 2/5 Infrastructure

by David Kippen

While it’s everywhere,

"infrastructure can be deceptive, because what catches your eye may not be terribly important."

Power supply is first because without power, economic growth can’t happen. Often developing countries struggle to keep power supply growing at the same rate as the private economy. And if they can, they struggle with the physical demands of routing wires to ever more locations from a fixed power grid.

The reason for this is simple: as more and more buildings electrify, they tap into a grid built before homes and businesses were rich enough to require electricity. In Vietnam, virtually every telephone pole in downtown Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is topped off with a crows-nest of wires. And though Bangkok is superficially much farther along the development curve, you’ll see an extremely overburdened power grid with power lines everywhere and often, a chaos of wiring at individual poles.

Eventually, the development will peak. That peak will then be followed by the orderly replacement of the haphazard wiring. Until then, signs of cobbled together power delivery are good indicators that the location is still growing.

Road quality follows a predictable progression from dirt to gravel to either asphalt or concrete as cities grow. However, the demands of growth—heavy traffic, excessive trucking carrying heavy loads—often degrades roads faster than they can be developed, particularly when there is limited capital for government investment. In city centers, the quality of roads, curbs, and sidewalks tells you far more than the number of new buildings you see. Taken together with the moped index (I’ll post about this later), road quality is a great indicator of the health of the public and private sector.

Capital investments in transportation such as rail lines are important because they’re a sign of arrival. Only when a population is large enough, fixed enough in location, and regular enough in migration patterns does it make sense to alleviate the strain on roads by investing in light rail systems. Similarly, even if there’s no light rail in place, investment in second level (i.e., raised or below-ground) pedestrian walkways can be a good sign that the local economy is maturing.

DIY Market Research 3/5: Individual Expenditure by David Kippen

Last modified on 2012-02-23 15:03:10 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Dr. David Kippen, HRExaminer.com Editorial Advisory Board Contributor

This week, we’re trying something different. David Kippen, the genius behind Evviva Brands is going to take us on a tour of Market Research. David is a powerful advocate for the idea that you have to learn about the markets you serve.  So, one step at a time, we’ll go through the basics of doing your own work to get a ‘dirt under the fingernails’ look at the market. – John Sumser

Dr. Kippen is CEO and Chief Strategist of Evviva Brands. With a background spanning advertising and communications and a client base spanning the globe, Dr. Kippen is recognized as among the top thought leaders in brand strategy. David has held leadership roles in several top associations that support the HR and communications professions. He is currently a member of SHRM’s Performance Management Task Force and an active member of the Council of Communication Management. Full Bio »

DIY Market Research 3/5 Individual Expenditure

by David Kippen

"Alan Greenspan famously watched a “men’s underwear index” because in lean times men replaced their underwear less frequently than during flush times."

This is often the easiest to assess.

I look to see how people spend their discretionary income, in three variable areas. Climbing the development ladder these are: shoe stock, owned transportation, and women’s accessories.

Shoes are durable, almost universal, and range from extremely cheap to very expensive. Because of the price range and their durability, looking at wear and tear tells you a lot about the wearer’s underlying economics. Alan Greenspan famously watched a “men’s underwear index” because in lean times men replaced their underwear less frequently than during flush times. That sort of data is not possible to get everywhere, so I look carefully at the average quality of shoe stock and how new the average shoes are. This is not about assessing whether people are wearing cheap or expensive shoes—it’s about whether they’re wearing newer, rather than older, and higher quality, rather than lower quality, shoes.

Owned transportation can vary from bicycle to scooter, tractor, boat, livestock or luxury car, and from very new to very old. Like shoes, it tells you fairly obvious things about the economy. In Vietnam, moving from bicycle to scooter represents a huge improvement in average daily wage. In Beijing moving from scooters to luxury cars is an even bigger shift. Transportation can also tell you a great deal about how far people are able to travel to find work. You’re obviously not going nearly so far on bicycle, an ox, or a tractor as on a scooter or car. Second to housing (which you probably can’t observe without knowing more about your talent’s migration patterns than you’ll have access to), transportation is the largest area of individual investment you’ll see. The more cars there are, the newer they are, the higher the wages in the area are and the wider the talent pool is.

Women’s accessories are often the trickiest to assess.It’s not really worth it in most markets unless there is also evidence of robust owned transportation. (If everyone’s on bicycles, the inventory of women’s accessories isn’t very useful.) But if the transportation stock is fairly good, women in many developing markets wear significant family wealth in their accessories and jewelry. So this is an important marker of a variety of things ranging from safety and social order (higher if there’s significant jewelry present) to trust in the formal economy (lower if families believe they must keep significant wealth in gold in case of economic instability). So part of what I look at is the quality of the jewelry (is it fake or real gold?) and the youngest ages at which I see jewelry commonly being worn.

