Brainstorming

What is Brainstorming?

Brainstorming is simply a means of getting a large number of ideas from a group of people in a short time. Brainstorming is great for marketers! Marketers can generate new creative ideas for products, services, solutions or concepts. Not only is brainstorming useful for creative thinking, but is can also be used for marketing problem solving and marketing decision making.
Successful brainstorming depends upon four key rules:
1. Suspend judgement.
2. Let yourself go and freewheel.
3. Go for quantity - quality implies evaluation (which means that you have not suspended judgement).
4. Cross-fertilize - pick up someone else's ideas and suggest others leading from it.

Steps in Brainstorming.

A. State the problem.
B. Restate the problem.
C. Select restatement.
D. Warm-up.
E. Brainstorm.

Oiling the Wheels

If brainstorming group dries up the leader can get the ideas flowing again by using any one of the following approaches:
1. Silent review - let the group review silently the ideas already generated in order to stimulate their thinking.
2. Quantity targets - encourage the group to go for 10, 50 or 100 ideas!
3. The one idea - get the group to focus on one idea and use that as a stimulus.
4. Select a restatement from the list the group produced earlier and brainstorm it.
5. Wildest idea - let the group silently review the ideas already generated in order to use the wildest idea as a stimulus for more productive ideas.

Evaluating ideas
1. Scrutinise all the ideas and pick out any that instantly jump out at you.
2. Sort the remaining ideas into groups of a manageable size and examine using some predefined criteria e.g. profitability or relative competitive advantage.
3. Subject ideas to reverse brainstorming. Ask the question 'In how many ways can this idea fail?'

The Marketing research Process.

Marketing research is gathered using a systematic approach. An example of one follows:
1. Define the problem. Never conduct research for things that you would 'like' to know. Make sure that you really 'need' to know something. The problem then becomes the focus of the research. For example, why are sales falling in New Zealand?
2. How will you collect the data that you will analyze to solve your problem? Do we conduct a telephone survey, or do we arrange a focus group? The methods of data collection will be discussed in more detail later.
3. Select a sampling method. Do we us a random sample, stratified sample, or cluster sample?
4. How will we analyze any data collected? What software will we use? What degree of accuracy is required?
5. Decide upon a budget and a timeframe.
6. Go back and speak to the managers or clients requesting the research. Make sure that you agree on the problem! If you gain approval, then move on to step seven. 7. Go ahead and collect the data.
8. Conduct the analysis of the data.
9. Check for errors. It is not uncommon to find errors in sampling, data collection method, or analytic mistakes.
10. Write your final report. This will contain charts, tables, and diagrams that will communicate the results of the research, and hopefully lead to a solution to your problem. Watch out for errors in interpretation.

Sources of Data - Primary and Secondary
There are two main sources of data - primary and secondary. primary research is conducted from scratch. It is original and collected to solve the problem in hand. secondary research, also known as desk research, already exists since it has been collected for other purposes.
We have given a general introduction to marketing research. Marketing research is a huge topic area and has many processes, procedures, and terminologies that build upon the points above. (See also lesson on primary marketing research and secondary marketing research).