Semiotics analysis is study of signs and symbols to draw out inferences on how they impact a brand’s perception in the mind of end consumer.

What comes in your mind when you see a Mcdonald’s logo, or a Starbuck’s advertisement?

Brand logo plays a major role in creating first impression of brand and what it stands for in minds of end consumers.

A logo broadly comprises of:

1. Shape
2. Color
3. Tag-Line(If any)

We all our semiotic analysts inside, but that is more of intuitive judgement than a well laid out systematic analysis.

Marketing communications let’s face it uses more of a hit or miss approach and hence at times it becomes difficult to explain the ROI of marketing spend in various corporate organizations.

Semiotics putting in simple terms is the way signs interact with each other and the information they carry to human mind.

As marketing professionals we thrive to build brand perception through suitable mix of content and media, but often we overlook importance of brand logo and the image it forms about the organization.

Semiotic analysis maps ground rules and lays out a systematic approach to understand and explain, how choosing a particular brand logo would affect brand image of the enterprise.

Now once you’ve decided on what message you want to communicate, designed and developed content to be marketed, next comes the type of media to be chosen.

Rational and pragmatic approaches say that media’s function is just to deliver the content that is being sent, but in ways choosing media does have its effect on end results as well.

We usually refer to signs as a substitute for the thing itself, but in reality its not, its basically represents the underlying concept, not the real thing.

Whenever we encounter a particular sign, it is the concept that comes to our mind not the thing itself, and how we behave towards this concept is how we actually think and a perception is formed. (Saussure’s theory on semiotics)

Essentially, What distinguishes a sign or a logo is what actually constitutes it, and at the same time sign can not have a standalone meaning in absolute sense, it conveys different concepts in different contexts, and hence a particular sign is always accompanied with a context to make sense.

So ultimately following points broadly should be kept in mind before finalizing a particular logo for an enterprise:

1. Underlying concept that you want to associate with the sign or content.
2. You should be aware of the behavior that would be triggered onto encountering that concept.
3. Context that should go implicitly with the sign or logo that you finalize.
4. Media chosen: Media can have a lasting effect on the desired outcome.
   1. For e.g. if you’re looking to advertise a local restaurant, what media will help in reaching your target audience??

So in the end you have to start building it from bottom to top, with the end result in  mind(what action do you want your target audience to take?) you build enterprise branding and promotions strategy.

It is of great importance to any MR institution to know what all are the contact points where customers are interacting with each other and information exchange is taking place.

If we broadly classify traditional MR techniques they would include:

1. Quantitative Research:
   • Online surveys
   • Field Data collection
   • SPSS data modelling
   • Advance Analytics
2. Qualitative Research:
   • Face to face interviews
   • Focus groups
   • In-depth interviews
   • Expert opinion
3. Behavioral Economics
4. Neuro-marketing
5. Eyeball tracking studies
6. Outdoor media research
7. Social Media Monitoring:
   • Sentiments monitoring
   • Text analysis
   • Consumer interaction and trend analysis
   • Social brand equity monitoring
8. Digital:
   • CTRs or click through rates
   • SEO
   • Blog marketing
   • Online forums
   • Online identity management
9. Mobile:
   • Mobile advertising
   • User interaction with mobile devices
   • Share of time spent on Mobile devices

MR industry is at its evolutionary threshold wherein importance of old school or traditional techniques has not gone down, but end user contact point have increased.

Now consumers are expressing there sentiments at various platforms, Digital, social media, through mobile devices. word of mouth so on and so forth.

What I believe is that we can’t focus on going with just one particular method of research these days to get true end consumer opinion about a particular product or service.

Hence we might see the rise of MR portfolio services in time to come, wherein depending on data inflow for a particular product total spend on MR would be divided among these various platforms.

When this happens we have to have an integrated IT enabled platform wherein we can provide whole gamut of services through a single sign on platform.

This post is in reference to our previous post on highlighting the benefits of implementing IT solutions for Market Research companies.

Click on the link below to see findings:

http://linkd.in/zI637O

Whenever we think about SMBs we think of low profit margins, or even forget profit margins, we perceive targeting SMBs as a cost to the company.
While actually doing so we are missing out on the larger picture.

