|
Archive for the ‘Business Decisions’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »Research Reveals Engineers Want Universities to Teach Business SkillsWednesday, March 24th, 2010  One of the biggest challenges facing any higher education institution is attracting students through its doors. The Tufts Gordon Institute, part of Tufts University’s School of Engineering in Boston, Massachusetts, recently commissioned global market research specialist B2B International to research the views of potential masters degree students across North America. The project’s objective was to assist Tufts Engineering School in updating its innovative masters program in management specifically aimed at engineering and science graduates—the Master of Science in Engineering Management (MSEM). The MSEM degree is a relatively new phenomenon, only recently appearing at various top universities across North America. Tufts University has been one successful school with this offering, and its directors were interested to learn more about potential students’ preferences so it could optimize the program further. Eve Lenkowsky, Research Executive at B2B International explains, “Typically, science and engineering college graduates have been faced with the choice of either learning about business completely outside of their scientific fields, or simply continuing with an advanced engineering or science program like a masters or Ph.D. Few institutions give ambitious science graduates the chance to make their skills more applicable to the modern workplace and, in particular, management positions. Our project confirmed that there is a rising need for this kind of offering.” The study was conducted among American and Canadian professionals who had all previously completed an undergraduate course in engineering or science. Nearly all are currently employed in an engineering, scientific or technical role and stated a possible interest in pursuing a graduate masters degree or Ph.D. in engineering or science. Carried out via e-survey, some of the key findings from the study include the following:
Mary Viola, Engineering Management Program Director, concluded, “We were very pleased with the success of the research. The feedback from the participants reveals clear trends and preferences which we will build into our program to meet the needs of our potential students even more effectively. We look forward to better serving students who are looking to develop into leaders of technology companies.” NOTES With 30 years’ experience in business-to-business market research, B2B International has built up an impressive client portfolio and has published books, white papers and articles on marketing and market research. It has offices in three continents (North America, Europe and Asia) where its research specialists have researched all the major geographical areas of the world. B2B International’s offering includes market assessment and market entry studies, segmentation studies, product development studies, branding studies, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction research, pricing strategy and advertising studies. B2B’s leading practitioners have also run a large number of training courses on marketing and market research. About The Tufts Gordon Institute Their focus on engineering leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship – in classes, hands-on projects and real-world experiences – gives students the practical leadership tools they need not only to advance their careers, but to inspire teams, and to encourage and develop innovative ideas that will make a difference in the world. The Role of MarketersWednesday, November 25th, 2009 
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), at its recent annual conference, has urged marketers to lead the United States out of the recession. Chief Marketing Officers of various multinationals – among them Walmart, McDonald’s, IBM, MillerCoors and Google – all spoke at the conference to explain how the actions of marketing departments have led to major turnarounds in fortune or fueled record growth. Included were examples of how, by focusing on the customer and having a deep understanding what their brands were about, stronger reputations have been built and impressive growth achieved. In further news from the ANA, a new study shows that marketers increasingly see themselves as ‘visionaries’. When asked to choose whether they identified themselves as tactician, facilitator, leader or visionary, one-third of the 150 marketers who participated in the online study chose ‘visionary’. The study found that ‘visionaries’ had a much higher level of influence within their respective organizations than those in other categories. For example, 89% were more likely to be leading strategic dialogue (compared to 11% of non-visionaries), two-thirds were more likely to be leading discussions around reinventing the business (compared to 21%), and 60% were more likely to collaborate with financial functions (as opposed to 22% of the non-visionaries). Short-term Strategies In The RecessionTuesday, June 30th, 2009
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has found that two-thirds of marketers have, in response to the current economic environment, shifted their emphasis to more short-term strategies. These were some of the findings of a Brand-Building study of 129 marketers, which took the form of an online survey. Yet in spite of the short-term tactics, marketers are already planning increased activities for when the recession ends. 68% will be increasing their media budgets, 41% increasing social networking/word-of-mouth, and 40% allocating more money to innovation and testing/learning. Almost three-quarters of respondents admitted that they would ideally like to implement these additional marketing activities three to six months before the recession ends. The survey found that few marketing initiatives had been postponed or cancelled outright, but many had suffered from reduced budgets. Those activities that are being maintained during the recession include:
A number of activities have been increased over recent months, including:
When compared to the results of previous surveys, many traditional media channels have suffered:
These results are fairly representative of current sentiment in the wider marketing community. Many organizations are shying away from traditional media and focusing on online opportunities. Indeed, a recent survey by B2B International showed around half of marketers planning to increase their e-marketing spend in 2009, with many stating that online marketing had already proven itself to be a successful strategy in the face of recessionary pressures. More than a quarter were planning increases in their PR activity. On the flip side, around half planned to cut expenditure in the more traditional areas of tradeshows/events and magazine advertising. Click here to read our white paper on Marketing Strategies in a Recession. Understanding Cultural Differences Across B2B MarketsFriday, June 19th, 2009
Nick Hague this week takes us on a world tour, explaining why you should never be surprised to get such varied responses to your global customer satisfaction questions. We tend to have a human instinct that ‘deep inside’ all people are the same – but they are not. Therefore, if we go into another country and make decisions based on how we operate in our own home country – the chances are we’ll make some very bad decisions – Geert Hofstede After spending what seems like the last few months living out of a suitcase delivering research findings to a myriad of companies in countries ranging from Germany, Belgium, Spain and Ireland to the USA and China, it has hit home to me even more so, how important it is to understand individual country differences. These differences might be cultural, behavioural or attitudinal, but a researcher needs to know what lies behind a given score before making informed recommendations for action. Carrying out international research is all in a day’s work at B2B International! Enquiries for customer satisfaction and loyalty research have risen in recent months as the global recession bites harder and companies are turning their attention towards retaining their existing customer base. We are often tasked with carrying out customer satisfaction studies that cover multiple geographies. Implementing and evaluating such research requires an understanding of the different cultures and infrastructures within a particular geography; for example will a Chinese respondent answer an unsolicited telephone call or will an e-survey alienate half your target market in Spain? Another complexity that comes up in multi-country studies is making sure a translated questionnaire has the same meaning across multiple geographies. However, one of the most important aspects of carrying out international research is having the insight to why individuals from different countries around the world convey such different ratings; especially customer satisfaction ratings, when receiving a similar if not identical service from the same global organisation. So my Thursday Night Insight rant this week is about response styles and I pose the question: Why do customer satisfaction response styles differ between countries? Typically, in any customer satisfaction survey the norm is to use a 10 point scale where 1 means totally unsatisfied and 10 means totally satisfied. When asking this question to customers across different countries I can definitely make the following general observations:
However, one point that should be made clear is that these observations are generalizations and what we do see is that respondents from North America typically give higher satisfaction scores than their UK or Western European counterparts. One reason, I personally believe, is down to cultural differences. For example, I have an American colleague who works within our European HQ and on his first day at B2B International he greeted me with the question ‘how are you today?’ to which I replied ‘OK’. He looked aghast and said ‘why, what’s the matter?’ There was no problem or issue but my typical English response led my colleague to think that something was wrong based on our different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, based on these differences, Americans would typically rate a product or service as a 9 or 10 (totally satisfied or excellent) while Europeans would rate a similar issue as a 7 or 8 (an okay, acceptable, satisfactory score). Another reason for higher satisfaction scores in the US could be that Americans are more likely to respond to a survey even when service levels are good and expectations are being met whilst Europeans only respond if the service is poor or they have a gripe to bear – however, this is a personal point of view and so like any good researcher I wanted to know if any external research has been carried out looking at geographical scoring differences. Supporting the internal B2B viewpoint is a piece of research I came across carried out with 116,000 employees of IBM Corporation operating in more than 40 countries. Using these findings, Geert Hofstede from Maastricht University developed a framework that identified four different typologies