How Great Research Helps Tech Companies

How Well do you Understand Your Customers’ Needs?

As a Tech Company, how well do you know your customers? In most cases, identifying who has an affinity for your brand and focusing on the needs of that customer type can spell success for your products, especially the launch of your new offerings.

Sure, you might think you can have AI go over your customer database and hope it’s able to recognize customers and prospects most likely to purchase your product. However, AI shortcuts are unable to approach the intuitive and interpretive power of human thinking, let alone the kind performing at a high and excellent level.

The Story of HP Test & Measurement

The case of Hewlett Packard’s “Mentor” campaign is instructive.  HP commissioned our researchers to spend quality time with worldwide HP engineers as well as engineers from other companies, learning about their daily lives – how they think, feel, and behave.  The researchers stretched the intuitive, interpretive, and synthesis-building capacities of their right brains to arrive at a subtle insight that AI would have great difficulty seeing: that HP engineers showed greater qualities of “mentorship” than other engineers.

The result was a highly successful, award-winning global campaign.  Conversion rates soared as HP logged higher equipment sales in virtually every world region. The campaign also produced significant financial gains for HP and won an ADDY Award for creativity.

The Squaresoft Video Games Story

We also conducted primary market research for Squaresoft Video Games to determine affinities for their products. They had been sending out about 200,000 mail pieces per month to key metros across the US. By giving us extracts of their file of purchases of similar games, we appended characteristics and modeled affinities for prospective buyers.

We called those most likely to respond “Videobrats.” The model reduced the number of markets to 4 key metros which had the highest concentration of “Videobrats,” concentrating their marketing on high-affinity households in these markets.

Our researchers spent a great deal of time with Videobrats in these markets, exploring their daily lives, discovering how they think, how they interact with others, and how they spend time with entertainment and gaming software.  This hard work produced a key set of insights that could be perceived only through the intuitive and interpretive power of the human mind.  It’s not something AI could touch.

The result was a campaign of extraordinary power and great marketplace success.  Squaresoft reported dramatically increased sales of the two game titles in the specific geographies in question, ranging from 20% to 200%.  Not only that, the “Videobrats” campaign won the KPMG Award of Merit for ROI performance and the Ernst & Young Most Effective Marketing Campaign Award.

The Lessons for Marketing in the Tech Sector

Many people conducting marketing campaigns in the tech sector believe you just need to tell people on the web what you have (e.g., software, hardware, systems), and the magic of internet targeting will take care of the rest.  They’re wrong.  It’s as important in tech as in any other category to tell people why they should want the software, hardware, or systems from your brand instead of another brand.  That requires you to express something about what psychologically or emotionally binds your customers to your brand.

Discovering the root of these deeper connections requires more complex layers of understanding and perception than AI can provide at present.  Hard-working humans driving their minds to higher levels of interpretation and synthesis can do it.

When market research is used not just as a means to an end but as a way to gain a deeper understanding, Tech Companies are able to produce outstanding results because they are able to come up with inspired and creative solutions addressing the needs of those who value their brand the most. AI is unable to unlock these sophisticated types of solutions because it’s unable to relate on an intuitive and interpretive level the same way excellent human thinking does.

If you’d like to see this kind of magic brought to life for your brand, please reach out to us here.