The opportunities presented by the Chinese market are becoming increasingly difficult for Western businesses to ignore. Despite the global economic crisis, China’s economy still managed to achieve a GDP growth rate of 8.3% in 2009, and some industries (such as the automotive and pharmaceutical sectors) continued to see double-digit growth throughout the economic downturn. With economic analysts predicting China to become the engine for global economic growth over the next decade, many Western enterprises are actively realigning their global strategies to give a greater precedence to China and other Asian markets.

Within China, rapidly changing demographics, rising incomes, increased consumer spending and an increasingly open business environment have all helped to make the Chinese market increasingly attractive to Western businesses across a variety of industries. Similarly, declining sales in their home markets has forced many US and European companies to relocate China firmly to the centre of their long-term global growth strategies.

Breaking into the China market successfully can seem like an almost impossible task to foreign companies with limited or no experience of doing business there. In the latest white paper for B2B International, Mark Hedley illustrates some of the fundamental considerations that any company must take when approaching the China market for the first time. Although these steps may lead to very different conclusions for different companies, they can help companies to properly determine an appropriate strategy for China.

To read the full white paper click on the following link Entering Chinese Business-to-Business Markets: The Challenges & The Opportunities

Colleagues in our White Plains, New York office, spotted the following article in their local newspaper, the Westchester County Business Journal. In something of a ‘Business Agony Aunt’ column, advice is given to a company looking to expand into a new area – and which is basically asking about market assessment studies. We reproduce the article below:

We are expanding services into a new market, similar delivery, but to a different target. This will be the third service we offer. How can we get an idea of what our market share might be for each of the three services we sell?

Market share is defined as that portion of the goods or services provided by one or more companies to a target market. Expand your search to include market profits, growth rates, compensation and analysis of industry leaders to get a well-rounded picture of what your industry is up to. Knowing about your market can help you assess the challenges or opportunities of attempting to grow.

Get the facts
So where do you get market data? Lots of places – trade associations, marketing lists, researchers, indexing services, colleges and universities, and government databases often have facts. Trade shows, surveys, vendors and sales reps can provide anecdotal information.

When looking up industries, you’ll find classification codes are useful. Try an Internet search. Start with the SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) code, and its more recent cousin, the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System). NAICS is more reflective of our increasingly service-based, non-manufacturing economy.

The U.S. Census Bureau site provides information about taxable and exempt businesses by category, including numbers of companies, gross revenue, number of employees and annual payroll. Using this information, you can determine where your company sits versus the average firm in your industry.

Analyze the data
Once you find data about the size of a particular market, what do you do?

Use it to make some decisions. Here are some questions you might want to ask before deciding what to do next.

• Who are the top three competitors in my market?
• How much of the market do they hold?
• Is their market share increasing or decreasing?

If the big guns are increasing share, the market may be going to consolidation. Get out fast. If big players are getting out, or if they’re losing share because it’s not a core focus for them, there may be opportunity to jump in and take away a slice. Make sure it’s profitable enough to be worth the effort.

• Who are the three competitors just ahead of my company?
• Are they growing or declining?
• How does my company compare?

If the next closest competitors are growing faster than the market, watch out, they may be formidable. If they are declining faster than the market, you may be able to step in. Or, the market may be collapsing and it’s time to get out – find out why they’re declining. If any company is over 30 percent of market share, it may be time to look elsewhere for growth. If it’s your company that has 30 percent share, start another niche to become less dependent on one market.

Other considerations
Is the size of the target market growing or declining overall? How about profits? Are there any anomalies within the market that are bucking the trends? What niches exist close to what my company does, but different?

Look for markets with profits at or above what your company earns today. Look for industries with average size, salaries and marketing spend at or below your company’s average. Look through the SIC codes or NAICS for ideas on markets that could be underserved. Ask: How would niche-ing my company in a different way make my company more competitive, give my company more opportunity to grow?

