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Archive for the ‘Market Research’ Category
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Recently released figures from mainland Europe show that some parts of the European market research industry found 2009 to be a difficult year.
Market research revenues in Germany fell by 5% last year, according to figures provided by 151 German agencies to industry publication Context – the total revenue of those taking part amounting to €2.08 billion.
According to Context, fewer agencies agreed to provide figures for 2009 than did for 2008, probably because of disappointing results. Of the agencies that did take part, 54% reported a fall in revenue and 17% saw a rise.
In spite of staff cuts at many agencies, the total number of permanent employees in the German market research industry was actually up overall – yet revenue per employee was down for the third year running.
Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, market research revenues were estimated to be down 4% last year, according to industry association Simar. Based on preliminary figures from 22 research agencies in the country, 2009 total revenue was put at Kc2.2 billion (£73.2 million).
Brighter news for 2010, though, with predictions that the industry will return to 2008 levels (Kc2.3 billion or £76.6 million). Most agencies surveyed expect their revenues this year to be the same or higher than they were in 2009.
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Credit Crunch, Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Market Research |
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Ethnography research is a technique that is being used more and more in business to business markets and in the last month B2B International has carried out numerous ethnographic projects looking at getting into the mind of the trade (both plumbers and builders).
Ethnographic research must surely be among the most misunderstood, misrepresented and misused of the currently used qualitative research techniques, and this is true whether it is within a B2B or a B2C context. This article below by Neil McPhee and taken from this month’s BIG Times spreads some light on the technique.
What is Ethnography?
Ethnography is a research process that is rooted in the anthropological and sociological traditions of understanding that places a researcher within the context of the research setting they are studying. Through the process of first hand observation and participation in people’s lives, a process known as cultural immersion, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of individuals and their cultural belief systems. Ethnography represents more than mere observation, it involves direct participation into the lives and the culture of people. Its strength is its attempt to get at the underlying meanings of actions and beliefs within the context of a cultural group/ setting. In order to leverage ethnography to generate new insights, commercial research organisations have uniquely adapted ethnography to fit the needs of commercial business practice.
My friend and co-tutor, on the ESOMAR Ethnography and Observation workshop, Hy Mariampolski PhD, from the USA, calls it Marketing Ethnography. I tend to call it Research or Commercial Ethnography, but in any event, it has a number of characteristics which make it a very different animal from an interview. Commercial ethnography is a movement away from the study of ‘native cultures’ and a movement towards the study of consumer cultures, this including a B2B context here. The principles are the same: a quest to understand people within the context of their natural environment.
Due to both consumer and business pressures we spend much shorter periods of time than would be ideal with people but our aim is still to participate directly in people’s lives in order to gain access to social situations that help us to better understand their world. We then take this understanding into the realm of business to better design products and services that will in turn better meet the needs of our constituents.
How do we recognize “ethnography?”
There are a number of attributes that constitute its practice.
1. Ethnography: describes the behaviours, values, beliefs, and practices of the participants in a given cultural setting. This is important, as the notion of Culture/Values etc, are prerequisites for “real” ethnography. We need to identify, and then understand,
the rules and their symbolism and significance within the respondents’ worlds.
2. Context: Thick and Thin descriptions (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures). We observe, analyse and report on contextualized behaviour and symbolism, and we tend to seek the broader definition of context. Simply observing office workers, say, eating in the staff restaurant, tells us little about the company, but placed in the context of employment policies, working
culture and management attitudes, we learn a lot about the personality of the company, the pressure on staff to minimise lunch hours etc. This leads us to “thick” and “thin” descriptions:
i. A thick description of a human behaviour is one that explains not just the behaviour, but its context as well, such that the behaviour becomes meaningful to an outsider 2. It provides context that interprets observed actions and provides meaning to these actions. In this way analysis can fuse with description.
ii. A thin description describes only the event/act itself, and would only detail events whereas a thick description would try to analyse possible intent and the interpretation of events by participants.
