Archive for the ‘Consumer Research’ Category
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
In this article, Stefan Stern, writing in the Financial Times, leads with a quote from The Graduate in which Mr McGuire addresses young Ben with the words “I just want to say one word to you, just one word – are you listening – plastics”. Stern suggests that data are the new plastics.
It is true that the buzzword in industry is analytics. This seems surprising to us in the market research industry. Data and analytics has been our baby for the last 50 years. When you drive your car, of course you need to look out of the window, but you would be a fool to set off without checking your fuel gauge or occasionally looking at your speedometer. A map may come in useful or, more likely today, a Sat Nav (GPS). Our industry has long provided much of the good data on the company dashboard and the Sat Nav to guide your journey.
The problem is that data is fast becoming a commodity. There is so much data handed out for nothing. It is in front of you in the newspaper. It hits you from the television. It sits under your nose in your company and, of course, it abounds on the net. In fact, most of us are paralysed by too much data.
However, there is some data that is almost invaluable. Just think of the things you would like to know about your market. Which customers are likely to be buying the products or services you sell in the next few months or weeks? And when they do buy, what will drive their decision? Where do you sit in their consideration set? What are the unmet needs in your market and how could you satisfy them? What will your market look like in five years’ time? Who will be the competitors to wrestle with then? The list could go on and on.
What do you think? Will data be the new plastics?
Smarter leaders are betting big on data
By Stefan Stern
Published: March 9 2010
Last week a very wise man – OK, it was my chief executive – said a smart thing. “Data is the new plastics,” he declared. This was a sly reference to a famous scene in the film The Graduate. What he meant, I think, was that the unlikely subject of data has suddenly become fashionable. It is now the sort of discipline you might encourage your son or daughter to pursue.
Clever people talk knowingly about “analytics” – managing better with the use of data – as if they have discovered the secret of business success. Perhaps they have. Software companies are certainly pushing the concept hard.
Last month the consultants Accenture announced a partnership with the IT company SAS. They are forming an analytics group which will offer what they call “predictive solutions”. This means getting hold of useful data fast and interpreting them intelligently, to try to anticipate sudden changes in your market, or to spot gaps others have not yet seen. IBM is touting its analytics capabilities aggressively, while SAP is also talking a good analytics game.
I was recently given a briefing by Vivek Ranadivé, the chief executive of Tibco, a Nasdaq-listed software company, on the emerging possibilities of our data-rich world. Mr Ranadivé is something of a visionary in this field. His first book, The Power of Now, was published 11 years ago. This was followed in 2006 by The Power to Predict. His latest book, The Two Second Advantage, will be out this year.
Mr Ranadivé is dismissive of what he considers outdated approaches to the handling of data. “We have 20th-century infrastructure trying to solve 21st-century problems,” he says.
During the past two decades, companies have become good at storing large amounts of data. Databases contain historical information about transactions that have been carried out. But what about all those near-misses, when customers visit your website, stay a while but leave without buying anything? A passive database will not record any of that activity. It will not even know that such things have happened.
Mr Ranadivé says we should think of business in terms of events, not transactions. Near-misses are customer events, too. The latest approach to data tries to spot these events in real time, so businesses can make use of that information quickly. In the jargon, this is called “in-memory analytics”, so called because memory has become a cheap and almost infinite commodity, and all that customer activity can be monitored live, as it happens.
Faster transmission of information makes a lot of things possible: marketing campaigns that react quickly to what customers want, smoother-functioning supply chains, even the introduction of the “smart grid”, which can spot possible power outages much sooner.
Last month Thomas Davenport, professor at Babson College, and Jeanne Harris, director of research at Accenture’s high performance institute, published Analytics at Work, a primer for managers who want to introduce a more rigorous approach to the use of data. It is a challenging read, in part because it makes plain how much work has to be done to capture and use data effectively.
