....er, know your market

Research is important right?

I'm not going to go off on one here about the importance of doing research. Principally, because the importance of carrying out research is so blindingly obvious that I cannot even be arsed to explain why.

There exists, in the world of communications, the abbreviation FMC. It stands for fixed mobile convergence. I'm not going to explain what it means or what the issues are, because what follows is so laughably under-researched, there is no need.

-----Original Message-----
From: bad.pr@noresearch.pr
Sent: 24 October 2008 15:25
To: the, Finisher
Subject: Find your own expert with FMC

Find your own expert with FMC

Farming Media Centre, launched this week by the Guild of Agricultural Journalists, enables journalists, editors and PR agencies to 'pick the brains' of the experts, improving understanding and reliability when agriculture and food issues are making headlines.

Its ultimate objective is to promote, defend and ensure accuracy in reporting views, opinions and facts on agricultural topics, by making experts and their knowledge easily available to anyone in the media.

There then followed a lengthy email about the importance of the Farming Media Centre.

What did this PR do? Did she type FMC into Google and decide that sending this press release to a telecoms journalist was a good idea because 'hey, FMC is relevant to telecoms'.

What exactly was the thought process?

Was there a thought process?

Spinpox*

This positing is inspired by the PR antics of a firm that has a product which I quite like. Although, I would add that the product is almost totally pointless and I probably – well, definitely - wouldn’t pay for it.

The firm has been around a fair while now, making slow gains here and there, punting the aforementioned product and it has yet to make any real dent into consumer consciousness.

Not much has changed in terms of functionality since launch. The product, which is a mobile phone service, remains fairly quirky and of niche interest. The firm would love for one or all of the major carriers to realise what they’ve been missing out on and promote this product to their subscriber base.

This scenario is a trifle unlikely since the service competes with a service the carriers already provide. Besides which, if the carriers liked the idea they would have nicked it by now and done it themselves. Indeed, I’ve noticed that a number of rival consumer offerings have popped up during the last year. None of these will be particularly successful either.

Still, that’s not Bad PR, it’s just bad business.

The Bad PR element that bugs me is the firm’s insistence upon carrying out research that, guess what? Well, yep, it claims, finds, bears out, corroborates, affirms, announces, authenticates, validates, substantiates and confirms that consumers really, really, really like the product and that it’s dead useful and popular, honest.

The firm is not alone in this deadly PR disease that I’ve dubbed spinpox*. In fact, let’s face it, pretty much any piece of ‘research’ is funded by a firm that has a vested interest in the results of the research backing up their business.

I could go out onto Oxford Street today with a carefully phrased set of questions that ‘prove’ that the majority of UK consumers would be interested in cycling to Iraq for their summer holidays.

You can ‘prove’ just about anything with funded research.

*Any resemblance to an actual organisation’s name is purely coincidental.