Ken Gasque: October 20, 2013

By Ken Gasque

When doing marketing planning keep in mind the adage, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gets us into trouble, it’s what we know that isn’t so.”  We feel confident that we know something to be true.  We feel it’s just common sense.  We feel we know how others will think, act or react because that is how we think.  To compound things we are impatient.  We want success and we want it now.  So we say, just do it.  Get started.  We solve the problem without giving the problem much attention.

I have read several different quotes attributed to Albert Einstein that go something like this.  “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”  Einstein is also credited as saying “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” I think both of these statements make a good model for marketing.

In the 1950s the shipping industry was losing business and revenues were going down.  The ‘common sense’ approach was to find ways to cut cost and be more efficient.  The theory of the day was to build lighter, smaller ships that could move faster and be more efficient.   But they could not cut enough out of the costs to make it affordable.

One man asked a different question.  He asked how can we make shipping more profitable?  This is how “containerized shipping’ became a reality.  Jim McLean, owner of McLean Trucking Company, turned the industry around.  “Hand-loading a ship cost $5.86 a ton at that time. Using containers, cost only 16 cents a ton to load a ship, a 36-fold savings. Containerization also greatly reduced the time to load and unload ships. McLean knew ‘A ship earns money only when she’s at sea,’ and based his business on that efficiency.”

Well designed questions and research will give you insights to what the consumers are thinking; and the process of developing good questions can be informative and instructive for you.  First, it is critical to identify what you want to know and yet be careful not to prove what you know.  Most people know they influence the answer with the way they ask the question.  Often they ask the question in a way that will validate what they already know or what they want the answer to be.

Spend more time determining what the problem really is. Look at the problem from as many different prospectives as you can imagine. Be willing to break the rules. Pretend there are no wrong answers. Think as differently as you can.  Think as a 7 year old would.

Better questions get better answers. Spend more time crafting questions and the results may be easier to analyze. Sales people know that the ‘questions are the answers,’ lawyers know the answers before they ask the questions, and teachers use ‘what if’ questions to stir the imagination.  Reverse the question, instead of asking ‘who are you selling?’ ask ‘who are you not selling?’  And ‘why are you not selling them?’  In interviews ask the consumer ‘what if’ questions.  Ask questions in as many ways possible that will allow you to dig deeper.  Look for questions that will give you more insight.   Ask how they feel about a brand and then ask ‘how the brand feels about them.’  You may be surprised.  If so, follow up with more questions.

Great victories are not won in the heat of battle.  Marketing planning pays.

© CopyrightKen Gasque 2013 all rights reserved

Ken Gasque is president ofGasque Marketing and Advertising a brand development and marketing planningcompany in West Columbia, SC.  He can bereached at [email protected]