But even academic experts agree that, however sophisticated your approach to data, you still need judgment to make good decisions. When Prof Davenport met a pilot at a party and started discussing analytics, he received this reply: “Oh yes, we’ve got lots of that in modern airliners – avionics, lots of computers, ‘fly by wire’, and all that. But I still occasionally find it useful to look out the window.”
Others are even more sceptical. Paco Underhill, a retail guru and chief executive of the consultancy Envirosell, says that today it is almost too easy to accumulate data. Instead of going to witness things first-hand, managers do a lot of their thinking sitting down, staring at spreadsheets. He is a great advocate of rubber-soled shoes. Get away from your desk, he says, and go and see for yourself. Wear rubber soles at your Envirosell interview if you want to get hired, Mr Underhill advises.
Not everyone will be fired up by the idea of plunging deep into a world of data. In the 1960s, bright young graduates, like the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie, did not all choose to pursue a career in plastics. But one young chap at General Electric did. Welch, I think his name was. Things seemed to work out pretty well for him.
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Consumer Research, Customer Satisfaction, Data Quality, Market Assesment, Needs |
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Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Much has been written on the subject of brands – not least by B2B International! As we know, a brand is made up of many things – name, logo and values to name but a few. But can there be any doubt about the importance of a brand name? In a Thursday Night Insight article last year, Chrissie Douglas gave us some hints on selecting a brand name:
- Brand names should be simple so that they are easy to understand, pronounce and spell. Two words in the name should be considered the maximum.
- Brand names should be vivid in imagery so that the mnemonics present strong memory cues.
- Brand names should be familiar sounding so that much of the information to which the name relates is already stored in the mind.
- Brand names should be distinctive so that the word attracts attention and does not become confused with other brands.
So, what happens if you get it wrong?
According to research by YouGov/G2, Cillit Bang has been voted the UK’s most disliked brand name. Of the 2,000 British consumers surveyed, a quarter of women, a fifth of men and 27% of over-55s did not like the brand name. Yet, the cleaning brand, which was launched in 2005 by Reckitt Benckiser, is actually considered by its owner to be a “power brand” and its sales show it to be an extremely successful product. So, clearly, brand name is not everything.
Yet, of the top 10 most disliked brand names (shown below), four are new names for previously known brands, including 3 in the top 5:
- Cillit Bang
- Cif
- Starbucks
- Pasta Hut
- Snickers
- Veet
- Accenture
- Aldi
- Plenty
- Mates
Cif used to be known in the UK as Jif, Snickers was for many years called Marathon, and Veet previously went by the name Immac. This perhaps underlines the importance of getting the brand name right in the first place. Once people have started to associate certain values and attributes with a brand, any changes can lead to confusion or mistrust. Unless you recognise the importance of brands and adopt a well thought-out marketing and communications rebranding strategy, you could find yourself with a lot of brand rebuilding work to be done.
To find out more about branding, please refer to several of our white papers, including:
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Articles, Branding, Chrissie Douglas, Consumer Research, Corporate Identity, Customer Insight, Re-branding |
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
On the customer satisfaction page of our website, we state the following:
“Most companies lose 45% to 50% of their customers every five years, and winning new customers can be up to 20 times more expensive than retaining existing customers. Just a 5% reduction in the customer defection rate can increase profits by 25% to 85%, depending on the industry.”
There can be very little doubt that retaining your existing customers – especially those most profitable ones – is vital under any economic conditions; never more so than when times are tough.
Indeed, as reported in CCF Online, customer service author Colin Shaw, who spoke at the recent Call Centre Expo, is adamant that a recession is the ideal opportunity to galvanise customers and create strong customer loyalty.
While competitors may allow customer service to take a back seat when times are tough, now is the opportunity for you to focus on improving the experience of your customers.
According to Shaw, some of the key questions we as companies should be asking are:
- What is the experience we are trying to deliver?
- What are the emotions we are trying to evoke in our customers?
- What do customers really want?
- What provides the most value?
