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Market research

© 2008 Max Lent

A cover letter written to an advertising agency requesting photography assignments resulted in my being hired as a writer, not as a photographer.  I was told during my interview that good writers were harder to come by than photographers in the Rochester, NY area.  Photography students from the nearby Rochester Institute of Technology were plentiful and often stayed in the area after graduating.  The result was an overabundance of highly trained photographers who would work for next to nothing and sometimes nothing.  Good writers who could write creative short declarative sentences were a rarity.

On my first day at the advertising agency I noticed that nearly everyone working at the agency had a personal computer.  I also noticed that none of the computers were being used for anything more sophisticated than word processing.  I suggested to the owner of the advertising agency that I could train their staff to use the computers to maintain databases of existing and potential clients.  I further suggested that I could use the information stored in the databases to generate personalized mail merged letters to prospective customers.  The owner was impressed, but admitted that they didn't even have a typed list of sales prospects.

Before moving to Rochester I held a research position at the UCLA School of Public Health and published a directory of photography galleries and museums, so I was no stranger to library research.  I suggested to the owner of the agency that they provide me with a profile of their ideal potential customer.  Using that profile I invested a couple of days doing library reference research and came up with a few hundred ideal leads.  The data I collected was then keyed into a database.  I next wrote the content of the sales letter, programmed the mail merge, and printed the letters and envelopes.  Business cards and brochures were included in the outgoing envelopes.  

The result of the effort was more calls from potential clients than were expected.  In retrospect I should have staggered the mailing.  New business was generated and the return on investment was measurable and substantial.  

While working on the prospective client database one afternoon an urgent call for a radio commercial script came into the agency.  None of the scriptwriters was available.  In an act of desperation the owner asked if I could write a 30 second radio script in less than an hour.  I said that I didn't know, but that I would give it a try.  That script later won a Golden Microphone award.

Another area where I was able to help this client was customer service.  I implemented numerous customer service policies.  For example, if one of our commercials was successful for our client, we sent them flowers and Champaign.  We tracked client birthdays and sent cards and small gifts.  More importantly, we asked clients to evaluate our products and services.  We followed up sales with brief evaluation questionnaires.  When problems were described, we fixed the problems and sent out another follow-up communication.

What I learned from this experience and others like it was that few businesses use existing resources to their fullest potential.  As an outsider I could see potential where others had not.  My expertise in a wide variety of areas enabled me to help this and other similar clients in ways they could not imagine.  For example, this client would never have dreamed of posting a want ad for a researcher, database programmer, writer, knowledge management consultant, customer service consultant, and market research employee.  They didn't know they needed one and besides who would have written the ad.      

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Contact Information:

Max Lent
Business and Web Consultant
812 Coventry Drive, Webster, NY 14580
Telephone: 585-670-9707