Ambiguity, or The Project Takes Shape

Team Behr had our initial call with our client earlier this week, and for all our nerves about "meeting" the client, I think it went pretty well! It turns out our contact, Lisa, was recently a student herself - she just graduated with her master's in marketing communications, so she is familiar with the student experience.

I won't go too far into the details of the Team Behr project, partly because of confidentiality and partly because that's not really the point of the blog, but I will say that the project is going to focus heavily on market research of a segment that Behr thinks could be fertile ground for growth. Our project will involve assessing three things: the size of the segment, their openness to the Behr brand, and any needs they have that Behr can address.

So here's where the "ambiguity" that is one of the hallmarks of marketing comes in. We know that members of this segment exist at the intersection of two demographic lines. What we don't know yet is the best way to find them:

• Should we begin with finding members of demographic group A and asking them if they are ALSO members of demographic group B? Or vice versa?
• Should we contact organizations representing one of the demographic groups and ask them to connect us to their members?
• Should we search social media to find people in our target for qualitative interviews?
• Should we create surveys that prescreen for members of our target segment, so we can ask them some deeper questions right away?

One place we know we can't begin is with Behr itself, because we have been asked to conduct our research in the general population rather than with Behr's existing customers. This project is focusing on acquisition rather than retention, so the team at Behr wants the opinions of people who hasn't necessarily had experience with the Behr brand.

Of course, this is just the first in what I'm sure will be a long series of questions over the course of this project. I can already see a few of them: "What about the budget?" "When do you want to see results?" And further down the line: "How will we determine if the segment size is significant enough to target?"

I have confidence that as we continue to work with Lisa, we will answer all these questions, one at a time.