AMA: Audible Former Senior Director, Head of Product Marketing, Jameelah Calhoun on Market Research

Thanks for asking this question. The exercise of defining your competitive set is a critical, but at times under-emphasized aspect of conducting research. There are three primary modes for competitive research: 1) optimization, 2) growth and 3) exploration. 1) Optimization is the most narrow mode. This is meant to identify how you are positioned relative to direct competitors, who are in the same industry and product family as your company. This is where your win/loss interviews become important ...Read More

I focus on creating a collaborative environment with market research, user research, and analytics teams as they provide critical inputs for product marketing to function. PMM owns defining the research objectives and the business questions, while the research and analytics teams are the subject matter experts on defining the specific methodologies and taking the lead on execution. There is of course input throughout from PMM, but we leverage the expertise of our research teams to ensure we get ...Read More

Segmentations and personas both have a role to play in informing product strategy and targeting for marketing. Defining segments is more of quantitative exercise with a primary goal of optimizing your business and operating model. Typically, I couple an external prospect survey with internal data on how existing customers interact with your product. You're looking for attributes that are correlated with customer outcomes and behaviors. Some key dimensions for segmentation include purchase behavi ...Read More

Your leadership will be focused on the ROI of the budget and time spent developing personas. The most salient metric for these exercises will be customer acquisition costs. I would look at trends in customer acquisition costs over time, across segments, and across channels. This helps illuminate where there are pockets of inefficiency. On the qualitative side, it can also be valuable to gather sentiment from your customer-facing teams (i.e. sales and customer service) on how the lack of personal ...Read More

Customer insights are the bedrock of any product marketing function. There are 4 key steps when planning research: 1) knowing your objectives, 2) establishing your hypotheses, 3) discerning which methodology will deliver the right inputs to drive your decisions, and 4) articulating the 'so what'.  1) Establish your top 2 learning objectives for the exercise. It may be helpful to gather input from key stakeholders on how this study may inform their function. For example, you may be looking to det ...Read More

Thanks for this awesome question! The great news is that there are many pathways and many skillsets that can lead to a successful career in product marketing. In my case, I started my career as a financial analyst and consultant. These skills have been invaluable for me as product marketing requires you to quickly understand large customer data sets and distill insights as well as being able to think strategically about short term and long term market trends. As I've gone deeper into product man ...Read More

It's important to take an iterative approach to customer research that spans the product development cycle. No single research study can anticipate and answer every potential customer challenge or angle, so it is important to build iteration into your plans. I follow 4 main stages of research: 1) finding opportunities, 2) evaluating concepts, 3) UX Research and Usability, and 4) market acceptance research.  Throughout each step, it is important to constantly revisit the core question - which is ...Read More