3. Ethnographer role and conduct: A key principle of the method is that the researcher must not just observe, but must find a role within the group observed from which to participate in some manner, even if only as “outside observer.” The creation of a non-threatening role and presence, and the creation of virtually instant rapport, is one of the critical dimensions of effective ethnographic
work. Instant “rapport” is essential. Simply turning up with a video camera and a script and asking questions as in a quantitative questionnaire, or assuming that respondents will behave naturally, with no further guidance, is naive and useless. We must establish our “presence” in a way that allows people to become oblivious, as far as possible, to the presence of the researcher.
4. Time and duration: Realistically, we cannot often spend months or years living with our subjects, as did the ethnographers of old. Spending two or three years on an island was possible in the past but few clients would wear that in a proposal. However, time and duration is still a crucial dimension. I would argue for a full day (8-10 hours) as a rule of thumb, and a real half day (4- 5 hours) as being a minimum time to spend with someone/someplace. In reality, by the time you have arrived, got established, created some rapport and done a basic “fact find”, you have probably been there for two hours already! To go further, to become an accepted part of the furniture and to achieve that critical blend of visible but invisible presence, you really cannot expect to be there for LESS than half a day, and to be around long enough to observe a range of behaviours more than once ideally, and to observe the context, simply takes longer. A 2 hour visit simply is not long enough for any measure of real ethnography.
5. Participant observation: This is a critical element, as it is, in practice, what we spend a lot of a session doing. We watch what is going on, we note (film) critical elements of behaviour and context, and often follow up with a “conversational narrative” (the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation), this being the sort of everyday and nonscripted exchange that goes on between people: it is not a formalised interview. • In reality, the conversation between ethnographer and respondent should seem like the usual conversation between friends, or acquaintances, at least. Asking structured questions, sounding like a “researcher” is not the way to do it, though many clients have asked for very specific questions to be asked – or have asked them themselves while on accompaniment. However, this is not the way it works best.
6. Video ethnography: This is often thought to be “ethnography”, where in fact, it is simply one aspect and one format of it and refers to the video recording of the sample of targets in their natural environment and context, and feeding back footage of practice to clients. Implicit in this is that no analysis or decoding is offered: it is simply recorded footage, with no significant editing, analysis, selectivity or contextual reference made. It is well short of the requirements for a full ethnography.
7. Analysis and Data Collection: Analysis and data collection are not distinct phases, they occur simultaneously. Both are ‘messy’ and involve the use of human beings as the unit of observation. Ethnography relies upon detail to convey the feel as well as the facts of an observed setting. During analysis, we often use some form of measurements, not simply impressionistic reportage, and these could involve:-
- Symbolism, what something (behaviour, function or artifact) stands for
- “Nerve centres”
- Functions – the role or purpose of activities
- Underlying rules implicit in the observation findings
- Language, jargon, slang
- Observing order/process/li>
- Counts
- Length of time
- Measure – weight, distance
- Interactions with and between others
- Evident but unspoken feelings and emotions
- What’s really happened vs. the story of what happened
- Etc
In summary
But above all, we are looking to see/understand the bigger, more conceptual issues about their culture and environment, using cultural and social theories to make sense of what we see.
Posted in
B2B Marketing, B2C, Culture, Market Research, Research Methods |
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Friday, October 16th, 2009
Matt Powell this week draws some interesting conclusions between his parallel lives as both a market researcher and an actor.
As some of you may or may not know, as well as my career as a market researcher I am also a keen actor, and have been ‘treading the boards’ for some years now. Over the years that I have been immersed in the industry of research and marketing, I have noticed that much of what we deal with as researchers in our day-to-day job is particularly relevant to the job of an actor – from research techniques that come in useful when researching a role, to certain useful business and marketing models. For this Thursday Night Insight I have decided to look at a couple of the similarities between the job of an actor and the job of a researcher.
