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Archive for the ‘Industrial Research’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »Online Leadership Portal – Part 2 of 2Monday, September 24th, 2007
Online resources for leadership Key words and phrases used on the various sites reflected these differences. Website buzz words amongst SMEs were development, entrepreneur, business planning and advice; for corporates it was challenge, innovative, best practice and cutting edge; words such as innovative, community and good practice were common on public sector sites; and the voluntary sector used development, support, improve and understand. The layout and aesthetics of websites also varied: conservative and professional for the private sector, plain and dull for SMEs, happy and inviting for the voluntary sector, and old fashioned and cluttered for the public sector. Having researched what was out there online, focus groups were undertaken to gauge interest in online resources: people from corporates showed most interest in using online resources on leadership; in the public sector there was a tendency to use formal academic programmes for leadership training; the concept of leadership appears newer to the voluntary sector; SMEs are least likely to engage with leadership issues as they are more focussed on management and keeping up-to-date with regulations; students see a strong role for web resources though they expect sophisticated use of technology. Forum respondents were asked what would make them use an online resource: • functionality – such that the site was easy to use, site search is essential, good navigation links, personalisation All this feedback collected by B2B was able to provide decision-making information for the NLA who then advised designers of the online portal so as to be able to embrace these opinions and also respond to the different requirements. The future Thoughts on the site in the future focussed on a platform portal with self-selecting sector options. Ideas include: • more bespoke solutions tailored to the needs of specific users or sectors B2B director Carol-Ann Morgan is manager of the research. She believes that the NLA site is the only one that addresses all business/industry sectors and can also engage all levels of management from shop floor to boardroom. “This site pulls all the different elements together as one complete resource. It is easy to use, when and where the individual wants. It allows ideas, best practice, information and leadership advice to be shared for the benefit of all and it encourages individual and cross-sector networking. In fact, it does what it set out to do, ie promote distributed leadership.” About The Northern leadership Academy – www.northernleadershipacademy.co.uk. The NLA’s interactive leadership portal has been developed to help individuals and organisations based in the North improve their leadership skills through a raft of specialist content and interactive resources. Once registered, individuals can create personal profiles and engage in peer-to-peer networking, access a comprehensive directory of leadership resources, have the opportunity to participate in e-learning courses and sign-up to highly rated personal development programmes such as ‘Windmills’ and Harvard’s ‘Manage Mentor’. The portal hosts a series of industry-specific channels for those working in the private, public, community and voluntary sectors. Managed by industry professionals, these channels offer dedicated forums, discussion areas, audio-visual tools, event calendars and other content specific to these sectors. Online Leadership Portal – Part 1 of 2Friday, September 21st, 2007
LOG ON TO LEADERSHIP Findings from business-to-business market research specialist B2B International have helped establish an innovative online leadership resource The Northern Leadership Academy (NLA) is a pioneering partnership between the business and management schools of the Universities of Lancaster, Leeds and Liverpool. Its overarching mission, to be achieved through more and better leadership in the region, is to boost Northern productivity, helping close the multi-billion economic gap between the North and the average for the rest of England. One of many deliverable themes for the NLA was the development of a leadership portal. B2B International, with expertise in the academic sector, was commissioned to determine the content and functionality of this leadership portal and evaluate the final product. Research began in October 2006, looking at what online resources were currently available and conducting focus groups with individuals of varying levels of leadership who worked in the private, public, community and voluntary sectors, and with business/MBA students. The portal was launched in spring this year with further refinement now due. B2B is currently undertaking an e-survey on the website to elicit views. The NLA’s core objective is the promotion of distributed leadership across all sectors and industries in the North. This is based on a principle of collaborative working and shared responsibility, as opposed to focussing on the traits, behaviour and actions of a sole or single leader making key commercial and strategic decisions in isolation. The new paradigm means that the heroic, natural-born leader gives way to distributed leadership with collective responsibility. It leads to high levels of personal responsibility and performance, encourages learning by doing and innovation whilst enabling the followers to feel empowered and involved. Varying styles of leadership B2B’s research shows marked differences in leadership across sectors. In the corporate/ private world, leadership development was found to be central – a leader was essential to develop staff to deliver profit to shareholders. In the public sector, leaders were more compliant, managing services for the public good and busy with direction and responsibility. A leader within the SME sector was a true manager as he or she had to survive in a competitive environment and needed to control costs and gain business. A more reluctant leader emerged in the voluntary sector, keen to help others develop and be seen as inclusive, collaborative and democratic. Part 2 will be published on Monday Need Research? Think IndependentlyMonday, September 17th, 2007
