« More Valuable Than Gold The Industrial Interview »White Paper – Getting People To Switch – Part 2 of 3
Today’s post is part 2 of our white paper on “Getting People To Switch” What themes emerge from this examination of switching behaviour for different types of products and services? The first thing we note is that both rational and emotional factors weave their way into all the decisions. The problem we face is that buyers and specifiers in industry find it hard to admit to or even work out the influence of the emotional effect. Market researchers attempt to measure these influences at different levels. There is the very obvious “front of mindâ€? level where a buyer or specifier is asked very simply to say why they choose a supplier or what would prompt them to switch. Not surprisingly, because it is front of mind, the answers are fairly predictable. “We choose the best quality for the best price and of course delivery is importantâ€?. The researcher may follow this with a prompted question that reminds the buyer or specifier what issues are in the equation. This memory jogger may identify new factors. There are many variants on the prompted questioning theme. For example, the respondent may be asked to rank factors, score them out of 5 or 10 or spend points over half a dozen factors to indicate which carries the most weight. Figure 2 A Simple Points Spend Question To Establish Customer Needs More sophisticated tools such as conjoint analysis can show the trade off between different issues although even here there is no guarantee that the emotional issues will be given their full weight. Points spend and conjoint use structured market research interviews to throw light on the forces shaping behaviour. On their own they are not enough to give us the deeper insights of how buyers behave and what makes them switch. For this we have to turn to qualitative research. And here we must get as close to psychology as we can to get a deep understanding of what makes buyers tick. Look out for part 3 next Tuesday (29th Aug). For more market research white papers, click here. This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 9:30 am and is filed under Articles, Customer Satisfaction, Market Assesment, White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Leave a Reply |
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