Probably the best definition of marketing I ever heard (heard it at Mplanet 2006) was that marketing’s job is to drive profitability by unlocking consumer insight. Thus, perhaps the search for the new holy grail is where can we find newer, more accurate, and the most actionable consumer insight. Perhaps text analysis should be a new part of your marketing research toolkit. My guest today was Cindy Mobley, product development manager for Maritz Research and she’s helped uncover and discover what text analysis is and does.

For marketing researchers, you may already have heard about text analysis. It's history found its roots in national security, but today's businesses are using it as a way to glean richer meaning from customer surveys or other customer input channels. For marketers who haven’t heard about text analysis, this may be a tool you’ll want to consider if you’re at all interested in getting a clearer read into the intentions and feelings of your customers – and I am guessing even your prospects.

Cindy mentioned that she heard a statistic that 85% of all information in the world today is in text form. The ability to analyze this text for meaning and actionable data points is huge. Subjectivity, for the most part, is removed...and since this is a technology-based solution, we get a much faster outcome.

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My guest today was Tim Riesterer -- co-host of the radio program and CEO of teh CMM Group. It's always nice to have Tim on the program because he brings a keen sense of perspective to one of marketing's greatest areas of pain: our consistent inability to engage customers in a relevant dialogue that is mapped to their needs. What we are really good at is talking about ourselves.

Tim mentioned that 85% of brand decisions by customers are made from the interactions between themselves and sales professionals. This is amazing...85% of sales come directly from the experience with a sales person. Not from all the marketing messages, the slick brochures, or the creative ads we run.

By building out our stories -- not our history and media boilerplates -- but answers to every customer scenario, Tim feels we can significantly increase the number of sales, decrease the length of the sales process, and speed up the training time of new sales staff. And through these stories we achieve a level of differentiation that keeps us safe from commodity status and price-point selling.

Check out the Customer Message Management forum at www.marketingpower.com/msa or visit Tim's Web site at www.customermessage.com for more info, a Web cast, and even info on Tim's book.

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