How does my company compare to others in the industry in terms of compensation, annual revenue, marketing spend and year-over-year growth? Am I at, above or below industry performance standards?

Be careful if the compensation or marketing spend is unusually high, that may make it harder to compete and retain clients and employees. If your company is performing below industry standard, figure out how to improve or get out. Use comparative stats to help decide where to focus sales and marketing dollars and efforts. Set growth rates in line with the industry, or clearly and factually define how the company will buck industry trends to accomplish its goals.

Looking for a good book? Try, “How To Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies,” by Kathryn Korostoff.

Article written by Andi Gray of Strategy Leaders Inc.,Chappaqua, New York. www.StrategyLeaders.com

• To find out more about the research studies we can conduct on your behalf to help you assess a market’s potential, please click here.
• To get some hints on how to conduct your own initial desk research, read our white paper How To Get Information For Next To Nothing
• To read a Market Assessment Case Study, please click here.

Following yesterdays post on ‘Market Research In A Recession’ is today’s post detailing the seven steps to minimize the impact of reduced market research spending. These steps from John Quelch (a professor at Harvard Business School) confirm a lot of what we have learnt in business to business markets over the last few months:

1. Stay focused. Savvy marketers focus their research on the products, brands, and markets that are key to their marketing strategy. In a recession, it’s essential to get a clear read on existing core customers, including those who are most loyal to the brand and those who are most profitable, rather than fritter away research resources on potential or peripheral customers. When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers. Now, nice-to-knows that are not essential will have to wait.
2. Enlist trusted research partners. Marketers and research suppliers who trust each other and have established long-term relationships can jointly plan how to extract more insights and make better decisions based on fewer expenditures. For example, combining data sets may reveal new leading indicators of changes in customer behavior. Tracking studies may have an edge over one-off projects. CMOs who trim costs by consolidating their budgets with an integrated research supplier should insist that the supplier aggressively explore synergies across its various component agencies as well as eliminate research redundancies.
3. Value experience and judgment. CMOs should tap the knowledge and intuitions of managers and researchers who’ve lived through previous recessions. In setting prices, for example, such insight can help calibrate the optimal level of price promotion offers. Experience also reveals proxies: in tough times, some marketers use research results from Sweden as a proxy for Scandinavia, rather than conducting the same research in all Scandinavian countries.
4. Seize opportunities overseas. Some large multinational marketers, such as Unilever, are shifting market research expenditures away from Western Europe and toward emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. Relative to the developed economies, the costs of research in emerging economies are less and the payoff from incremental insight can often be greater. Brand preferences and consumption levels in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil tend to be more fluid. Customer research is therefore critical to aid marketers trying to cement brand preferences early on as these economies develop.
5. Use online market research with a dash of skepticism. Online research is cheap, fast, and the wave of the future. Tools like SurveyMonkey allow non-expert users to create custom surveys in minutes. As an alternative to offline focus groups, custom online panels  can be formed for qualitative research on new product ideas or new ads. Taking the do-it-yourself approach rather than outsourcing to a market research firm is attractive in a cost-cutting era, but you risk getting no more than what you pay for. The opinions of convenience sample of an enthusiastic online brand community may not represent all users.
6. Don’t cut market research across the board. Just as important as knowing where to cut research is knowing where not to cut. When marketers are creating fewer new ads and introducing fewer new products, it is doubly important to use rigorous pretesting to select the strongest alternatives. In categories where the bases for customers’ value judgments are changing, modest expenditures on copy research can prevent blowing much more money on ineffective messaging. Adding a few questions to standard tracking studies is a low-cost way to shed light on changes in customer attitudes and purchase behavior. For key products, running conjoint studies to check on shifts in price elasticities of demand and price-attribute tradeoffs can usefully improve the profitability of pricing decisions at a time when cash is king.
7. Keep an eye on the new customer. No one has a perfect record of predicting the future, and the recession is making it harder for customers to envision or articulate their needs. Even so, and despite budget pressures, smart marketers devote a portion of their market research to getting a handle on future changes in customer behavior. Are customers of your brand going to revert to previous consumption patterns when the recession ends? Or are they developing coping mechanisms that will endure, especially if the recession is lengthy? What new products and services will customers be open to embracing? If, as in the financial services category, customer confidence and trust in brands have been seriously eroded, how long and what steps will it take to regain them? Eventually, the recession will end, and future success depends on being well-positioned, based on sound research, when it does.