“It is not the strongest species that survive….but the ones most responsive to changeâ€? Charles Darwin Gone are the days where organizations employed ‘Market Research Managers’ to commission, manage and utilize market research carried out by external agencies; in fact it is very rare these days that a company has such a position. Originally the focus of market research was on marketing issues, and the main users of market research were the marketing departments of large companies. Over time its use has broadened to a wide range of business issues, and today market research is used by a broad spectrum of functions in a wide range of small as well as large organisations. In deed, in recent years, the use of market research has developed very healthily outside the traditional confines of the Marketing and Market Research departments, thanks to the relationships built and skills offered by independent consultants and small/medium research agencies. Market research carried out by ‘Independent Consultants Group’ and Ciao! shows that independent market research consultants are viewed in a very positive light. Reflecting the individual nature of their service, their key characteristics are creativity (a more flexible approach to problem solving, free thinking) and a good working relationship (good listeners, stimulating to work with) – in addition to experience, actionability, insight, commitment and an understanding of business issues. The key findings were as follows: 1. Market research is now a highly valued information source, which has become more useful in the past five years 2. Market research is being commissioned by a wide variety of client functions other than Marketing and Market Research. The client base has broadened considerably and this trend seems likely to continue, as market research becomes increasingly a mainstream rather than a specialist tool 3. Confidence appears to be growing in the usefulness of the Internet (presumably as a resource in its own right as well as a tool which makes market research easier to use and more widely accessible – http://www.b2binternational.com/aboutb2b/techniques/quantitative/esurveys.php ), and in technological developments which render market research ever more relevant to business issues eg online focus groups – http://www.b2binternational.com/library/whitepapers/whitepapers14.php 4. Smaller, independent market research consultants are widely used by research buyers because they have a broader skill set and can work with a more varied client base rather than just the conventional Market Research function 5. Independent consultants are valued for their creativity and problem-solving approach and the good working relationship that they build with clients – good listeners and stimulating to work with. These are important skills which need to be more widely developed in the market research industry. 6. The perception of large/global research agencies tends to be much more associated with offering standard off-the-shelf solutions rather than understanding the problem. They are seen to delegate to juniors and provide information rather than insight. This does not project the right image for the healthy future development of the industry For more information on B2B International’s consultancy offering visit http://www.b2binternational.com/services/consultancy_and_training/consultancy_services.php This article can be viewed in its entirety at www.indepconsultants.org Logo Research – Approach With CautionThursday, September 6th, 2007
By Paul Hague – Director, B2B International Ltd The Role Of The Logo Logos are the marks by which companies are recognized. Their origins were the hot seared marks burned on to the rumps of cattle when they roamed freely on the plains of the US. Each mark distinguished the owner of the cattle just as a logo distinguishes a company today. Logos provide the vital service of helping us recognize, in an instant, the product or service which is being offered. In a world which is becoming ever more confusing because of the plethora of choice, brands help us home-in on products which are familiar and in which we have confidence. They assist us in making supplier choice with the best logos and brands being attached to the best companies. This means that any change to a logo should be made with considerable caution. Once a logo has become established, it takes on a life of its own. It becomes so familiar to customers, it is owned by them. Indeed, any change to the logo may create an adverse reaction. “What are you doing messing around with my logo?�. As a result, companies change their logos relatively infrequently and often quite subtly. The illustration below shows how the Shell logo, the ICI logo, and the IBM logo have all changed over decades. In the ICI logo, for example, the original founding company of Nobel was changed to ICI at an early juncture and many years later the underscoring waves were simplified and reduced in amplitude. The logo still has a recognizable DNA even after 50 years.
As a general principle, logos only have a radical makeover if a company is in dire trouble as occurred with Ratners. Occasionally a logo is changed to signify a major change in direction for the company, as has recently been the case with BP which has “gone green�.
When companies have changed the logo for no real reason, it usually has mixed receptions. This was certainly the case with British Airways.
