Millennium Marketing Research®

Tom Schori DBA Millennium Marketing Research®, 808 Ironwood, Normal IL 61761, 309-532-8466

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Are you absolutely certain you know what customers, prospects think of your company?

By Thomas R. Schori, Ph.D., and Michael L. Garee, Principals,  Millennium Marketing Research, 808 E. Ironwood, Normal, IL 61761-5239. Tel. 309-532-8466 -

Ask top management at most companies¾large, medium or small¾if they genuinely know what their customers and prospective customers think of their company, and we’ll bet the farm that the overwhelming majority of them will reply, even sometimes indignantly, in the unequivocal affirmative. The sad truth, however, is that top management at many companies quite likely knows the very least about how customers and prospects view their respective companies.

We recently had the occasion to talk to the Chief Executive Officer of a company (which shall go unnamed) that had at one time been a thriving, prosperous company, but had in recent years been experiencing diminishing fortunes. Indeed, it was clear from existing financial data that the only way the company was headed was downward, ultimately into extinction. Wouldn’t it be helpful, we asked the CEO, if the company were to conduct research to learn how they might keep more existing customers, and equally important, how they might also attract new customers? We were told in no uncertain terms that he, the CEO, and his and his executive staff already knew quite well what customers and prospects wanted and how they viewed the company. Thank you very much!

Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated case. There are literally thousands of companies in the marketplace that continue to fool themselves that recent downturns in fortune are merely an aberration, that a "turn-around" is imminent. It’s just a matter of rolling out some new product or implementing some new plan. Then, everything will return to "the way it used to be." Within the next five to ten years, many, if not most of these companies will one day quietly close the books and the doors on their businesses. And, quite likely, even then, some managers will still be insisting that a "turn-around" is imminent.

What causes such behavior, such myopic vision in otherwise honorable, basically good people? There are several reasons, we think.

First, in order to arrive at the very highest executive ranks at most companies, one has to be fiercely loyal, sometimes even to the point of becoming "messianic" about the company and all it stands for. With a mindset like this, it can become quite a stretch to critically evaluate both the strengths and weaknesses of a company, particularly the weaknesses. And, every company has weaknesses, of course.

Second, most top managers are really quite insulated and isolated from the everyday trials and tribulations facing their companies. The people feeling the "blasts" from customers and prospects are generally going to be the "frontline" employees, not the executives or the people who report to them. And certainly, most people reporting directly to the executives aren’t going to go out of their way to bring lots of "bad" news to the executives (assuming these people even know it themselves), for fear of appearing "disloyal" to the company by criticizing some aspect of it.

And, finally, it’s probably just essentially human nature for most of us (including company management, of course) to reject facts that simply don’t fit in to our way of thinking about things.

Still, this whole issue goes far beyond ego involvement or other dynamics of human behavior. As we’ve said, what’s at stake is the literal survival of thousands of companies in a plethora of industries unless they gain the courage to "bite the bullet" and genuinely learn what is turning off existing customers and repelling prospective customers.

How can a company effectively learn what its customers and prospects actually think of it? To be sure, there is no one, all-encompassing approach, but one approach we’ve found particularly useful is the following.

Segment and gain input from all key ‘constituents’

Every company has rather clearly defined "constituents," consisting, usually, of the following groups of people: executive management, middle management, frontline supervisors, the employee group at large, customers and prospective customers and, if a publicly owned company, the stockholder group. To comprehensively "flesh out" the image of a company, the opinions and attitudes of each and every one of these constituent groups should be obtained, separately, objectively and in complete anonymity.

Carefully evaluate existing ‘dissonance’ among key ‘constituents’

Unless a company is atypical in virtually every meaningful way, considerable "dissonance" will be shown to exist among the various constituent groups, insofar as opinions and attitudes about the company are concerned. As a matter of fact, it has been our experience time after time that top management quite probably will be genuinely "shocked" and "amazed" at how differently from them, say, the employee group at large views the company. Likewise, many of the thing they knew with absolute certainty about how customers and prospects view the company will be shown to be patently false.

‘Operationalize’ the research findings

It’s one thing to learn how the various constituent groups view a company, or even to be able to surface and evaluate the dissonance that exists among the groups. It’s quite another to take the next, very necessary step, i.e., to do something substantive as the result of the research findings, to "operationalize" the findings to the extent that image is positively altered or at least enhanced. It’s in this area that many companies err and err badly. If, for example, the research findings clearly illustrate that a company’s management is severely out of step with how customers and prospects view the company, there is always the risk that the research itself will be blamed and therefore "shelved." Sort of a permutation of the "kill the messenger that brings the bad news" syndrome. On the other hand, if a company sincerely wants to reposition itself to maximize its market potential, it will quickly and decisively implement the necessary operational and marketing steps suggested by the research results.