The Why Behind the Buy

I've spent a large part of the last 13 years working on visibility and lead generation campaigns for a leading supplier to the machine vision industry. That's one of the reasons why, for the last four years, I've been consistently excited to see the results of the Vision System Design Brand Awareness/Brand Preference Study (http://bit.ly/2hrsro1). It's a great way for marketers to gain a better grasp of buyer habits, trends and tendencies in the machine vision industry.

I also wanted to better understand how the visibility investments made impacted the ranking of the brand in relation to the competition. Each year, the survey results would show if the brand moved up, down, or maintained its standing in the industry in terms of awareness. The study was broken out into specific product categories such as machine vision software, industrial cameras, lighting and illumination, and lenses and optics. Results would be used to inform the next year's lead geneation and visibility investments and activities.

To my knowledge, it was the only brand preference survey in the machine vision industry, and was the most reliable source of actual buyer feedback for three main reasons.

First, participants are all qualified Vision Systems Design subscribers. Only responses from those describing their organization's business as an end user of vision and/or image processing systems, independent systems integrator, or manufacturer of turnkey vision or image processing systems, are included in the results.

Next, for each product category studied, respondents are again qualified to ensure their involvement in purchasing decisions. And finally, there's even further qualification within each product category, counting only responses from individuals that actually make purchases, or intend to make purchases, within a specified timeframe.

Now that I'm no longer working in corporate marketing, I'm not as interested to see where the various vendors stand in terms of brand awareness. I'm more interested in better understanding the why behind the buy. That is, how our audience of engineers and system integrators rank the criteria they use when specifying components for machine vision and image processing systems.

It's not surprising in my opinion that quality ranks highest. After all, many of our qualified subscribers purchase vision system components for use in harsh industrial environments. In these applications, reliability is critical and the high cost of production downtime and increased service and support requests can really eat into the bottom line of our readers' organizations.

Speaking of our readers, I wanted to remind all current qualified Vision Systems Design subscribers that it's subscription renewal time, regardless of when you subscribed. It's super easy. Just find the Holiday Renewal email sent December 19th. It links to a pre-populated form based on previous responses. Simply review, update if necessary, and hit submit. Otherwise, you can go to: http://bit.ly/2ibNqPO and requalify from scratch.