Market Insights Scorecard

The Scorecard is a diagnostic reporting table that helps guide basic marketing decisions. If more than one main customer segment exists, then more than one table is developed.

The left columns of the table show customer priorities. While we often think about product and service attributes or features, customers buy products and services because of benefits. Thus, the Scorecard is based on identifying the key benefits that drive purchase decisions, which can then be related to attributes or features or to issues outside the core product. Each benefit is empirically examined, so the Scorecard allows us to see the relative importance of benefits. In the example table shown here, Benefits #1 and #3 are most important.

The right columns of the table report how customers think competing brands perform on these benefits. A brand might be successful just by being the highest performer on one benefit, as long as that benefit is highly important. Usually a brand’s sales are more secure from competition if customers view the brand as high-performing in more than one benefit area. In contrast, a dangerous outcome would be a low performance appraisal by customers for benefits that are highly important. Color coding is customized for each client application, depending on how the Scorecard will be used. In this example the green color shows a critical strength (high performance on an important benefit) and the red color shows a potentially critical weakness (low performance on an important benefit). The yellow color shows possible opportunities, where performance is high on a less important benefit. The opportunity could be to see whether the importance of the benefit could be increased, or whether resources used to achieve this high performance could be better spent somewhere else.

When should you develop or update a Scorecard? Mainly before making major decisions. Imagine you’re about to make a major decision that changes your product offerings. Someone asks you whether you know how customers will react? Hopefully you can say yes, and the decisions you are making will increase your success with customers. The Scorecard provides you this knowledge. Think of the Scorecard as a health checkup for your brand, analogous to a checkup for a car or even an individual. A checkup lets us know when we’re in good shape and ready for action, and when we need to shore up weaknesses before they become problems.

How is the Scorecard useful? Some examples:
* Marketing mix: having better ideas for succeeding with product, price, promotion and place
* Competitive positioning: being able to secure a market position that is more competitively differentiated, so you can compete based on value rather than on price
* Planning: providing a comprehensive view of the market so valid long term initiatives can be designed
* Personnel: being able to hire the best-fit people, based on what needs to be accomplished, for example to address key benefits that require specific expertise among employees