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Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »Business Models & Competitive AdvantageTuesday, July 5th, 2011  The commercial landscape is littered with examples of firms with innovative products or services which failed because they could not achieve profitability – typically either they could not attract sufficient customers or were based on unsound economics. A good product or service is therefore no guarantee of success in the marketplace. In their latest paper, Colin Mason and Ross Brown argue that high growth depends on how you set yourself up to deliver value into the market. To read in full this article on how fast-growth enterprises design their business models, please click here. Innovation Is The Key To Business SurvivalWednesday, April 6th, 2011
Every company needs to innovate to survive. This means constantly enhancing existing products and services, and developing new ones – all to drive revenue and profits, to illustrate a market leadership position, and to stay ahead of the competition. A new white paper by Julia Cupman can be viewed on this subject at http://www.b2binternational.com/publications/white-papers/product-development-research/ Three key takeaways that are drawn from this paper include the following: Market research can unleash new ideas and opportunities for product development. It has been said that 80% of industrial innovations have come from customers themselves. Companies that do not actively listen to the market could, therefore, be ignoring unmet needs and closing their ears to new product opportunities. Market research can help you maximize revenues of a product or service. Market research need not cover only product enhancements or new product development. Market research can provide answers on the size of the market, its growth prospects, the distribution channels, optimum pricing, and factors influencing the purchasing decision. Market research provides insurance, reducing business risk. After apparently not having conducted market research, FedEx lost $340 million on a new Zap mail offering, and DuPont lost an estimated $100 million on a new synthetic leather product, Corfam. In order to avoid embarrassing and costly mistakes such as these, it’s understandable why so many companies turn to disciplined market research to test and validate concepts and prototypes prior to new product launch. Market Research: The Second Oldest Profession?Friday, September 4th, 2009
Paul Hague this week takes us on a trip down memory lane to discover the origins, history and development of the market research profession as we now know it. A prostitute, a doctor and a market researcher were sitting around late one evening, and they got to discussing which was the oldest profession. The doctor pointed out that according to biblical tradition, God created Eve from Adam’s rib. This obviously required surgery, so therefore that was the oldest profession in the world. The prostitute said that this may be so but that was engineered by God, not doctors. Eve’s temptation of Adam was a clear indication that her profession was the first. The two turned to the researcher who was listening intently and taking notes. "Which profession do you think is the oldest?" they asked. "Well," said the researcher, "we can’t be sure without a survey and that will take six weeks. However, what you should know is that market research is the second oldest profession." "How is that?" asked the other two in unison. "No doubt at all about it," said the researcher, "because when Adam and Eve had done their deed, the first words that were uttered were, "How was it for you?"". This story got me thinking about the history of market research. Casual questioning, as from Eve, is not the systematic process that we know as market research. It is said that the first recorded straw polls (incidentally, the term comes from farmers throwing a handful of straw into the air to check out where the wind was coming from) were in the early 1820s when newspapers in the United States carried out simple street surveys to see how the political winds were blowing. By the early 1900s a fledgling market research industry had started in the U.S. focusing on advertising testing in one form or another. The industry arrived on the U.K. shores in the 1920s and 30s, and I was reminded of this the other day when I picked up what must be one of the first books published on market research in this country (Market Research by Paul Redmayne & Hugh Weeks, Butterworth & Co – 1931). Flipping the yellowing, musty pages, I was quickly taken back to my formative days in the market research department of Dunlop, where we had an ingenious device for analysing responses from questionnaires. The closed answers were represented on single cards, perforated with holes around the edge, each representing an answer to a question. If a respondent gave a particular answer, the perforated hole would be punched open right to the edge. When all the cards were punched, they could be lined up in the box and a needle would be run through the holes so that we could lift out only those cards which were not punched right to the edge. This enabled us to do a quick count of the number of cards left in the box, which represented respondents giving an answer to a question. Charting in those days was laboriously carried out with my Rotring pen and graph paper. Redmayne and Weeks had some sage advice for the novice market researcher on this subject: "There are many advantages in using a standard sheet of charting paper, so that charts can be kept together in a ring binder. It is useful to make a practice, dating each chart and of indicating to whom it has been shown and for what purpose it was first prepared, together with the original source of the various statistics plotted." Check out this illustration of how they suggested charts should look. You wouldn’t easily turn out 100 of these by hand the night before a presentation!
