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Archive for the ‘China’ Category
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
As B2B International expands its operations around the world, the most recent office opening earlier this year in Shanghai, Director of International Operations Matthew Harrison says: “we are delighted that we’re strengthening our North America and Asia-Pacific teams. As the number of clients grows, so too does the need for more experienced and talented researchers.”
Guan Jingyuan joins as research executive in B2B International’s Beijing office. Jingyuan, a bi-lingual Chinese national, has previously worked for Shell in London, UK. A skilled qualitative researcher, she has undertaken research projects for several multinational clients across a number of different industry sectors. Her clients include the likes of Shell, Air Products, International Paint, HR Certification Institute, Etola and DSM, and she has experience researching the fine chemicals, education, agriculture and renewable energy markets.
In the USA, Cristin Malone is appointed as a research analyst in the New York office. In her role, Cristin analyses both qualitative and quantitative data, designs questionnaires, moderates and manages online focus groups, and develops presentations for clients. An experienced market researcher, her previous work has included developing syndicated multicultural attitude and purchase behaviour reports, and conducting primary research for major cable, satellite, and Telco operators, TV networks, Internet companies, and technology developers.
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Asia, B2B News, China, Growth, USA |
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Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
B2B International is pleased to announce the opening of its new Shanghai office, complementing its Beijing office which opened in 2006. The company has expanded its China operations to Shanghai to meet the growing demand for business-to-business market research among Chinese and foreign companies with headquarters in this important city.
The Shanghai Expo, which runs between May and October this year, has generated global interest in Shanghai and is expected to receive 70 million visitors. It has meant a massive investment in the city’s infrastructure and has created huge commercial opportunities for companies across a range of industries.
Asia Business Development Manager Mark Hedley explains, “The excitement in Shanghai created by the Expo this year has led to a huge growth in interest in the region from foreign businesses, both as an investment location and as a rapidly growing market for foreign produced goods and services. The addition of a Shanghai office to complement our existing Beijing operation extends our fieldwork coverage across the country and enables our consultants to better meet the needs of companies interested in China’s potential.”
To find out more about how B2B International in Shanghai can help with your research needs, please email shanghai@b2binternational.com or call directly on +86 (0)21 5117 5860.
Posted in
Asia, Business Development, China, Growth |
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Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Taking us on a tour of his opulent Beijing hotel, Matthew Harrison this week explains why segmentation of a target market remains crucial.
I am writing this latest installment to Thursday Night Insight from my hotel in Beijing. Beijing is a city I know well and I have become accustomed to its hospitality – the faultless service in restaurants, the branch of Subway that delivers my foot-long sandwich for free, and the animated army of traffic lieutenants who bark at passers-by if they so much as lean over the road when the pedestrian light is on red. Sadly they don’t afford the same courtesy to the smoke-belching construction trucks that make it their business to run over pedestrians when the lights eventually change.
Variety being the spice of life and ‘adventurous’ being my middle name, I decided to sample a new hotel for this latest visit to our Chinese office. The Japanese-run Jinglun has served me well over the years, but having been charged the equivalent of $10 for half a pint of warm Tsingtao during my last visit, I decided to venture further afield to the Jianguo Hotel – a lengthy 1-minute hike away and self-proclaimed Garden Hotel of Beijing – which for some reason was offering luxurious rooms at knock-down rates.
Upon my arrival I was immediately impressed, as I always am when Chinese hospitality is involved. The politest man in the world took my case from the cab without asking. I never saw him again, but by the time I arrived at room 739, my luggage would be waiting for me. The garden theme was plain to see, the labyrinthine corridors snaking round a series of open-air ponds and trellised courtyards. The sight of a French restaurant adjacent to an English pub at the corner of the foyer meant that I immediately assumed I was in heaven, even if the 3 photocopies of my visa, passport and credit card seemed an excessive way of granting me entry.
