Thoughts on Thought Leadership
Using Surveys to Generate Market Demand
Many professional services firms have seen the value of surveys in generating press and market interest in their services. One highly visible example is the annual survey of senior information systems executives that Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) launched in 1987. Over the course of its life, that survey produced hundreds of articles in business and trade publications and helped shift CSC’ s image from a federal systems contractor to a business consulting firm.
But today nearly every large professional services firm conducts surveys. What can a you do to ensure your surveys stand out from the crowd? In our experience, three steps can be helpful:
- Target emerging issues with lots of hype but little clarity. It’ s a lot easier to capture attention by shedding light on new and important issues than it is examining a long-standing and forgotten one. NerveWire Inc., at the time an up-and-coming consulting and systems integration firm (now part of Wipro Ltd.), realized that its focus-“collaborative commerce”-had become a buzzword over the past few years. IT vendors (especially Internet software firms) had been hyping the phenomenon to sell technology that companies could use to connect to other companies. In fact, a number of business gurus including Michael Hammer, James Champy, and C.K. Prahalad had heralded collaborative commerce as an important trend. Yet hardly anyone had any statistics to back up the trend--i.e., that companies indeed were trying to integrate their operations with suppliers, customers and other entities, and that the effort was worthwhile.
- Sharpen the inquiry. To gain attention on an issue that’s long been researched, firms must identify the “white space” in terms of unexplored or poorly explored issues. For example, during the heart of the “B2B e-commerce” craze, a small company in Bellevue, WA, called Edifecs sought to create awareness for its consulting services and related software. Rather than trying to address the whole of B2B--a virtually impossible task for a company of any size--Edifecs decided to research a small but critical slice of the market that to date had been ignored: the technology and business process changes that companies had to make to prepare their operations to do business electronically (an effort known as “B2B enablement.”)
- Mine the results more effectively. With lots of competition on a survey topic, firms can generate extra press by making the findings more relevant to specific industries and/or business functions. Slicing and dicing the data by industry and producing industry-specific press releases and survey reports can generate significantly more press than a “one-size-fits-all” survey report and news release. An excellent example is the annual Retail Technology Study formerly conducted by CSC and RIS News magazine. This survey polled hundreds of retail executives across the industry, generating rich data on retailers’ information technology investment and deployment plans.
NerveWire conducted a survey that proved that collaborative commerce deserved the hype. The study tracked the percentage of companies that were tightly integrated with outside parties and the paybacks they enjoyed from that integration. The research results generated significant market interest in NerveWire: mentions in 20 business publications (including an entire column in the Financial Times); 100 requests for the research report from clients and prospects who had read about it in the press; five clients requesting a briefing on the study; and 20 influential industry analysts attending a NerveWire briefing.
Edifecs surveyed several hundred e-commerce managers on how their companies were addressing the enablement challenge, and came up with a very compelling story on why companies’ lack of attention to enablement was severely impeding the adoption of B2B e-commerce in all industries. Edifecs’s survey report and media relations activities generated numerous articles in the IT trade press and helped the company secure meetings with influential industry analysts covering the e-commerce market. One such analyst commented that he had not even heard of “enablement” prior to the Edifecs study, but would ensure that the issue was included in subsequent research efforts his firm would undertake in the B2B arena.
The overall results of the survey garnered considerable media attention in both the IT trade press (such as Computerworld and Informationweek) as well as the retail trade press that covered the industry at large (e.g., Chain Store Age). To maximize coverage, CSC also parsed the survey findings by individual retail segments--supermarkets, drug stores, mass merchants, apparel, convenience stores, etc.--and promoted these findings via news releases tailored to the respective trade press serving those particular segments. The result: extensive coverage of the survey in all major relevant publications, which generated hundreds of sales leads every year for CSC’ s retail consulting practice.
Surveys can be an excellent tool for generating market awareness and leads. But the proliferation of business surveys now means that firms must dig much deeper in their studies, and market them more effectively, to capture audiences’ attention.