DIY Market Research 4/5: Private Investment by David Kippen

Last modified on 2012-02-23 19:26:35 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Dr. David Kippen, HRExaminer.com Editorial Advisory Board Contributor

This week, we’re trying something different. David Kippen, the genius behind Evviva Brands is going to take us on a tour of Market Research. David is a powerful advocate for the idea that you have to learn about the markets you serve.  So, one step at a time, we’ll go through the basics of doing your own work to get a ‘dirt under the fingernails’ look at the market. – John Sumser

Dr. Kippen is CEO and Chief Strategist of Evviva Brands. With a background spanning advertising and communications and a client base spanning the globe, Dr. Kippen is recognized as among the top thought leaders in brand strategy. David has held leadership roles in several top associations that support the HR and communications professions. He is currently a member of SHRM’s Performance Management Task Force and an active member of the Council of Communication Management. Full Bio »

DIY Market Research 4/5 Private Investment

by David Kippen

"Not only is most of what you see private investment, but it’s hard to see. For example, is the shiny new building you’re looking at is brand new or just a re-skinned brick building that’s about to fall down?"

This is tricky. Not only is most of what you see private investment, but it’s hard to see. For example, is the shiny new building you’re looking at is brand new or just a re-skinned brick building that’s about to fall down? But there are a few key elements of private investment I’ve learned to look for. In order of development, these are bike shops, 5&10 stores, and billboards.

More bike shops (places that repair motorcycles and mopeds) mean there are a high number of people getting around on two wheels. So lots of bike shops tend to be inversely correlated with high development. Similarly, they’ll range from street-corner operations through tented areas to real mini-garages. Each tells you something important about the degree of local development. And they’re ubiquitous enough (because bikes break down often) to be impossible to miss if your eyes are open.

5&10s, the mom-and-pop shops, that carry everything from chicken wire and tin to dental floss and plungers, are all displaced quickly when bigger more efficient stores come to town. But as long as the general income level is low, volume wholesalers can’t generate the revenue they need to offset their fixed operating and inventory costs. So if you see frequent small five and dime stores, you’re looking at a market on the lower side of the development curve.

Billboards may sound like a no-brainer: they’re everywhere, right? Yes, and no. Remember, billboards are constrained by the same market dynamics as wholesalers: they need a mass market ready and able to spend discretionary income on mass-produced product. So question one is “how many do you see?” Question two should be “what are they selling?” Billboards seem to climb a predictable ladder from beverages (Coke, for example, and local beers) to consumer electronics, then phone minutes/plans, then cosmetics, then lifestyle products, then designer brands. What you see will tell you a lot about where the local market is.

DIY Market Research 5/5: Wrapup by David Kippen

Last modified on 2012-02-24 16:10:27 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Dr. David Kippen, HRExaminer.com Editorial Advisory Board Contributor

This week, we’re trying something different. David Kippen, the genius behind Evviva Brands is going to take us on a tour of Market Research. David is a powerful advocate for the idea that you have to learn about the markets you serve.  So, one step at a time, we’ll go through the basics of doing your own work to get a ‘dirt under the fingernails’ look at the market. – John Sumser

Dr. Kippen is CEO and Chief Strategist of Evviva Brands. With a background spanning advertising and communications and a client base spanning the globe, Dr. Kippen is recognized as among the top thought leaders in brand strategy. David has held leadership roles in several top associations that support the HR and communications professions. He is currently a member of SHRM’s Performance Management Task Force and an active member of the Council of Communication Management. Full Bio »

DIY Market Research 5/5 Wrapup: Great. Now What?

by David Kippen

Market research on the local economy, infrastructure and quality of living can show you how costly local talent will be.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but why should you care? And why should you bother? First, because taken together, these details comprise a mosaic illustrating many important things about the fixed cost of the local economy and the local quality of living. As a general rule, the better each of these areas is, the more costly local talent will be.*

That obviously has important implications for pay expectations. And keep in mind that the developing world is…developing. That means you might end up with a very different mosaic in two similarly sized cities. Also, because migration patterns in developing economies are often driven by kinship and family ties, citizens of one city may not understand that their own local economic environment isn’t the same as the country as a whole.

But there’s a finer point, one that has everything to do with advertising and is exactly why it’s so important not to let your agency fake their way: the less developed the economy, the more important basic job elements will be to your core talent; the more developed the economy, the more likely talent is to seek self-individuation through work.

In plain English, if you’re try to use marketing messages about “a career of your dreams” in a marketplace where people dream about predictable income, you’ve missed your mark. And if you  promise “stable work” in a marketplace where the talent wants development and advancement, you might as well sell nail clippers to penguins.

(* Cost of talent sometimes correlates positively with education level, but because quality is generally predicated on suitability for a given task, that’s often not the case. The universal ranking of universities offering specialized programs are typically a better indicator.)