Pressures for efficiency and accountability at the client level have increased the value of consultants who have marketing research expertise, says one of Canada’s pre-eminent marketers.
Lowell Lunden, former chairman of the Association of Canadian Advertisers and, for 28 years, a top marketing executive at Quaker Oats in Canada and the u.s., said in a Nov. 18 speech to the Canadian Association of Marketing Research Organizations (camro) that in order to fulfill the marketer’s need for knowledge, researchers must go beyond providing dry facts to assume a broader role in their clients’ businesses.
‘The time is right for the marketing research community to ask itself: What business are we in?’ says Lunden. ‘I would suggest… the knowledge business.’
To be successful today, marketers need specialists who can help them understand the business they are in, or should be in, Lunden says.
‘Netscape has a saying: ‘If customers buy a product it is called marketing, and if they do not, it is called marketing research.’ I believe marketing research deserves more credit than that.’
Lunden says that in the past, market research firms have tended to submit reports that have not adequately taken into consideration the big picture. He says that must change because clients need a great deal more context from research consultants if they are to survive in a knowledge-based marketing environment.
He says some clients want recommendations based on the consultant’s experience and intuition, while others want the research findings with no editorializing. He recommends giving both, but with a clear distinction between fact and conjecture.
After many years as a client, Lunden is now himself a consultant.
This past summer, he took early retirement from Quaker Oats. Before Quaker, he had been with The Pillsbury Company and worked in hospital administration as a Captain in the u.s. Army Medical Service Corps.
Though retired from Quaker, Lunden is quick to point out he’s not retired.
He’s started his own company, LLunden & Associates Limited, and is positioning it as a knowledge-based management marketing consultancy.
The focus of his business is the trademarked concept ‘Just-In-Time Communications’, a philosophical framework to buy, plan and schedule advertising in such a way that more weeks of a year are covered without spending more money.
His philosophy is based on research in North America and the u.s. suggesting the notion that an ad needs to be seen repeatedly in order to be effective, is simply not true.
‘Research indicates the first advertising impression is generally more powerful in influencing behaviour than subsequent impressions. Reach, therefore, is more important than frequency over the course of a year.
‘Advertising effectiveness can be improved if the money spent delivering excessive frequency can be redirected to disperse messages more widely, to run more often, when decisions are being made that will impact on behaviour,’ Lunden says.