Due to our business-to-business focus at B2B International, many of the research projects that we conduct incorporate a number of research methodologies that complement each other in order to answer the overall research objective(s). Indeed, many of our questionnaires and discussion guides are much longer than the typical consumer research project. Many projects can include a phase of desk research, followed by in-depth interviews, followed by an e-survey or a quantitative telephone survey. The data from these individual phases are then analysed and a report developed that is presented to our client upon completion of the project. That, of course, is a very brief summation of the job, but I mention it in order to highlight the point that for most research projects, we have a huge amount of varying types of data that need to be analysed and distilled into the few slides where our recommendations are made.
As researchers, when presenting the findings from a project, we may sometimes feel the need to display the results for every question, as much of the desk research as possible, and as many quotes as we are able – sometimes we feel we need to show that we have indeed gathered the data that we said we would. Of course, we always try to steer clear of this – the presentation, in the end, is our means of communicating to the client our answer to the research objective, and therefore the more concise it is the better.
Whilst working as an actor, I have noticed how similar the processes of a research project and bringing a role from script to stage can be. By the time an actor takes to the stage, or steps in front of the cameras to perform a role, he or she will have done huge amounts of work in order to bring the role to life. Hours, days and weeks will have been spent on absorbing the text, researching particular areas of interest, and rehearsing before the actor even steps onto the stage. As well as learning the lines for a part, an actor will also conduct large amounts of research on elements such as: historical period in which the play/film is set, specialist trades of a character, accents, cultural trends, technologies used, and many more. This research enables the actor to deliver a role that is grounded in truth, and ultimately believable to the audience.
This process struck a chord with me recently as I realised the similarities between how an actor delivers a role onstage following an extensive phase of research and preparation, and how the findings from a research project are delivered to answer a specific objective. In both instances, the final outcome (whether the research presentation, or the actor’s performance that an audience sees) is only the tip of the iceberg. As an audience in a theatre we do not wish to see an actor’s heavily annotated script, their rehearsal process, or the large amounts of research that have been done – we want to watch the performance. Indeed, with market research, the final presentation that we see is simply the tip of a much, much larger iceberg – we know there is a huge amount of data that has been gathered, but we do not wish to see a chart for every question, or a quote slide for every open-ended question; we wish to see the information that is relevant to answering the research objective. As researchers there may be questions that influence our decision and choices for recommendations, but in many cases (as with an actor’s research portfolio) we do not need to see these – the bigger picture is what counts. However, I hasten to add, without the information that is not seen – the main body of the iceberg, if you will – we are unable to fully make our recommendations or draw our conclusions. Likewise, an actor would not be able to deliver a believable, truthful performance without his or her unseen work.
Indeed, the comparison between the job of a market researcher and an actor is also true when we think of the differences in how a research objective may be answered by one researcher compared with another. Of course, all competent researchers will be able to design a project that answers the research objective – though there may be many different ways of achieving this, different methods, and different means of presenting the data. In the same way, we know that if we see Ian McKellan performing Hamlet, the words spoken will be the same as the Hamlet that we would see Kenneth Brannagh perform. However, we also know that the performances will be very different.
There are many more similarities between the jobs of a market researcher and an actor that could be touched upon – however, these two seem to resonate quite clearly to me as good examples. After all, in both jobs we seek to fully understand a particular problem, issue or situation, before analysing what we know and then delivering a well informed interpretation of it. Just rest assured that the tip of the iceberg is usually, and I say ‘usually’, the most interesting part.
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Market Research, Matt Powell, Research Methods, Thursday Night Insight, Uncategorized |
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Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Eve Lenkowsky’s first Thursday Night Insight shows us why careful segmentation of our target markets is vital to survival.
At the risk of coming off as the dorkiest member of B2B International, I’m going to tell you about my latest hobby: fish. That’s right, I’m a ichthyophile. Say that one 3 times fast.
