Many years ago, some friends of mine and I took a trip down the west coast of Mexico over a Spring break. We made a few important stops for educational purposes, such as at the manufacturing facility of Carta Blanca beer in Sinaloa (this for a serious study of manufacturing and  production of one of the world’s oldest beers).

 

Study concluded, we continued south and wound up in the little town of San Blas, just a bit North of Acapulco.

 

Not much more than a village at the time, San Blas has an historical significance in that it was one of the key points for the Manila galleon trade in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries whereby Mexico sent silver to the Far East on Manila galleons, which then returned with porcelain, spices, silk, and other exotic goods from the Philippines and China. Much of which was then sent overland across Mexico and on to Spain. (Both Mexico and the Philippines were Spanish colonies at the time.)

 

The town itself was settled by a mixture of native ethnic groups, many of whom were still encamped in the jungle-like terrain of the surrounding community.

 

Against this touch of historical Mexican background come four college students (all members of the wildest fraternity at San Jose State (which was ranked as the #2 party school in the United States by Playboy magazine at the time). So, on an Easter break, they landed, God knows how, on a deserted stretch of beach belonging to a community of ethnic natives at around 4:00am on a Saturday morning.

 

We crashed.

 

The sound of the surf and a horde of predatory fleas combined to wake me a few hours later. I glanced at the morning sun, my eyes burned, my head ached, and my mouth was so dry my tongue stuck to the roof of it.

 

I pushed myself up, leaned on one shoulder and looked down the beach. No one. My comrades had abandoned me.  To where, I had no idea. I did recall that there was a tribe of natives back off the beach located in the underbrush.

 

But what would my comrades do there?

 

The mind ran wild as one of my fraternity brothers with whom we were traveling was a few bottles short of a six pack.

 

I turned and looked in the other direction.

 

There, about 100 yards down the sun-kissed beach was a little….stand… I guess you’d call it. It was rather like a grill on a stand of metal. The grill sat under a thatched roof and a woman – maybe 5’2”, round midsection (very round) and long black hair blowing in a morning breeze – was tending to something on the grill.

 

I stood. The sand under my feet seemed to shift as if it were on water. And then it stopped.

 

I made for the thatched hut and grill.

 

When I got there, the woman smiled. A front tooth was missing; another was in dire need of dental work. She motioned to the grill where several tortillas were roasting.

 

“Queres?” (You want some?)

 

“Si.”

 

“Quantos?” (How many?)

 

“Dos.”

 

More smiles as she reached into a large steel tub filled with water and ice cubes and extracted…wait for it…a can of Coke.

 

“Queres Coke?”

 

 

Here I was, 2,651 miles south of San Jose, 1,407 miles South of the U.S. border on a Mexican beach no one had used or been aware of in hundreds of years, and a Mexican woman cooking tortillas on a make-shift grill asks me if I want a Coke.

 

“Si.”

 

But, for a moment, think of the brand extension. Because it was a unique series of surveys and market research that got me the Coke on that hot, Mexican morning at the port of the long-gone Manilla galleon trade.

In the 1960s, the Coca-Cola company was expanding its markets globally. And in doing so, Mexico became one of its most significant international markets. The company employed innovative strategies for market research and surveys that reached deeply into the native population to understand consumer behavior and preferences.

As part of this research, they also studied consumption patterns in rural areas and designed targeted distribution strategies into these areas.

And, thus, my thatched-hut hostess offered me a Coke on this lonelybeach where magnificent Manilla galleons used to depart for the orient loaded with tons of silver.

Courtesy Kitco.com

By the 1970s, Mexico became one of Coke’s largest global markets.

The Coca Cola company currently spends $5 billion a year on advertising and is well known for its extensive use of research and surveys. I don’t know exactly how much of that $5 billion is spent on surveys and research but it is known to be a great deal. Whatever the cost, it is stunningly effective as it generates $44 billion a year in sales.

Of course, the Coca-Cola company is not the only company that uses surveys and research to provide a foundation for their marketing and advertising. Apple is also famous for their surveys and their deep research and understanding of their public. And they haven’t done so badly with $3.7 trillion in market capitalization making them the largest corporation in the world.

Indeed, I would be shocked if every member of the DJIA were not mega-users of surveys.

Why is that? Why does the corporate world conduct surveys of their customers and potential customers?

This, of course, is not rocket science: if you are selling something to a public, you ideally need to market what it is that your targeted public needs and wants from the product or service that you provide.

When you ask them, when you survey them, you find out the answer to that question or those questions. There is skill and expertise in creating the survey questions so that you don’t get “social” answers to the question.

What is it that your prospective public thinks is valuable about what you sell? You want to know the benefit they see in buying your product or service and state that “benefit” in their own words.

Too many corporations offer their prospective public answers to the survey questions and ask them to choose one.

No.

Let the respondents answer in their own words. It may be a similar concept, but your buying public may state it differently. And it is their wording on how the public phrases the benefit that you want to use in your advertising and marketing. It is this wording that parallels the minds of your buyers and prompts them to purchase.

Understanding this puts a premium on the tabulation of the survey responses. A professional tabulator knows how to look for those key phrases and create the tabulation that, when used in Marketing and/or PR, gets the person to pull out their credit card.

At On Target Research, we have been conducting surveys for our clients for more than 30 years. Some of those clients have been the giant brands that you are more than familiar with, but our biggest customer base is the smaller to medium size companies as they often don’t have the internal expertise to create and conduct and then utilize the results of survey findings.

We can get you those key phrases by properly wording your surveys and properly tabulating the responses. It is doing these steps correctly that makes your marketing to customers or prospects sing and impels new leads, sales and income.

Interested?

Call or email me using the contact information below.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman

President & CEO

On Target Research

www.ontargetresearch.com

Br***@**********an.net

1-818-397-1401