One of the five-strong gaggle of receptionists eventually gave me my room card, contained in a small cardboard booklet advertising the English pub, French restaurant and 3 other onsite establishments, including Shang Court Chinese Imperial Cuisine – or, as its catchy tagline reminded me, ‘The only luxurious restaurant with the imperial palace and feudal official mansion cuisine of the Shang Dynasty in Beijing’. I made a mental note to return later and find out whether the food was as stodgy as the advertising.
I headed down 3 corridors, around 4 gardens, under 2 pagodas, through a pond, over a crocodile infested ravine, up 6 floors, down another corridor and into my room. It was a sight to behold. A huge plasma screen looked down on me imposingly. A green velvet sedan-chair lazed seductively in front of the window. Beneath 2 glass shelves stocked with Dragonseal 2008 vintage, the mini-bar hummed its sensuous hum, pouting its lips and beckoning me towards it with come-hither eyes and lovestrewn promises of Heineken straight from the can.
The room was as confusing as the hotel itself. As if the boastful attention seeking of the plasma screen wasn’t bad enough, its brash identical twin was suspended just feet away. I counted at least 4 waste paper baskets – why? The bath had 3 taps, one less than the number of telephones dotted around the room. 5 mirrors vied for space with 6 cabinets, a desk, and a mysterious contraption that looked like a zimmer frame for a man with 3 legs.
20 hours after leaving home, I threw the 17 decorative cushions onto the floor and collapsed onto the king-sized bed, determined to let fatigue take its toll. The minibar hummed with dejection whilst the Dragonseal glared its hateful blood-red disapproval.
But this room would not let me sleep. It was just too much. Too much attention, too much fuss for a half-asleep Englishman. This beautiful hotel, this monument to sino-european chic, was not for me. I began to long for the wide wildlife-free corridors and blanched, single-screen rooms of the Jinglun hotel. The Jianguo was wasted on me.
This hotel was forgetting the basics of segmentation, which divides a target market into groups with distinct needs, the supplier charging each segment a price aligned with the benefits received. In selling me this room, the Jianguo made a crucial mistake – it provided me with a luxury offering at a bargain basement price. The effective segmenter would have dealt with me in one of 3 ways:
- Provided me with a more basic room, in line with my requirements and the price I was willing to pay.
- Sought to upsell the luxurious room, highlighting its benefits and charging me extra for them.
- Not done business with me at all. Crucial to effective segmentation is to know who your customers are, and who your customers are not. The only customers in a properly segmented market are those whose needs and budgets are aligned with the benefits they receive. Resources and time are only spent on the segments that the supplier chooses to serve.
Segmentation should be regarded as a strategy, not a tactic. Whilst it is tempting in the short term to ‘leave value on the table’ in order to ensure a sale and increase cashflow, in the long term this is just as self-defeating as raising costs too high. High costs will eventually erode margins and alienate the target audience that is prepared to pay for the benefits you offer.
Posted in
China, Matt Harrison, Needs, Segmentation, Thursday Night Insight |
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Friday, April 23rd, 2010
In today’s Thursday Night Insight, Caroline Harrison comes across a great example of why market research pays dividends.
A recent convert to Wikipedia, I was checking out this popular encyclopedia website just the other day. Probably the thing I love most about a half-hour surf on this site is the weird and wonderful voyage of discovery you will experience, as you quickly lose interest in the topic you had originally gone to read up on and spot a far more intriguing word or phrase to click on, thus jumping to a completely different subject.
You might go on there to learn more about the life and times of Winston Churchill (actually, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940-45 and then again from 1951-55), but two clicks of the mouse later you can be learning about the origins of the kiwi fruit (not originally from New Zealand, as the name might suggest); a couple of clicks after that you’ll be fascinated to learn about the performance of Spain at the Olympic Games (115 medals in all since first participating in the 1900 Games), and a few minutes after you can lose yourself in the riveting topic of pop music in Ukraine (the 1990s saw an explosion in the Ukrainian Pop music world – apparently).
Indeed, such a bizarre ‘Wiki-journey’ the other day led me to a list of the world’s largest shopping malls. And it was here that something caught my eye and amused me greatly. Let me enlighten you.