Targeting SMBs as your potential clients has following issues:

1. It takes a while to build good business relations with the decision maker.
2. Profit margins that you seek become obsolete when the cycle reaches price negotiation stage (If there is any possibility of negotiations at all).
3. If your SMB prospect lies in the same value chain as your bigger clients do, then they’ll seek same service quality as your bigger clients but on a price effective basis.
4. Sales Cycle becomes longer because of above mentioned reasons.

Now the question that arises is why target SMEs anyway if there are so many bottlenecks and there’s not even sufficient profit margin to justify the time and efforts that you are putting in to get them in??
One of the possible explanations to the above question can be as follows:

1. It is not about what it is more about how?
   1. Go for volume.
      1. This means you have to acquire as much SMBs as possible as your clients and effectively pitch your offering with a price effective perspective.
      2. Initially it may feel like the price that you are working at is not justifying the inputs but in longer run, you’ll definitely reap the rewards.
   2. Cross-sell and up-sell
      1. Once you have established good business relations with your SME prospect you can always pitch in your other products and hence can get more business from your existing client.
      2. Add more value to your existing product and establish service and product differentiators.
      3. Up-sell your existing services based on the service differentiators that you established.
2. It is about your business’s long term strategy
   1. They provide you with a client base to fall back on in pressing times
      1. SMEs work on a low profit margin themselves and hence even in pressing times they have sufficient business coming in.
      2. If one of your Key Account (Clients at top of the value chain) go to some other service provider you still have steady cash flows coming from your SME clients.
      3. SMEs basically consolidate and strengthen the roots of your enterprise, by providing you with steady business and hence healthy cash flows.
   2. Once these SMEs grow over a period of time, they can eventually become one of your key accounts.
3. How to establish a good marketing and sales strategy to go about acquiring SMEs as your potential clients?
   1. Finding out key areas that are critical to your prospective client base.
      1. Price effective solutions:
         1. Cash flows are very important for every SME, Hence you have to come up with a different pricing model price effective yet flexible enough.
         2. Don’t go about quoting anything just to get more clients.
            1. Some of us misunderstand price effective with quoting almost anything to SMEs.
            2. You have to have a pricing model for this segment which can scale up with time depending on the type of project and margins available with your prospect.
      2. Service level differentiators:
         1. Again if your prospect lies in the same value chain in which your prospect does, they’ll need same quality of services as your Key accounts do.
         2. You have to clearly and confidently put across what you are offering within the price range that you quoted.
      3. Establishing ROI:
         1. It is quite difficult to convince prospect for the ROI that they’ll get out of buying your services.
         2. Prepare a good EVE (Economic value Estimate) that will show your value proposition clearly to your prospects.
         3. If you have a POC (proof of concept) model at your end, it can further help establish credibility of your service offerings in eyes of your potential clients.

Keeping in Mind all these points and approaching SMEs with the right strategy will definitely help you achieve the desired number and in long term build sustainable business for your enterprise.

Even if there are sufficient incentives to take surveys in a particular panel, respondents take them just for the sake of taking those surveys and hence it only reduces the quality of information received at researcher’s end.

Solution:

I believe solution lies in the structure itself, in the very design. Surveys are usually very monotonous by design and feel.
After taking a certain number of surveys it becomes difficult for a respondent to give right answer to similar questions and even tend to get confused, or worst they won’t take your survey at all.

Gamification is all about designing your system, in a way that makes the whole experience of taking surveys interesting and hence engaging more respondents, at the same time increasing adoption rate.

Question that arises next is, how can I implement these techniques to improve my existing response rates??

There are some key elements to every survey that decide on the response rate of the survey once it is administered.