based on national culture that impacted on response styles. These typologies were: Power distance: The degree to which people in a country accept a hierarchical or unequal distribution of power in organizations. Therefore respondents would typically score mid-response ratings and countries showing this type of response style include Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Philippines, China, Brazil, Chile and Mexico Uncertainty avoidance: The degree to which people prefer structured vs. unstructured situations. Cultures high in uncertainty avoidance prefer unambiguous situations and are therefore more likely to use the endpoints of the scale as opposed to the middle, thus exhibiting an extreme response style. Countries showing this type of response include Belgium, Poland, France, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Korea and Japan Individualism: The degree to which people in a country focus on working as individuals vs. working together. Cultures high in individualism are less likely to exhibit a middle satisfaction score because they would emphasize their individual opinion as opposed to their perception of the group opinion. Among all the response styles, individualistic cultures may exhibit extreme response styles and include countries such as US, Canada, Australia, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Italy, Hungary and France. Assertiveness: The degree to which people in a country emphasize traits such as assertiveness and insensitivity to feelings. One could hypothesize that individuals in these cultures would favour more extreme response styles and that “softer,” more “sensitive” cultures exhibit more modesty or middle response styles. Countries that have been categorized as assertive are the UK, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Japan. However, it should be pointed out that Geert’s research is inconclusive with regards to the impact of this dimension on response scores. In conclusion, the key takeaways are thus. Every business needs a feedback loop to assess their performance and provide an ongoing measurement and benchmark for future progress. Customer satisfaction surveys are excellent at delivering this feedback, but different country cultures do impact on responses and response rates and so, when analyzing international research findings, a researcher needs to use their knowledge and judgement to whether a response is based on different levels of performance, or simply because of a result of cultural difference. In the future, when comparing international customer satisfaction research findings, it might be useful to take the following three steps:
Finally, to wrap up this week’s ramblings I should point out that when it comes to customer service and customer satisfaction, one issue that transcends all geographies is that it is imperative that the customer is listened to, and feels valued and cared for. Relationships are key in any business to business market throughout the world, and so invest in your people as they are the face of your business and typically are the driving force behind excellent satisfaction scores whether you are based in Torquay, Tokyo or Timbuktu. Never Underestimate IntelligenceMonday, June 8th, 2009
New York’s Westchester County Business Journal, in its weekly business advice column, has just run an article entitled ‘keeping abreast of the competition’. For us, as market research and competitive intelligence experts, we can never read enough articles that encourage organizations large and small to recognize the importance of quality, up-to-date business intelligence. As anyone who is familiar with Porter’s Five Forces will be well aware, very few, if any, companies operate alone in their given marketplace. Each company’s specific micro environment consists of forces that affect its ability to serve its customers and make a profit. Competition is out there in the form of direct established rivals, as well as the threat of new entrants to the market or the threat of substitute products. Any change in any of these forces normally requires a company to re-assess the marketplace, hence the need to regularly review your competitive intelligence. Even the decision of a competitor to get out of your chosen marketplace, for example, should be viewed with a degree of caution rather than unbridled celebration. Why does your competitor no longer wish to be in your market? Do they know something important that you don’t? Intelligence is, of course, available from a wide range of sources. In its most basic forms there is much you can do yourself: talk to your suppliers, customers and employees; keep abreast of developments by reading industry periodicals or industry reports; scour the internet for news. Yet much information – especially that of a sensitive nature – can be difficult to come by, and not all companies have the necessary people resources to conduct a thorough and comprehensive competitor analysis. In many cases, they may require the help of an external research consultancy who will be adept at sourcing data – from mystery shopping, to competitor pricing research studies, through to conducting structured interviews with customers, suppliers, distributors, industry experts and even competitors themselves. There is no doubt that there is a whole world of information out there, and that competitor intelligence at your fingertips enables you to make intelligent future business decisions. Find out more about how B2B International’s competitive intelligence work can enhance your own knowledge by clicking here. « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
|