The world’s largest shopping mall, with a gross leasable area of 600,000m2 (or 6.46 million sq ft), is said to be the New South China Mall in Dongyuan, China, a city of more than 10 million inhabitants. The mall contains sufficient space for as many as 2,350 stores. It also boasts seven zones modelled on international cities, nations and regions, and features include an 85-foot (25 m) replica of the Arc de Triomphe, a replica of Venice’s St Mark’s bell tower, a 1.3 mile (2.1 km) canal with gondolas, and a 553-metre indoor-outdoor roller coaster. It opened in 2005. It has been 99.2% unoccupied since that time.
99.2% unoccupied??? So, we have here the world’s biggest shopping centre, but there have been more or less no shops (less than a dozen, I understand) in it for the past five years, and presumably very few shoppers either. Not exactly fit for purpose, is it? In fact, it sounds like it was an unbelievably bad idea in the first place.
Now I don’t want to sound like a broken record, once again hammering home the need for market research, but surely a little planning and investigation might have revealed this looked likely to be a white elephant of elephantine proportions?
Apparently, some people fault the mall’s location in the suburbs of Dongyuan, where it is only practical to travel by car, as the primary reason the mall is largely unoccupied. Dongyuan itself does not have an airport, and there are no major connecting highways adjacent to the mall’s location. Yes, all of these do sound like potential problems which should have been taken into consideration. But did the mall’s planners not also talk to the local population about whether they would be interested in shopping in a new mall? Did they not think about whether good public transport links would make a difference to visitor numbers? Did they not ask major retailers whether they would want to open another branch of their store in this new shopping centre? There are just so many things that should surely have been researched thoroughly before investing millions and millions of dollars in building what could conceivably be dubbed the world’s worst shopping mall, never mind the world’s biggest.
For companies too, there is no point in having huge scale, ambitious plans for seemingly amazing products or out-of-this-world services if they are not practical, affordable, attainable or required. Do your market research! Find out if there is a market for your proposed brainchild – and I mean really find out. The money and time it takes to do this will all be worth it when you are able to go ahead and launch your fantastic vision successfully. And, trust me, it will definitely be worth it when you realise you actually had better not go ahead and spend all that money on developing, packaging, promoting, distributing and launching your idea after all!
Posted in
Budgets, Business Development, Caroline Harrison, China, Decision making, Thursday Night Insight |
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Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Good news for market researchers everywhere! After a difficult 2009 for many industries around the world, there is some positive news: According to the latest survey of Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) members, half as many respondents expect to cut their market research spend this year compared with 2009.
Last year, more than 20% of members questioned said they would make less or much less use of market research. For 2010 that figure is just 10%. Meanwhile those who envisage greater or much greater use of market research has risen by six points to 45%.
A recent survey by Casro, the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, also found optimism to be returning in the US market research industry. 78% of Casro members who were surveyed in the fourth quarter of 2009 said that better times had already returned or would do so in 2010.
Returning to the MENG study, and of the 533 MENG members surveyed, a quarter expect their overall marketing budgets to increase in 2010. A similar number, 27%, expect further declines – although it must be noted that more than 50% expected cutbacks when asked last year. Almost half of respondents believe their marketing budgets will remain unchanged in 2010.
Some of the top findings from the report include:
- 66% of marketers are more optimistic about business opportunity in 2010; 28% view 2010 similarly to 2009, while only 6% are less optimistic about the outlook.
- Social media remains hot with 70% of marketers planning new social media initiatives in 2010. Interestingly, social media, twitter and social networking ranked as the top “buzz words marketers are most tired of hearing.”
- Regarding companies’ presence on social media sites, large companies are more likely to have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace; smaller companies rely more on LinkedIn.
- “Marketing ROI” moved from the third most important marketing concept in last year’s survey to the number one spot in this year’s survey, followed by “Customer Retention” and “Brand Loyalty.”
- China was still ranked as the top geographic opportunity for growth, followed by India, Latin America and Brazil.
Find out about the opportunities that China could present your business by emailing beijing@b2binternational.com
Posted in
Branding, China, Customer Retention, Market Research, Marketing |
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