Your Organization is Worth Investing in!

Invest in Your Company the Way You Invest in Yourself

What is your personal investment strategy?  Max out your 401K to earn the highest employer matching percentage?  Save the first 5%, 10% of your pay to ensure that you are saving?  Invest in yourself by paying for an MBA?   Whatever your strategy,  you are wise to think long term and to follow the lesson from The Shawshank Redemption:  little by little will get you there in the end.* 

Do you invest in your company?  Sure you pay for a lot for ongoing expenses and perhaps you budget for periodic investments in IT, maybe in new plant and equipment as the need arises.  But when you think about what your company really is, it’s really not the plant and equipment or the inventory.  It’s the sum total of the knowledge of how to operate in a manner that continues and grows the return on investment.  (Drucker:  the first obligation of a business is to perpetuate itself.)  So when we think about investing in a business, shouldn’t “investment” include investment in the company’s knowledge base? 

In the 22 years that Design Research has been in business we have encountered only one client (out of the hundred or so that we have served) that incorporates research results into a formalized company database that is available to all employees.   (And we know that employees use that database because we received follow-up questions and requests for additional research for at least five years after the initial project.  That client is investing in what it knows about the universe it operates in and it distributes that knowledge widely within the company.)

Don’t worry about setting up a corporate knowledge base.  But do think of research as an investment in your business.  You want to hire the smartest, best informed people right?  Why not further inform them by investing in research?  Research can provide your team with detailed information about such basic market information as:

                -The demographics of your consumers (Who buys your products?)

                -Your company’s Brand Awareness and Brand Equity (Who knows of your brand and what do they think about it?)

                -Market Overviews/Category Attitudes, Awareness and Usage (Why do people buy your category and how do they use it?

                -Design Segmentation Studies (How is your marketplace segmented by design and which segments do you participate in?  How are they trending over time?)

                -Retailer Customer surveys (What do customers of your customers want and how do they differ?)

You have the strategic savvy to follow a disciplined approach to investing in yourself.  Isn’t it time to invest in your company as well? 

Call or email us for a sample research plan that you can use as a map for your management team to move toward investing in your knowledge base today!

Your Organization is Worth Investing in!