Some telling stats reveal that many companies only have themselves to blame when it comes to customer churn. On average, of the customers that leave, it is because:
- 1% have died
- 3% have moved away
- 9% have been lured away
- 14% have been disappointed with the product
- 68% have felt the company to be indifferent to them
This would indicate that four out of every five customers leave because of the actions – or inactions – of the company.
Ironically it can be small things – which are more often than not easy to action – that go a long way towards making a customer feel valued, keeping a customer happy and, more importantly, encouraging their loyalty.
Don’t overlook the importance of keeping your customers satisfied. Why not read more about this subject in the following white papers:
Better still, call or e-mail us to see how our tailored customer satisfaction programmes can help you maintain customers for life.
Posted in
Consumer Research, Customer Insight, Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, Marketing Strategy, Uncategorized |
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Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Most of you reading B2B International’s blog will be marketers of b2b products and services. But how often do you think about those end consumers? They may not be able to buy your products in stores, but there is a school of thought which says that if you do market your business-to-business product or service to consumers, you could create new demand from potential business partners.
So says ‘B-to-B-to-C’, an interesting article in September 30 issue of Marketing News.
The article reminds us that behind the face of many consumer products and services, there’s a business-to-business brand that distinguishes the product from the competition. These b2b ‘ingredient’ brands all help to create the product that the end consumer is ultimately looking for. Some b2b brand managers therefore market to consumers, hoping that if end-users care about their brands, business partners will embrace them and promote them.
If this is a route you wish to go down – and there can be little doubt that this is a bold strategy to adopt – there are no hard and fast rules as to how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to the different business and consumer marketing efforts. Indeed, if not done correctly, marketing your b2b brand directly to consumers can be a very easy way to spend a lot of money with very little return.
A good starting point is – as always – thorough research. Research can demonstrate to you whether your brand possesses a distinct value and whether it could impact positively on a consumer brand’s profile and price point. If this is the case, consumer marketing may be an option for your b2b brand.
Try to convince your b2b client to promote your brand on their product: this will make your b2b ‘ingredient’ matter to consumers. Just make sure that your ingredient brand’s stand-out attribute is clearly explained to the end consumers so you can ultimately encourage them to demand products that possess your brand. To do this, its distinctiveness needs to resonate with end users, so make sure your research shows that consumers see the value of your brand. A segmentation study may, for example, determine which types of consumers would be attracted to your brand offering.
The article finishes with some words of advice for anyone doing B-to-B-to-C marketing: You need to help the consumer products brandishing your ingredient to succeed. Put simply, if they win, you win.
Posted in
Articles, B2B Marketing, B2C, Consumer Research, Sales, Segmentation |
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Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
An interesting article appeared recently on AdAge.com. Apparently the major U.S. pizza chains now do around 20% to 30% of their business online, but are keen to make that figure climb a lot higher.
While this story clearly relates to consumer markets and may not have any obvious relevance to b-to-b organizations, the reasons why these pizza chains are so keen to improve and increase their online transactions are of potential interest to companies across the board.
The online customers of the major pizza chains spend more and are more satisfied than non-online customers. Those who order their food online are also more likely to take advantage of special promotions used to drive interest in new products. As an added bonus, serving online customers is more efficient for each individual store.
Pizza Hut expects to do $1 billion in online sales by the end of 2012, which would be an immense increase from $100 million in May 2007. Domino’s, meanwhile, claims that its average online buyer spends $2 more than its customers who order by phone or in person.
According to Google’s director of local and B-to-B markets, the major pizza chains have all been quick to take advantage of shifting spending from traditional media to banner ads and search engine optimization.
They are also constantly looking for ways to help their customers place their orders more quickly – whether they are first-time users setting up an account or return visitors wishing to repeat a past order.
So, while you may not be looking to sell pizzas, their experiences may give you some food for thought.
Posted in
Consumer Research, Digital Marketing, Food, Online Marketing, Sales |
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