After 30 years in business, I can tell you without question, that the use of surveys for marketing and public relations increases leads, sales and income.

For Real.

More specifically, here are some of the key uses of surveys.

In the modern world of business, understanding customer needs and preferences is crucial for making informed decisions, developing effective strategies, and staying competitive in the market.

Surveys have emerged as one of the most valuable tools for gathering critical data and insights that drive marketing efforts. By directly engaging with customers, surveys provide businesses with detailed, real-time feedback that can shape everything from product development to customer service practices.

Understanding Consumer Behavior

At the core of any successful marketing strategy is a deep understanding of the target audience. Surveys provide marketers with direct access to this understanding by capturing detailed information about consumer attitudes, preferences, and purchasing behaviors.
.
A company launching a new product can use surveys to gauge potential customers’ interest, gather opinions on product feature
of success when the product is introduced to the market. Information about pricing can also be gathered.

Helping to form Decision-Making and Strategy

One of the most significant benefits of surveys in marketing is their ability to inform decision-making. Whether a company is considering a new marketing campaign, launching a product, or expanding into new markets, surveys provide data that guide these strategic choices.

For instance, before launching a new marketing initiative, a company can use surveys to test different messaging options, assess the effectiveness of various ad concepts, or evaluate consumer perception of the brand.

By periodically conducting surveys, companies can track customer satisfaction, measure brand awareness, and gather data on the success of promotional campaigns. This helps marketers identify areas of improvement, adjust strategies as needed, and allocate resources more effectively.

For example, if a company notices through survey responses that customers are dissatisfied with a particular feature of a product, they can quickly address the issue before it becomes a larger problem. Alternatively, if surveys reveal that a particular marketing channel is performing better than others, resources can be redirected to maximize the impact of that channel.

Real time feedback

The ability to receive real-time feedback is another advantage of surveys. In today’s fast-paced market environment, businesses cannot afford to wait weeks or months for research results. Surveys provide immediate access to consumer opinions and can be used to make quick, data-driven decisions. This is particularly important for businesses operating in industries where trends change rapidly or where customer preferences evolve frequently.

Gathering Insights for Personalization

The ability to deliver relevant, individualized content is a powerful way to enhance the customer experience and drive business growth.

Bottom Line

Surveys are an invaluable tool in marketing, offering businesses a cost-effective and efficient way to gather customer insights, inform strategic decisions, and engage with their audience. By leveraging surveys, companies can better understand consumer behavior, enhance customer satisfaction, and optimize their marketing efforts. However, to maximize the benefits of surveys, marketers must ensure that they are using sound methodology, designing clear questions, and analyzing results with care. When used effectively, surveys can help businesses stay ahead of the competition, drive innovation, and ultimately build stronger, more lasting relationships with their customers.

But more basically, you are in business to sell a product of service and surveys serve as the foundation for marketing and PR. Their use increase leads, sales and income.

“When we implemented On Target’s research survey findings, our profits increased and marketing costs decreased. From a financial analysis of our company, we discovered that over a two year period, On Target Research saved our firm over $300,000 a month or a ball park total of $7.2 million dollars so far.”

RC
President

If you are interested in having some surveys done. Call me or send an email.

Very Best,
Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
Br***@**********an.net
1-818-397-1401

What is it that makes a great entrepreneur?

There are a lot of factors, of course, but in my experience in providing  services for hundreds of business owners over the years, the one thing that stands out to me is that the good ones, those that are super successful, care deeply about the quality of the products they produce and the customers to whom they provide them.

This is basic. This is the launchpad.

Doug Kerr, a builder in Vancouver, BC, designs and builds homes of exquisite beauty. Doug’s care for what he does has earned the firm numerous awards and made the company tremendously successful.

Stephen Price was a friend and my doctor long before he launched his fantastically successful vitamin company, Dr. Price’s Vitamins, and had us conduct surveys. Stephen is more than a chiropractor; he is a dedicated scientist.

Terry Morrill took a paving stone company and expanded it into a wildly successful firm that designs and builds outdoor living spaces that seem like paradise – Pacific Outdoor Living. Terry has been so successful, and his care factor so generous, that he has written a book, now a bestseller, to help other contractors be successful.