These are:

1. Visual appeal and theme:
   1. Theme chosen should appeal to the respondent group that you are going to administer your survey to.
   2. Then there are some basic things to consider like:
      1. Colour of the background and font used:
         1. Black colour gives us a hint that it is receding away from us and light colours like yellow and white gives us a feeling that they are emerging out of the picture and coming in front.
      2. Rule of the thirds:
         1. You divide a particular layout by two horizontal and two vertical lines and you’ll have a matrix layout in front of you.
         2. Now the point where one horizontal line meets other vertical line is a point where the focus of a person lies while looking at that layout.
         3. So if you’re planning to include some graphics of interest, better place it at these locations, it could help improve quality of response significantly.
2. Usage of graphics in scales for measurement:
   1. Instead of conventional radio buttons, sliding scales could be used.
   2. Instead of text like “good”, “bad”, “worst”, smiley could be used.
3. When there is some sort of branching or benchmarking, complex logic involved.
   1. There is always a better way to take respondent from one page to the other.
      1. Different type of transitions and animations can be used, while transitioning him from one page to the other.
      2. Using more of graphical content then using text or conventional scales.

In the end it all comes down to how interesting the whole process of administering the survey is, if it is interesting and engaging enough, I don’t think you’ll ever run short of quality responses.

The reasons for this increased growth can be attributed to following factors:

1. Organizations want to understand the market landscape while the global economy recovers, before planning and executing their marketing strategy.
2. Increased focus on emerging markets in the APAC region.

It becomes all the more important and an area of concern for many organizations to understand the current consumer spending trends, and competitive landscape before they go ahead and plan their marketing initiatives.

According to a research report by Forrester group, consumers are interacting with each other at a global level, through various social media platform like facebook, twitter and thus influencing buying behaviour irrespective of the geographical territories. Now this calls for an increased emphasis on gaining global insights as well.

This increased inflow of information from various interfaces has impacted the Product lifecycles as end consumer are making more informed decision now and this has a deep influence on their buying behaviour, hence one of the major challenges for many organizations is to understand this change on a real time basis and adapt their strategies swiftly.

Now this raises two challenges in front of the market research companies:

1. To provide their clients with real time insights about the latest trends in the market.
2. To reduce the time involved in preparing these insights by adopting the best in breed processes and constantly innovating these existing methodologies and processes.

Increased focus on Emerging markets and APAC region:

With most of the US/Europe markets getting saturated and exhausted, multinationals are now eyeing the APAC region, reason being the increased disposable income with the consumers and thus increased spending trends.

So now these MNC’s are trying to capture maximum of this share of wallet that lies with consumers of these regions and the companies who are already enjoying a good market share want to retain and expand their business and to measure the effectiveness of their marketing programs they have to understand the customer satisfaction levels hence the need for market research reports.

Recent reports show that there has been a paradigm shift in the buying behaviour of consumers, across the newly emerging markets.

This change can be attributed to following factors:

1. Increased disposable income with consumers.
2. Increased Brand awareness amongst people due to availability of timely and effective information.
3. Impact of information flow from Social Media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc.
4. Opening up of markets for entry of other players, in various segments providing the consumer with more choices than ever.

Market Research: Conventional Practice

Market Research has been conventionally carried out through the Pen and the paper way, Most of the time resulting in longer turnaround time of projects, inefficiency and poorly laid out quality control procedures to establish the credibility of data collected on to the field.

Market Research: Driven through best in breed IT solutions

With increased pressure on MR companies to reduce the turnaround time and deliver insightful reports to their clients, role of IT in improvising current processes becomes a very crucial one.

It is very important to choose just the right IT solution for your needs, and this depends totally on what research processes are crucial that can turn out to be a bottleneck when it comes to reducing turnaround time of projects, maintaining the data quality and efficiency standards.

How IT solutions improve existing research processes:

1. Time: We have been talking about reducing turnaround time in this entire post, and well this is one of the most pressing needs of the hour.
2. Cost: Using right IT solution in the long run can definitely help you in cutting down cost adding hard dollars directly your bottom-line as with increased efficiency MR organization is able to take up more projects as compared to the case where IT solutions are not at all a part of the present Research processes.
3. Quality: IT solutions by capturing critical location based information, and with some other features like Time-stamping the data make it very easy to establish the authenticity of the data collected.

Thus improvising on the three most important constraints of any project, IT solutions become essential for any organization looking to improve upon its existing operational and research processes.