To view the latest marketing strategies of large multi-national corporates in a recession, click here.

Original article viewed at http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/

Matthew Harrison, B2B International’s Director of International Operations, was featured in Marketing’s recent special issue on emerging markets.

Drawing upon his time spent working in our China office and using his extensive experience gained through managing research projects in such far-reaching geographies as Russia, Sri Lanka and Tanzania, Matthew offers invaluable advice to Western companies looking to establish or build a presence in any emerging B2B market.  The full published article is as follows:

Some years ago, the chief justification for Western companies entering emerging markets was to establish low-cost manufacturing operations.

However, in the past five years there has been a revolution in strategy as the purchasing power of emerging economies has grown and these companies have now shifted their focus from supply to demand.

The casual observer watching a Muscovite sip a Starbucks cappuccino could be forgiven for thinking that customers in developing markets want Western products in Western packaging, promoted in a Western style at Western prices.

While many Western brands have developed a cachet across the developing world, the real picture is more complex, particularly in B2B markets. There are six factors that must distinguish B2B marketing in emerging markets.

The first is the importance of conveying higher product quality. In developing markets, companies’ product requirements often place less emphasis on product durability and quality of materials than in Western countries, putting greater importance on a lower cost. This is a huge challenge to Western companies seeking to enter the market, as they may find it hard to convey the value of the technical superiority of their product.

Second, when it comes to the services associated with a product offering, buyers in emerging markets are frequently as demanding, if not more so, than Westerners. For example, branches of Subway in China often take telephone orders for their sandwiches, and deliver these free of charge to customers’ homes or workplaces. A service such as this would be seen as extravagant in the West, but is often a basic requirement in Beijing and Shanghai, and no economic value is attached to it.

The third factor is the importance of local presence. Western companies entering developing markets often assume that the prestige of their brand excuses them from establishing a local presence. This is not the case. While customers in developing countries may be willing to pay more for the quality, prestige and technical know-how of an established Western company, all these advantages must be in addition to, not instead of, the basic requirements of spare-parts availability, access to technical support and face-to-face contact with local-language speakers.

Then there is promotion. If a Western brand can deliver on its promises, its name and values can prove a huge advantage and allow extremely large margins to be achieved. This is particularly true in consumer markets, where products such as luxury clothing and perfume brands frequently collect higher premiums than they do in the West.

In B2B markets, Western brands carry a particular weight if they can boast international accreditations such as ISO or a prestigious client list. These demonstrations of a company’s aptitude are often vital.

Fifth, relationships are key. As developing markets open up, buyers are only gradually becoming comfortable with dealing with people and companies they don’t know. Relationships are widely used as a substitute for brand when it comes to verifying provenance. Most B2B offerings also involve repeat purchases or after-sales support, and this makes attendance at events, face-to-face contact and local language capability essential.

Lastly, market research is vital. This is commonplace among Western companies, and the necessity of obtaining independent information is even more critical when it comes to operating in foreign markets. Not only do many Western companies lack insight into the developing markets, but cultural barriers and a lack of familiarity between managers in different locations can often mean that the exchange of information within international companies is wanting.

The most successful multinationals conduct frequent research across geographies, challenging their own thinking as well as the flow of information within their companies.

More of Matthew’s white papers on developing markets are available on our website:

• Business-to-business market research in China
• Marketing and selling to Chinese businesses
• Business-to-business market research in Russia