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John Martin |
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From Boomers to
Zoomers The Southeastern Institute of Research, Virginia's oldest market research firm, is finding new life through expertise in everything from Baby Boomers to commuting patterns.
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Baby
boomers just don’t get it – they don’t know how
old they are. They’re passing the 50-year milepost by
the millions every year, and far from signing up for the
American Association of Retired People, they’re barely
willing to concede they’ve hit middle age. According
to research conducted by the Southeastern Institute of
Research (SIR), the Boomers perceive themselves as 12
years younger than their chronological age. Not
surprisingly, observes SIR President John Martin, Baby
Boomers also feel that a lot of advertising directed at
them is missing the mark. Ad agency art directors and
copy writers – average age, 29 – tend to apply the
stereotypes of middle age. Says Martin, himself a Baby
Boomer: “You’ve got worlds in collision.” That
may be bad news for brand managers wasting billions of
dollars on ineffective advertising, but it’s a
business opportunity for Martin and his partner
Elizabeth McLaughlin, who took the helm of the
Richmond-based market research shop a year ago. By
establishing The Boomer Project with ad veteran Matt
Thornhill, they are positioning themselves as experts in
generational marketing who can bring strategic insight
to their clients. While
zealously preserving the research expertise that made
SIR an institution in the Mid-Atlantic marketing community, Martin and McLaughlin have
brought new energy to the 40-year-old firm. In the space
of a year, they’ve garnered national visibility
through the Boomer Project, forged a relationship with a
renowned statistician and demographer, refocused their
own marketing on selected industry verticals and landed
a slew of new clients, from Colonial Williamsburg to
e-commerce provider PayPal. Most
significantly, the new owners have refocused SIR from a
firm that delivers rock-solid marketing research, largely upon
request, into a company that participates in the
strategic decision-making of its clients. “When we do
research,” says Martin, “we start off as business
people thinking, ‘What’s the end goal?’ We start
with the understanding the strategic goals and business
drivers, and only then define the research
program.” That
kind of thinking comes naturally to Martin. He served
several years as president of Siddall, Inc., a
research-intensive ad agency in
Richmond,
when he made the decision to join PBM Products in
Gordonsville. PBM, founded by entrepreneur Paul Manning,
had the audacious goal of busting into the cozy duopoly
that controlled the baby formula business. Martin ran
the branding and marketing program that helped vault the
start-up into a $100 million-plus company in just a few
years. Among his more fateful decisions, he hired
McLaughlin, a go-getter GenXer who brought a wealth of
marketing experience from the cellular industry, as a
senior member of his team. Slinging
stones at industry Goliaths was alternately exhilarating
and terrifying. Martin and McLaughlin served as the
truth squad, traveling around the country when one of
the industry giants circulated potentially damaging
information about PBM’s baby formula product and triggered a lawsuit.
They hit the road again when the Food and Drug
Administration recalled a batch of PBM’s formula,
salvaging credibility with key distributors and
short-stopping what could have been a business-killing
disaster. Thriving under crisis, the duo clicked professionally. They began talking about starting a business of their own. As luck would have it, Robert Miller and Richard Steele were ready to retire after four decades of running SIR and wanted to sell their company. They sent out feelers to Martin, who’d been a loyal client over the years.
“Bob
and Richard are the deans of marketing research in
Virginia,”
Martin says. They’d built a team expert in the
intricacies of field work, data tabulation, the coding
of open-ended questions and other research arcana.
“Elizabeth and I saw an opportunity to take a brand,
which had a reputation of doing marketing research the
right way, and take it to the next level.” When
Martin and McLaughlin took over – he as CEO, she as
COO
–
they inherited a strong staff and roster of clients.
Although Miller left the firm, Steele stayed on to help
manage the transition before retiring by the end of this
year. Still, the new owners moved quickly to put their own imprint on the
company. First, they changed the company’s client mix.
SIR had many clients, but a number of them generated
projects only episodically. Martin and McLaughlin wanted
to focus on clients who saw research as a strategic
priority, built a budget for it into their operations
and were willing to pay for the insights they received. Furthermore,
rather than scatter-shot their efforts, the new owners
focused on key industries where they could speak
authoritatively and gain industry recognition as
experts. From his days at Siddall, Martin leveraged a
strong relationship with the Virginia Department of
Transportation into a national reputation in the field
of transportation demand management. VDOT is an SIR
customer, and transportation now is one of SIR’s
target industries. Other fields include hospitality
& travel – the firm hopes to announce soon the
hiring of one of the leading tourism marketers in the
country – as well as health care, education and trade
associations. Secondly,
the new bosses re-shaped the corporate culture to better
fit the new mission. Under SIR’s old business model,
researchers had the know-how to take projects from start
to finish – and usually did. The practice had the
virtue of providing clear lines of responsibility, but
Martin and McLaughlin wanted to give clients the benefit
of a wider variety of perspectives. As far as they were
concerned, the thinking behind the
questions and the analysis of the results was as important as
the raw data. “We
have very high expectations,” says McLaughlin. “We
want to knock it over the fence for the client. The pace
may have picked up – there may be more meetings and
more debate -- but we reach a consensus and deliver a
product that’s been vetted by everyone and reflects
the best thinking of the group.” Meanwhile,
SIR is building on a proprietary product, the Feature
Optimizer, developed under old management to conduct
multi-variant analysis on the trade offs consumers make
when choosing a bundle of products, services and prices.
A luxury resort could use the Feature Optimizer, for instance,
to calculate a promotional package of hotel rooms, meal
plans, golf and other activities at a variety of price
points. The
new SIR has Internet-enabled the
Feature Optimizer so consumers
can respond to the survey on the Web and their responses
can be downloaded directly into a database. Now clients
can track results in real time as survey responses pour
in. Meanwhile, SIR has formed a strong relationship with
Dr. Steven Nock, a Then,
of course, there’s the Boomer Project. SIR teamed up
with Matt Thornhill, chief marketing officer with
Boisseau Partners. Thornhill approached Martin, asking
if he’d be interested in helping start the project.
Martin thought the project made a good fit. A number of
SIR clients -- most prominently the AARP but also a
number of travel and hospitality clients like SIR
surveyed not only the Boomers but the ad agency creative
workers who were crafting ads for them. It’s axiomatic
in the ad business that branding dollars should be
focused on the 18-to-49 demographic because people form
brand loyalties when they’re young. But the research
showed that Boomers display far less loyalty than
previous generations, Martin says. Boomers have more
disposable income than any generation in history and
they’re more open to switching. “Over
the last 30 years, people have focused on the 18-to-49
demo. Once you turn 50, marketing people declare you
dead,” he declares. “But you don’t die when
you’re 50 – you’re just beginning to have the
financial resources to become a big consumer!” The
original idea was to bring those insights to SIR’s
clients, but the Boomers boomeranged in an unexpected
way. Community leaders in That’s
just fine with Martin and McLaughlin. Appreciating
generational differences in values can only help them do
a better job for clients like The Virginia Tobacco
Settlement Foundation,
which is charged with the job of reducing teenage
smoking. “You have to understand viewpoint of each
generation, their frame of references,” says Martin.
“It's all in how you frame the question.”
-- July 14, 2004
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Find Out More:
Southeastern Institute of Research home page
Elizabeth McLaughlin, COO
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