When I bought my fish tank a couple of months ago and began planning out the aquatic wonderland that would house my flippery little friends, the possibilities seemed endless. The tank can hold 30 gallons of water, and that means a whollllllle lotta fish. My childhood days of little fish bowls and dime goldfish were a thing of the past.
With the tune of "Under The Sea" playing in my ears and images of delicate angelfish, friendly flounder, and funky-looking bottom feeders dancing through my head, I waltzed into PETCO and told the pet store people about my "vision." The fish lady smiled as I pointed out which fish I liked, and she told me a few facts about each kind—it was all very educational. Everything was going great…until I told her I wanted all of them. Apparently, that idea was dead in the water.
You see, every species of fish has its own narrow range of water pH levels that it prefers to live in. If you put a fish in water that goes outside of this range, it will suffer or die. But when a fish is in the right kind of water, it can flourish and prosper. I wouldn’t be able to take home that whole assortment of fish because they wouldn’t all be able to live in the same tank together, no matter how large it was. So realistically, to make my tank the best it could be, I had to acknowledge the fact that I would have to make choices. I couldn’t have all of the varied types of fish I wanted since they all had different needs and behaviors, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still have a really cool tank.
I asked the fish lady to help me categorize the species that I liked by their approximate pH level needs. To make things easy, we created three basic segments: the acidic-dwelling fish, the neutral pH fish, and the fish that need a more alkaline environment. With that settled, I would just need to choose one of the three segments I’d identified, then design my tank around the types of fish I’d chosen within that segment. This would let me make it an optimal environment for them to live in and also for me to enjoy visually—win/win.
The same thing can go with segmentation studies in market research. Segmentation is crucial to marketing because once you identify the segments of customers or prospective customers that you want to do business with, you must set different marketing objectives for each segment. Identifying segments through market research allows you to compare and contrast how portions of your customer base might react to various marketing concepts, pricing, advertising copy or visuals. Essentially, you can test various tactics in terms of product, price, promotion and place (route to market) and see how they stack up among your segments. You can also figure out if their needs or desires differ or have any overlap.
Every business, no matter how much money it throws into its products or marketing, has a finite amount of resources and must make choices about how to use them. Just as I created a beautiful environment and found a rich assortment of pH neutral fish to fill it, so too must businesses identify the best segments to target and fine-tune their offerings according to the segments of choice. Market research helps you to figure out how your offerings and positioning concepts will be viewed by various groups based on their firmographic characteristics, behaviors, or needs. Make your choice, choose your best bait, and go get those customers!
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Eve Lenkowsky, Market Research, Marketing, Needs, Segmentation, Thursday Night Insight |
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Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
Hot on the heels of the ESOMAR Global Market Research report, the Market Research Society’s most recent survey of the profession reveals that the UK industry fared comparatively well in 2008. However, 2009 has brought its own challenges that may compromise industry growth this year.
In the face of a grim global economic outlook, total UK market research agency revenue grew by 6.2% in 2008 according to the MRS, as compared with global growth of just 4.5% (reported here). This was driven, in large part, by international growth with international revenues jumping by 12.5% compared to 2007.
In Marketing Magazine’s latest market research league table, B2B International’s performance has outstripped this industry average, with a 24% rise in year-on-year turnover seen in 2008.
In their analysis of the results, Marketing magazine point to 2009 being the year when the recession truly begins to bite for the market research industry. Curtailed client budgets, increased consolidation within the sector, rising research demands and downward cost pressure are all cited as key challenges that agencies must address if they are to truly weather the ongoing storm.
Client-side, anecdotal evidence appears to suggest that the most pressing need from research partners is data that can truly influence, rather than merely support, business decisions. At B2B International, we’d like to think that this overarching aim is central to our ethos – To deliver “market research with intelligence”.
To learn more about B2B International’s range of market research and consultancy services, please click here.
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B2B News, Economic Recovery, Industry News, International Market Research, Market Research, Needs |
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