MBA's will love this detate!!!!! Is Market Research / Marketing Research critical to Success?????

MR is just a ****ing Marketing Fallacy popular amongst Top Companies / Executives / the so called MBA’s / Grey Haired nerds.

Have you ever heard of Dhirubhai Ambani getting into MR to figure out what should be his business or what products should he launch or what marketing strategy will be successful???????????

Never…..coz he didn’t have the money, neither was he educated or aware of such jargons, neither was he lucky to be influenced by educated people around him. He was however, fearless, street smart and good in understanding Human Psyche.

There are 2 ways of looking at MR:

A] To understand human wants and needs, to quantify the same in terms of meaningful data and use the same for Marketing Strategy

B] To introspect the reasons for failure of a particular Marketing Strategy

Both ways, you are doomed.

Data can be useful provided it’s on actuals and is a mere aggregation of numbers and is not an interpretation of subjective nature say human feelings, attitudes, needs etc….

It’s absurd that we try to quantify such things……….

I remember attending a seminar where some senior person from Eureka Forbes made a mention that before launching Aquaguard the co. had carried a research and the conclusion was that Indians will not pay thousands of rupees to purify water when conventional means like boiling, mixing of alum with water, use of candle filters, tap filters etc….are available at nominal cost.

Thank God, they ignored MR and successfully launched Aquaguard, which is today voted as a Superbrand.

Just imagine if you have a business idea and want to start up your company what do you require? Some cash, a good idea etc…..will you think of Market Research?????? Definitely not. If someone floats his company, it’s because he / she has a gut feel that the idea will work and mind you that’s the best way of learning also……coz if something has to be tested let it be your Gut FEEL and not someone else’s…….so will you ever conduct Market Research to confirm whether your idea will work or not??………definitely not.

The next example that I can cite is of Mr. Sanjeev Bhikchandani who never got into MR…..he just had a simple idea and sensed a huge business opportunity and today he is the CEO of one of the most successful dotcoms in India……….for those who can’t figure out, his company is better known as Naukri.com.

On the contrary we had Times of India the biggest and undoubtedly the largest media giant in India but could not sense the need to go online until their classified business in print was affected with the advent of Portals. They are one of the late entrants in the online industry in most of the domains i.e. Timesjobs.com (Online Recruitment Portal), Simplymarry.com (Online Matrimonial Portal), Magicbricks.com (Online Realestate Portal).

I can think of Market Research as one of the reasons why TOI could not be the first to venture online despite being a huge media conglomerate, despite having a highly qualified team, despite having a good brand value, huge financial capabaility etc….;-(

Probably, research would have said that online is not attractive ;-( and out of the heavens there are people like Mr. Sanjeev Bhikchandani and others who have forced them to go online ;-).

MR cannot gurantee success, it's only a holy way in the corporate world to cover your ass and pass the buck on MR just incase the strategy fails.

Well, to be successful you just need to possess a high degree of commonsense, a good idea, rely on your Gut Feel, understand human psche and stay away from Market / Marketing Research.

CHEERS!!!!!!!!!

Kunal.