Forget those passwords, please!

Market Logic Team

Fast-moving organizations with swift rates of change tap secondary sources to round out their understanding of consumers, markets, competitors, and trends. Whether it’s Euromonitor, the Mintel Global New Product Database (GNPB), EvaluatePharma for healthcare; Phocuswright for finance or Forrester for high tech trends, all of our clients use syndicated research. One of my financial clients subscribes to over 30 secondary sources, while a healthcare client deal with about half that number and our clients in CPG subscribe to 10 or so.

So how on earth can marketers remember passwords, logins, and content specialties? Given that forgetting a password is one of the top reasons why people reach out to a software help desk generally, imagine trying to remember 30 of them. With any luck, a marketer might remember one or two databases from all the sources your organization subscribes for you but even that relies upon the marketer’s experience with certain databases – positive or negative.

In this context, the best practice is to integrate all the secondary sources alongside primary research so the marketer gets all the answers, from all the sources with one click. No URLs, no passwords and logins, just useful answers to important questions. For example, when you ask a business question like “what do we know about millennial and mobile apps”, you’ll get answers from primary research (usage and attitude studies, concept tests, video immersions) together with results from every secondary source your organization subscribes to on your behalf.

I was in a training session with a client recently, where a marketer was performing a white spot analysis to improve direct mail performance. Her search results pulled together answers from multiple sources, but the killer result was an off-the-shelf analysis on exactly that topic, prepared by a secondary source she hadn’t heard of, let alone knew the access details to enter and explore. When we discussed the result in the breakout, she told me the same exercise would have taken her days to achieve.

So not only is money wasted when secondary source subscriptions aren’t integrated but valuable insights can be overlooked in important decisions.

How do you manage all those log-in details and passwords for your secondary sources?