Marketing is an essential part of any business nowadays and its importance towards making a product or service successful (or not!) cannot be overemphasized.
However, any marketing effort can easily end up as a costly business failure, if those in charge of marketing campaigns and departments fail or forget to do the basic things right, i.e. to ask their existing and potential consumers the right questions.
That is the Question was originally uploaded to Flickr by Alan Levine and is reused here under the terms and conditions of the CC BY 2.0 DEED Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license
The buying behavior and decisions of consumers are the decisive factors of a product's market success and a company's profitability.
Therefore, it is critical for marketers to direct their consumer research through asking the most important questions, answers to which may disclose a lot of valuable little details about consumer behavior.
So what do marketers forget to ask their customers?
The following very simple marketing question:
"What is that you DON'T LIKE in this product/service?". This question is worth pure gold!
It is very easy and common to ask an endless number of product questions related to basic features, such as size, dimensions, primary use, price etc.
What is difficult to ask, and is usually omitted, is whether there is anything that consumers may find unacceptable and which will serve as a good excuse for them not to buy the product.
Asking customers what they don't like about a specific product, service or company can be a painful process. Answers can cause discouragement as they can show weak points and disadvantages, as well as expose areas in which competitors are better; they can hurt self-confidence and the overall level of morale within a company.
On the other hand, uncovering consumers' dislikes about a product/service can be an eye-opening process through which new opportunities and room for improvement may arise.
Having customers show their true feelings, even if they are negative (I would add, especially when they are negative!) is like extinguishing a fire when it is still small.
You wouldn't like to let consumer dissatisfaction turn into animosity, just like a small fire can turn into a raging one that is completely out of control.