So what has changed in the market research industry over the last 100 years? Answer: almost everything. The questions we ask are broadly the same but the technology that allows us to ask these questions – the phone and online – has resulted in faster, cheaper and more thorough surveys than ever before. Qualitative research is, as it always has been, dependent on the skills of the moderator, although focus group venues provide an improved environment for viewing and testing products and concepts. In quantitative research, the tools and techniques such as conjoint, SIMALTO, Van Westendorp and the like enable us to get a better fix on prices and product features. I was amused to read Redmayne and Weeks say: "As market research acquires a more established position in industry, its purpose will be better understood and appreciated by ordinary men and women, so that in time we may hope to reach the position of the United States, where the man in the street will respond to questions about his tastes and his buying habits since he can understand the reasons why he is being questioned. The time, however, is still very far off when consumers will have cause to be annoyed by the frequency with which they are approached. It will need a great number of investigations before many of the inhabitants of this country are called upon twice unless the general technique of investigations become so stereotyped that certain representative towns are continually being chosen." There must hardly be a person in the UK who has not been subjected to some sort of invitation to take part in a survey in the last year. Returning to the story of the doctor, the prostitute and the market researcher, it occurs to me that market researchers may or may not be the second oldest profession in the world, but for certain, we will be the last profession hanging in there. When the world finally comes to an end, and we are queuing at the entrance to the Pearly Gates, there will be someone with a clip board and a questionnaire. "Just one more question Sir/Madam before you enter. Can you tell me how likely you are to recommend life on earth on a scale from 1 to 10 where…?" It’s that question again – "How was it for you?" Standing Out From The PackFriday, March 27th, 2009
What do a cassette tape, a boomerang, and a 1980′s electro-pop song have in common? In Matt Powell’s latest Thursday Night Insight entry this week, he looks at the impact of ‘thinking outside the box’ and standing apart from the competition, and the lasting impression that it can make. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve come into contact with a few advertising campaigns that have, in one way or another, caused me to devote at least some part of my day to thinking about them. By that, I mean more time than just taking a glance at a glossy piece of direct mail that goes straight into the recycle bin after couple of seconds. These pieces of marketing have really engaged me – either through getting me to think, causing me a great deal of intrigue, or just appealing to my inner child. The first was a cassette tape that arrived in the post in a brown padded envelope, in a Mission Impossible-esque manner. On the cassette was a label with a personalised web address for me to visit. I was not the only one of my in the office to receive one of these tapes, so there was some discussion as to what they were for. A quick visit to the website, showed that it was a campaign from E-Rewards that centred around constant evolution – the cassette tape being one of the evolutionary step in the personal music player. The campaign certainly stood out from everything else that landed on my desk that day, it created discussion around the office, caused me to visit the website, and now the cassette is adorning my desk-top. Certainly more interaction and longevity than standard direct mail would have been afforded. My second encounter with out-of-the ordinary marketing was on a lunch break whilst in the local supermarket/convenience store. Whilst I was perusing the assortment of soups on offer, I – and my fellow shoppers – were treated to short minute-long blasts of a very familiar 80′s electro pop song. I first dismissed it as the slipping standards of the store, probably allowing staff to play their own music through the store music system. Still, the familiar music was annoying me – I couldn’t remember where I knew it from. After a few more minute-long blasts it dawned on me why the dated music was so familiar – it was the music that backs Dairy Milk’s latest advertising campaign (with the boy and girl and the dancing eyebrows). Once I realised that, it evoked the amusing images from the TV advert – by coincidence I was stood at the counter waiting to pay – with an assortment of Dairy Milk products on display in front of me. Very clever. Plus, I was feeling slightly jubilant that I had remembered where I knew the music from – something that would have irritated me throughout the day if I hadn’t have figured it out. Again, slightly different approach to getting the message across, but a memorable impact. The third piece of marketing that I found particularly engaging is in fact B2B’s latest mailer – not that I’m blowing our own trumpet – it could be a mailer from any company and I would still be writing about it. It is, as the first sentence of this article has probably given away, a boomerang. The boomerang is a play on the theme of ‘getting a return on your investment’. The boomerang has instructions of how to use it on its reverse. This piece of marketing is now sat on my desk awaiting the day when I can finally find somewhere large enough, and unpopulated enough to throw it without posing a threat to the public. Indeed, over the past week, whenever I have come off the phone, I usually find that the boomerang has moved from my desk into my hand. Of course, there are many, many more examples that could be added to the three I have outlined above, but the message is the same. In order to stand out from the crowd and make a lasting impression, we need to somehow differentiate our offering. This applies not just to direct mail and advertising, but to business as well – and is even more important in times such as these. There is no harm in sitting with the pack – but thinking outside the box or offering something different to the competition, can really make the difference in setting a product or company aside from the rest, and create lasting success. For more information on how to differentiate your offering, why not cast your eyes over the following white paper: Differentiation: Are Product, Brand and Service Still Enough? Using Market Research For Product DevelopmentWednesday, March 18th, 2009
A new B2B International white paper – Using Market Research For Product Development – is now available online. In it, Julia Cupman assesses the importance of product development to a company’s growth prospects, focusing in particular on the vital role(s) that market research plays throughout all the different stages of the product life cycle, from initial concept through to product maturity. Product development research serves a host of purposes, such as establishing (unmet) needs, estimating likely demand, setting prices, shaping the specification of the product or determining optimal price points, to give but a few examples. Of course, product development research does not just examine the product alone; packaging, advertising, pricing, service, brand and company reputation are some of the other factors which together make up the complete customer value proposition. Indeed, improvements to packaging, delivery, or any aspect of service support could have just as big an impact as improvements to the physical product itself. Whether establishing potential opportunities for brand new products or trying to breathe life into a former favorite seemingly on its last legs, market research provides insight into the needs of the market, and reduces the risk associated with any form of product development. To read the white paper in full, please click here For further details on B2B International’s product development research services, please click here « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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