Using Market Research To Test Logo Changes Market research has an important role to play in the testing of all marketing communications. It provides an independent and scientific understanding of customers and potential customers’ views. Market researchers have a number of options available to them in this type of work. Qualitative research enables us to dig deep and obtain a full understanding of people’s views on logos, brands and other communication devices. There are two important types of qualitative research  Focus groups Focus groups Focus groups work extremely well in generating ideas and therefore are usually used for concept testing. In communications research they are useful for generating ideas for adverts and working out messages which resonate. The do sometimes suffer from a bias which may result from an outspoken and articulate respondent who carries the rest with him/her. Focus groups can be used to check out an existing logo and to find out its current strengths and weaknesses. However, they are not the vehicle for testing radical changes to logos as they tend to yield an over critical response to the proposal. Depth interviews This is a favoured method for carrying out research into a changed logo. Interviews with around 30 respondents would give a well considered view of any changes. Face-to-face depth interviews are expensive to set up and administer and, except in exceptional circumstances, they do not offer as good value for money as depth interviews carried out by telephone. The telephone in combination with the internet allows researchers to show examples of logos and other communications and at the same time ask for a reaction. Quantitative research Qualitative research gives us a deep understanding but does not provide the measures that we sometimes need to see what different groups of people think about changes to a logo or some other communication device. We have therefore to turn to quantitative research for these measurements. Quantitative research requires upwards of 100 interviews and more typically 200 plus interviews. It is therefore an expensive tool. It sometimes follows on after a preliminary qualitative phase. In logo research we would use quantitative research if we wanted to test awareness and attitudes to logos across a broad population. It probably would not be appropriate in any project which was considering a change to the logo. The Impact Of Cheap Products In ChinaWednesday, August 15th, 2007
An article from the Financial Times. We Must Count The True Cost Of Cheap China Richard McGregor, FT Monday, August 06, 2007 When An erstwhile colleague tried to illuminate the controversy over cheap imports from China, he positioned himself outside a Wal-Mart store in Illinois, asking shoppers if they should thank poorly paid Chinese workers for providing such low-cost goods. In response, as James Kynge records in his recent book on China’s global impact, most shoppers gave him puzzled looks or simply scurried away. That was two years ago. In the wake of the multiple scandals over tainted Chinese food and drug exports in recent months, such an exercise might now provoke outright hostility rather than uneasy indifference. The scandals have ensured that Chinese goods now have an indelible image of being not just cheap, but life-threatening as well. As with many bilateral conflicts between the US and China, perverse ironies abound. The current wave of outrage was set off earlier this year when pet food tainted by deliberately mislabelled Chinese-made additives began poisoning thousands of cats and dogs in the US. The fact that wrongly labelled foods, liquor and pharmaceuticals – usually by entrepreneurs looking to make a quick buck or just to survive in a cut-throat market – have routinely sickened and even killed people en masse in China has been largely overlooked. In this respect, powerless consumers in China should be thankful for pampered pets in the west. Without the outrage generated on the animals’ behalf, the Chinese authorities would not have acted with such alacrity to promise stricter regulation of the industries. The increased regulation itself may have some perverse consequences. The west has generally cheered on the growth of entrepreneurs in China. But regulation, by raising industry standards and barriers to entry, tends initially to reduce competition by squeezing out smaller operators, which in China are synonymous with the private sector. The beneficiaries may be big state companies, whose close ties to the ruling Communist party will help mould any regulations to suit their interests. The greatest, and most welcome, impact of the food and drug scandals, however, might be to shake up the cognitive disconnect that bedevils the debate about the fallout from China’s economic surge. The huge windfalls for western consumers have been paralleled by wailing about how cheap Chinese goods are destroying local jobs, to the unambiguous benefit of China. This crude dichotomy misses the nub of the issue: that the benefits of growth have been unevenly, and often unfairly, spread around. This has been a point that Beijing has been at pains to acknowledge in recent years, even if its policies to address the issue have been largely ineffective thus far. Ordinary Chinese, especially city dwellers, are much better off than they were before the country’s transformative market reforms nearly 30 years ago. But proportionately, their share of national income has declined. An International Monetary Fund paper found that the fall in the wage share of national income since the mid-1980s had been pronounced, from 67 per cent of gross domestic product to 56 per cent now. The World Bank found an even sharper drop, of 9 per cent, in the wage share from 1998. Chinese leaders publicly stress the priority of employment creation, but economic incentives continue to favour capital intensive industries, not the job-generating service sector. The huge profits these industries have made in recent years have flowed back to state investors and officials, not the workforce. The other winners have been foreign multinationals, often in local joint ventures, using China as an export base. Labour costs have been rising in China for years but remain low because of countervailing rises in productivity and the inability of workers to organise to win quantum improvements in their conditions. But the much-feared “China priceâ€? has always been about much more than cheap labour. The phenomenon has been underwritten by lax or non-existent enforcement of environmental rules, cheap finance and multiple incentives offered by regions competing for investment. For companies making low value-added goods, the cheap finance and investment incentives are being wound back by a central government that wants companies to focus on developing indigenous technologies. The enforcement of environmental rules and the establishment of a genuine regulatory regime promise to be much thornier tasks. Local autonomy, and the desire of every city, town and village in China to enjoy the fruits of economic growth, make effective regulation all but impossible any time soon. Many foreign commentators argue that Chinese pollution is already a global problem. They are doubtless correct. China’s emergence this year as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases is ample evidence for that. But if Chinese pollution is the It is an idea that would startle, and maybe even anger, shoppers in Illinois, but it might be a healthy reminder of where the low prices they enjoy really come from. One way or another, the cost of China to the world is going to rise. « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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