By Kirsten Robinson
Sure, there’s an abundance of projects that marketers want Research to focus on—but, are these projects truly in line with your company’s big-picture objectives?
Many marketers focus primarily on subjects that are within their span of control—such as features, package, and price. As a result, they miss out on scoping the bigger issues affecting the company.
The good news is Research can help reframe marketers’ expectations on the level and scope of projects that the business should undertake. At Johnson & Johnson, Research helped broaden their marketing function’s narrow perspective.
In order to resolve the disconnect between ideal and actual research focus, Johnson & Johnson developed a process that forces marketers to focus on what they actually need to know. The company’s research planning process maps out what the business knows and doesn’t know about customers and the market, elevating the discussion beyond prioritizing individual projects to prioritizing how to fill business’s knowledge gaps. The steps to Johnson & Johnson’s mapping strategy include:
- Capturing what is known today
- Prioritizing brand-level unknowns
- Reconciling cross-silo unknowns
- Competing for additional funding
- Communicating cross-silo prioritization decisions
MREB members, learn more about how Johnson & Johnson’s strategy-driven learning agenda works.
on August 23, 2011
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[...] going to impact company strategy. In fact, my colleague Kirsten Robinson just blogged about how to reframe partners’ requests on what they really need to know. And it even includes a formalized process for having business partners compete with each other [...]