I met Bob Duggan in the late seventies at the renown Delphian School in Oregon. We became friends and used to run together (I think he still does – my knees gave out years ago).

I did surveys for two of his companies.

I was somewhat of an investor at the time. Thought I was pretty good. But I have never seen anyone – then or since – with the prescience* to assess important markets …or create them.

*(prescience: the ability to know or correctly suggest what will happen in the future. Websters).

Of course, now Bob is a globally recognized, widely heralded billionaire CEO in the biotechnology world.

Besides my survey company, On Target Research, I write a financial newsletter, Strategic Financial Intelligence. And if you are a subscriber and followed my suggestions to invest in Bob’s current companies, you would be sitting on some handsome returns. See the graphs of the two companies of which Bob is now CEO and/or Chairman and that I recommended long ago.

Summit Therapeutics

SMMT

Pulse Biosciences, Inc.

PLSE

So, I have had the pleasure of doing market research and surveys for some pretty damn wonderful people and successful companies. From day one, it has sparked an excitement in me to survey clients or prospects and find a key that opens the door to increased sales or a hot PR program.

Yes, we get paid for our work. But the real pay is in helping people.

Bruce Wiseman

President & CEO

On Target Research

www.ontargetresearch.com

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

1-818-397-1401

By the skin of my teeth. A personal story.

I had majored in history in college and decided I wanted to go to graduate school and then teach. The first step was to get a Master’s degree at San Jose State, where I was finishing my undergraduate work and then on to Cal at UC Berkeley for a PhD.

But to get into graduate school at San Jose I had to have a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. Mine was 2.83. Bummer.

I talked to the head of the history department. He said I could take the graduate history entrance exam and if I passed, I could get into the Master’s program even with my “thin” GPA.

The exam was the toughest I had ever taken. For one, it covered all world history: Greece, Rome. European, Russian, American (17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century U.S. history). And it was right minus wrong.

Typically, if you take an exam that has 100 questions. You get 80 correct, your score? 80. But in a “right minus wrong” exam, there is a point deducted for every wrong answer. So not only are the wrong answers not counted, but a point is deducted. So, the score in this example is 60. Tough!

If it had been a “normal” exam, I would have passed easily. But as this was right minus wrong, I came in 2 points short of the requirement to be admitted to graduate school. I was called to the office of the head of the history department to go over my test results. He explained that I had come up a couple of points short of the required score.

But the head of the department, Charles Burdick, liked me. Not sure why other than I had taken his class on World War II, a subject on which Burdick was a nationally acknowledged expert. I remember one class in which he had a former admiral from the Third Reich come and talk to us about Germany’s World War II naval strategy (this was in ’63. the war ended in ’45, so maybe this guy had done some time. Whatever, Burdick knew him and this was history from the “horse’s mouth.”)

In fact, San Jose State University recognized Burdick as the most accomplished faculty member in its history.

Well, the most accomplished faculty member in the University’s history, let me in to the graduate program and told me if my grades dropped below 3.0, I was out.

I changed my schedule: I would close myself in my infant daughter’s closet at 6 pm, turn on the hanging light bulb and study until 6 am and then, go to bed. I was up in time for my afternoon seminars. I studied seven days a week. I had straight As in my graduate work – 4.0 GPA for my Master’s degree?

Not only did I have the “incentive” from Professor Burdick, But as I studied the storied history of our country my appreciation for its development – it’s creation – soared. I was enthralled.

Oh yes, America has its warts. But study the Westward movement of America during the 19th century: the frontiersmen of the Application valley, the Davy Crocketts of Tennessee and Kentucky, the cattle drives, the cowboys and the Indian wars of the Great Plains, to the Rockies and on to California gold.

So, as my knowledge of America’s history grew, so too did my appreciation of our country’s place on the world stage.

Now, I grew up and studied during the Cold War. Communism was the evil empire, the enemy. But fast forward about 30 years – and along comes an interesting journey when, in 1991, a friend asked me to join him in Moscow to help open up a business college…That’s right in Moscow!

The trip to Russia, just a few months after the historic collapse of the Soviet Union and the banning of the Communist party in Russia, was eye opening in the extreme. I found the individual Russians that I met were not walking around with nuclear missiles in their back pockets. No, they were among the nicest people I had ever met.

