|
|
Home
Potential
Clients
My
Work
Client
Results
Research
Published Papers
Guest Lectures
They
said it!
Resources
Contact
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Investment
evidence
the
Marketing/Engineering Investment Ratio™ (M/E Ratio™)
"Your
evidence of the relationship between Market Research and success is right
on! Dell's M/E Ratio™ is North of 1.5." Michael S. Dell, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Dell Computer Corporation
|
|
Getting
started
The
graphic which visualizes this research is there for a reason. Let’s take
a closer look.
|
|
|
Figure 6,
Getting Started
|
|
Getting
started
Make a fundamental shift in management attention and investment commitment
toward decisive, up-front Marketing. Aim for success with the
budget and staffing.
It
is understandable that, for people who have not yet had the experience
which good upstream marketing brings, it might be difficult to jump
in with a major market research budget.
In
the market place, time is essential. Rather than delay while you
ruminate about a bigger program, it might be better to start off with a
smaller project now.
|
A
wakeup call
|
|
|
A
wakeup call - super successful technology-based enterprises invest more in
Marketing (exclusive of promoting or selling) than in engineering.
"There
can be no doubt from Grabowski's data, that Marketing [Market
Research] is crucial towards developing a successful business."
Robert S. Rogers, III of MIT's Technology and Policy Program.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
GO |
|
Invest
more in Marketing than in engineering, M/E >1 |
|
|
|
CAUTION |
|
Invest
more in engineering than in Marketing, 0.1 < M/E < 1 |
|
|
|
WARNING |
|
No
investment in market research, M/E Ratio™ <0.1 |
|
|
|
|
Figure 7,
the GO, CAUTION, and WARNING zones of the M/E Investment Ratio™ |
"I've
been in software engineering management for more than twenty years at companies
including BBN, HighGround Systems, and Sun Microsystems, and have supervised
about $75 million of cumulative engineering effort. Over that career, I
would estimate that 80% of all the engineering investments were wasted,
in the sense that we developed products or features that customers did not need
or did not use.
"Often,
this was due to 'feature bloat,' especially me-too duplication of the
competition's feature set, without any fact-gathering or analysis to see if
those features were actually required by customers. Sometimes it was due
to Engineering having 'a good idea' that wasn't customer-validated before
implementation. Sometimes it was the right feature, but implemented in a
way the customers couldn't use.
"Had
we invested more deeply in Market Research to guide us as to what
customers needed and would spend money on, we could have saved a large portion
of that 80%, both in terms of dollars and (more importantly) in time to
market."
Richard
W. Fortier
The
choice is yours.
|
|
