Marketing Survey and the Holy cow!!!

Just finished my first marketing survey!!! And let me tell you the results don’t look too promising at all. It all began when our marketing professor challenged us to get into the mind of the ‘great Indian Customer’ and we (I and Indraneel) thought we were ready. Little did we realize that the minds that we were looking to get into have already been pawned off to ‘Big Box retailers’.

Dressed in our PGPX T-shirts and armed with nothing more than a disarming smile and the PGPX notepad, we hit the neighborhood retail stores early last week-end. But no sooner than we had approached our first customer, with our tell-tale ‘marketing survey signals’, the friendly staff came over to break the unfriendly news that they don’t allow customer surveys. Not inside the stores, not in their premises, and as we realized towards the end of our gig, not even on the streets in front of the stores.

Some stores were pretty straight forward in their refusal to allow us anywhere near their customers. But some others were even crueler. They decided to give us a whole tour of their facility, and a peek into their messed up organization structures all in the name of getting a formal permission to do customer interviews. To cut a long story short, we ran from pillar to post and then from post to pillar, ultimately deciding to give up on the formal permission and take our game to the streets. Now what happened on the streets? That is the suspense of the whole story, but before I go into that, let me jot down some of our key retail domain findings.

If you ever have to work on an assignment that involves getting competitive intelligence on how big retailers run their shop, all you need to do is to show up at one of their stores and pretend as if you want to interview their customers. You can start your retail expedition right at the cash and bag counter and if things go as per plan like it did for us, you will soon be talking to the CEO of the company at his head quarters.

And he won’t mind answering any of your questions or spend any amount of time with you, provided you don’t ask him permission to talk to his customers. (After all, customer is the King and you can’t talk to the King that easily…) He may even ask you to talk to his Board of directors, before he can let you talk to his customers, but by the time you would have already gotten your money’s worth and would be in a forgiving mood, even to the extent to think that he is being cute with his reasoning.

Inside the stores we found many of our fellow PGPX-ians also in the same state - blacklisted as marketing surveyors and reduced to just being customers. They had already decided to hide their surveying frustrations by buying anything and everything that they could see around, so as to fit into the customer crowd and not stand out as surveyors. So we thought we will try and get into their minds even though it was very clear to us as to what had triggered their purchasing decisions.

Me: Hey Vikram, you seem to have bought a lot of stuff, can I talk to you for a minute.

Vikram: No problem. But before that would you like to buy a pillow from me?

Me: (Puzzled by how my luck was not getting any better) But, why would you want to walk around selling pillows in a retail store? (I was wondering whether he had hit upon some strange business model by applying the market segmenting fundaas we had learnt at PGPX)

Vikram: (Kind of expecting my question) I was also here for the survey, but was stopped short of connecting with any customers. So I was just walking around and then I saw this ‘buy one get one free’ pillow deal. One thing led to another and now it looks like I have one too many pillows than I need.

Me: Tell me something which I don’t know (to which Vikram responded in his trade mark style)

Vikram: You are very handsome….

Out on the streets, we were a little luckier and were able to hit up with a customer who was able to empathize with our plight as he himself was an MBA and would have completed umpteen such surveys of the third degree in order to lay hands on his degree. He was very articulate and gave us all straight forward answers to our not-so-straight forward questions, like:

Me: Can you please tell us who usually plays the initiator, influencer, decider, buyer and user roles in your typical buying process?

MBA man: (Oozing with self deprecating humility) It’s all me, man. (He is also palpably excited about the fact that his wife is not around to let the cat out of his shopping bag.)

The ‘marketing survey – street style’, was about to wind up and we were getting ready to split when out-of-nowhere the ‘COW’ entered the scene. And mind you, this was more of a bull than a cow and there was nothing holy about it. For a minute I had given up all hopes of escape and just froze in my surveying position. The MBA man immediately got into his car and drove away and we were cowed down by the latest beast entering our market surveying escapade.

Now, luckily for us, Vikram was exiting the store right at that moment and the cow got distracted by the ‘big pillows’ that he was carrying and we could press the ‘escape’ button from the scene to save our lives. Thanks Vikram.

Now, on to more learnings. I was reasonably sure that this COW is on the Star Bazaar pay rolls, with the sole responsibility to discourage PGPX-ians from conducting market surveys on the streets in front of the store. (We later confirmed this best practice from their CEO, while we were meeting up with him to ask his permission). And this cow, I have to say, has done a tremendous job in executing its responsibility. I for one, would definitely not dare to go anywhere near Star Bazaar with anything even closely resembling a notepad. No sir, I don’t want to get my life, err.. hands dirty.

Not with the kind of ‘Black Cow’ protection that retailers are offering their customers from Market Surveyors of the PGPX kind.