And those relationships destroyed the fixed ideas I had about the Russian people. Ideas that had been pounded into my mind over the years by the government-controlled media here. A subservient press is a repugnant blight on our culture. It needs to be brought back to some semblance of honesty and respect (The New York Times has long been a mouthpiece for the CIA). But that’s another story.

And, truth be told, these were ideas that I had accepted without much challenge.

In Russia, (I travelled to Russia 5 times in the early 90s) my love of country never changed, but my view of the Russian people certainly did.

At any rate, by the time I spoke at the opening of the business college, I had a successful survey company. And when it came time for my talk (about 6 of us had come to Moscow for this opening) I gave a talk on the values of surveys. There were about 200 attendees at the opening of the college (probably most of the “entrepreneurs” in Moscow at the time:)

You have to understand the mind of the Russian businessman at that time. In talking to these folks, one came to understand their viewpoint, which had been conditioned by the fact that for 70 years, the State owned everything.

The idea that one could create a product or service without government approval, and sell it for more than it cost them and pocket the profit, instead of turning it over to the government, was unheard of.

When I explained that one could survey the public one was trying to sell their product to and find out what promotion was likely to increase their sales and income…well… Revolutionary.

Of course, we know this in free market America. Indeed, virtually every major brand in the world uses surveys to boost sales. So do small to medium sized businesses.

How do I know this?

My company has been helping companies increase their sales and income for over a quarter of a century with the use of surveys.

“When we implemented On Target’s research survey findings, our profits increased and marketing costs decreased. From a financial analysis of our company, we discovered that over a two year period, On Target Research saved our firm over $300,000 a month or a ball park total of $7.2 million dollars so far.”

R C
President

This story, from my years as a graduate student to helping Russian entrepreneurs, with a dash of political philosophy thrown in, is told with an eye to helping you increase your sales and income. With an eye to helping you flourish and prosper.

Can we be of service?

If so, contact me via phone or email using the links below.

Best,
Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
Br***@**********an.net
1-818-397-1401

We surveyed the marketing directors of the 7 largest oil companies on the planet.

We’ve surveyed state legislators, orthopedic surgeons, movie producers, Mexican cell phone users, and German businessmen. We’ve surveyed CEOs, CFOs, IT directors and consumers of virtually every kind of consumable.

The answers to many of the survey questions are often surprising. Not always, but often.

Here’s an example.

The relationship between the United States and Russia has gone through its ups and downs. There was the Cold War, of course – if a Russian was caught having a conversation with an American in Moscow in the 80s, Lubyanka awaited.

What a change after Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union in December of 1991.

It was just 6 months later, in June of 1992 that I handed my passport to the surly immigration officer at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

I subsequently traveled to Moscow several times in the 90s and, in so doing, developed a close relationship with the senior executives of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) – the federal Russian police (like the FBI).

It was a fascinating relationship, made more so because the MIA execs were fascinated with survey technology.

You may have seen this picture previously but, if not, this is a snapshot of me delivering a talk to 50 senior MIA executives in an historic conference room in the headquarters of the MIA. Yes, that’s a picture of Lenin behind me.

In the course of my meetings with a Colonel Pylov, he “confessed” that they were having trouble recruiting police – could we conduct surveys to help?

Yes.

The survey of Russian police required bilingual surveyors and tabulators but, once completed, the answer to the key question was startling. Though it really shouldn’t have been.

“What was the primary reason that you joined the MIA?”

“To get free transportation on the metro.”

What?

Yes. Ordinary Russians didn’t own cars in the late ’80s and early ’90s when these policemen would have originally joined the MIA. And police rode free on the metro. This was a big benefit.

There is more to the recruitment story, but I tell this to make the simple point: you don’t really know until you survey.

Something we have been doing for more than 25 years.

If you want to know what your customers think about your products or service, or what will motivate your prospects to buy from you as opposed to your competitors, call us or shoot us an email.

Best,
Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
Br***@**********an.net
1-818-397-1401

“On Target Research is fantastic. Their ability to extract relevant and powerful data from C-level executives is remarkable. In the short period of time, we were able to get profound insight into the hearts and minds of our potential clients. The research is invaluable for all of our marketing branding and sales initiatives.”

MA – President