Archive for the ‘Market Research’ Category
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
In a week of posts that we might as well as prefaced as “How market research can help you or your organisation”, today we look at how assessing market trends can help develop future strategies for all sorts of companies.
Given the time of year (supposedly summer for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere!) it seems particularly apposite to take a look at the tourism industry and what qualitative research has delivered for Britain’s tourist agency VisitBritain.
VisitBritain is Britain’s national tourism agency, tasked with marketing Britain in 36 countries in addition to promoting England in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. British tourism is worth approximately £86 billion to the UK economy every year. Some £66 billion of this is generated by domestic residents on trips taken within the UK, a further £16 billion by overseas visitors to Britain. It is Britain’s fifth largest industry and employs over two million people.
General speaking, Britain’s main influx of overseas visitors have tended to come from the US, Germany, France, Spain and Ireland. The market is, however, changing – especially as Asia is beginning to play a more important role in the world tourism market and destined to be the driving force for outbound and inbound tourism over the coming years.
Europe as a whole is forecast to enjoy a 30% increase in visits from Asia and a 31% rise from the Middle East over the next couple of years. During the same period, Europe is expected to experience only a 14% increase from North America, traditionally one of Britain’s main money earners. The falling dollar exchange rate is partly to blame, with North Americans now looking for cheaper, more affordable destinations. Britain is also slipping down the “must see now” list because of the growing popularity of “new” destinations such as India, Thailand and Croatia.
Research continues to help us understand what people want from a holiday and subsequent insights show us how we can meet their requirements. Qualitative research is used extensively to help VisitBritain develop this understanding, with the insights gained helping shape strategy in an increasingly competitive environment.
The above originally appeared in the July/August edition of “In Brief”, the Association for Qualitative Research’s bi-monthly update.
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Qualitative Research, Market Research, Articles |
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Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
We all know that it is easier to sell your product or service to a current customer than it is to try and get a potential customer on board. In these uncertain times, holding on to your most valued customers is more crucial than ever. From just a quick Google search you get many different statistics thrown in your face:
The average company loses 10% of its customers each year
A 5% reduction in the customer defection rate can increase profits by 25% to 85%, depending on the industry
The top 20% of customers in a business may generate as much as 80% of the company’s profits, half of which are lost serving the bottom 30% of unprofitable customers
Recent research by CMO Council shows that only a half of global marketers have strategies in place to further penetrate or monetize key customer account relationships and only one-third have strategies in place to win back dormant or lost customers.
For more information on how we can help you gain more value from your customers or win back lost customers contact the B2B International team.
Marketers look to boost customer retention
CMO Council study finds maximizing existing relationships takes a back seat to new leads
By Kate Maddox
May 5, 2008
While b-to-b marketers are increasingly focused on improving relationships with customers, they still have a long way to go in implementing effective, consistent customer retention practices, according to a study released last month by the Chief Marketing Officer Council.
The study found that only one-third of global marketers have strategies in place to win back dormant or lost customers, and only half have strategies to further penetrate or monetize key account relationships.
The study was based on an online survey of more than 450 global marketers, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of this year.
According to the study, only 6.8% of marketers said they have excellent knowledge of the customer when it comes to demographic, behavioral and psychographic data, while 51.9% said they have fair to little knowledge of the customer.
To help reduce customer churn, Fujitsu has given ownership of customer satisfaction metrics to functional heads across the organization, including product development, sales, marketing and customer service.
Fujitsu also implemented a CRM system about a year ago and is now trying to broaden its use from a sales contact tool to an enterprise wide customer asset manager.
For more, click here
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Customer Satisfaction, Market Research |
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
In his latest Thursday Night Insight blog feature, Alaric Fairbanks talks about the ways in which business-to-business market research agencies can prove their credentials for even the most highly specific and niche market research requests.
In our Asian operations, perhaps unsurprisingly given the rapidly industrialising nature of the major markets here and the strength of manufacturing, the bulk of work and enquiries are in the field of industrial research. Put more crudely, this involves “investigating an aspect of a market for something used to producing something else”.
Broadly speaking, this can be divided into three areas:
- Raw materials
- Components
- Equipment and machinery
Obviously this can cover a huge range of industries and products, which can cause problems for buyers of market research in these industries. Understandably, the research buyer would like to be reassured that the external agency chosen has experience in the market in question, as well as in the relevant geographical areas and with appropriate methodologies. This is relatively straightforward with broad industry categories, for example pharmaceuticals. Things get more complex, however, when the buyer would like to be reassured of experience within their particular niche. To take the pharmaceuticals example further, the next question, may be: “how about biopharm?”
Again, outlining experience in this area may be no problem for most specialist b2b agencies, but what if this is followed by; “have you covered chromatography products for the purification of monoclonal antibodies in China?” Even the most experienced agency will find it difficult to claim direct experience in such a highly specialised field; indeed, it is unlikely that the buyer will find any agency that has conducted exactly this research before.
So, what should a buyer be looking for in selecting an external agency for this project and what can the agency do to facilitate this decision? The general characteristics of industrial and manufacturing markets, together with their implications, should give us some indication of the type of experience a buyer should be looking for.
The customer numbers, and thus the number of potential respondents, will be much smaller than in consumer markets. This is especially true of highly specialised markets. For the research buyer, the key issue here will be the ability of the agency to recruit respondents from a very limited sample pool.
There are likely to be multiple and contradictory members of the decision making unit, all of whom will have an impact on the decision and whose views will be of importance to the research buyer. The first issue here is identifying the key decision makers – often from roles as diverse as production, maintenance, purchasing, etc – and their roles in the process. These people are by no means easy to reach, and an agency should be able to demonstrate a track record of identifying and reaching these types of respondents.
Many aspects of the information required to reach meaningful conclusions will be of an extremely technical nature and, as we have seen, it will be very difficult for an agency to build up a high level of technical knowledge across a wide range of highly specialised industries. From the agency side, a general understanding, coupled with the ability to listen to and apply the knowledge of the buyer should be a prerequisite. This can be demonstrated by examples of working in other highly specialised areas in related industries. We would suggest that although specific technical expertise is highly unlikely, an industrial background and a certain amount of maturity are essential.
Most industries have their own technical language and vocabulary that will need to be used in any specific research project. This means that at the design stage, especially for discussion guides and questionnaires, this has to be right, as a difference in phraseology could lead to different results. Care must be taken to ensure that this is correct.
Checking and verifying the information obtained at an early stage is particularly important in this type of research. This goes beyond standard research practice of checking that the questionnaire is “working” to “is this information technically possible?” This means that there will have to be especially close liaison between client-side technical staff and the agency in the early stages. Similarly, the agency should be able to demonstrate experience of this way of working. In the analysis stages it will be important that the implications of the answers to detailed specific questions are understood by the agency in interpreting the data obtained.
In summary, whilst industrial research is an incredibly wide field, it is almost impossible to have expert knowledge of the most technical and specific markets, the high level commonalities of industrial markets require a common skill set, and choosing an agency that demonstrates a history of working on this broad type of subject, together with some relevant industry knowledge, should be the first point of contact for the potential industrial market research buyer.
More information about what makes industrial market research unique can be found our White Paper, B2B Marketing.
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Alaric Fairbanks, Thursday Night Insight, Industrial Research, Market Research China, Market Research |
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
We live in an age of information overload. There can hardly be an executive in the world who doesn’t regularly type a question into Google and obtain thousands of answers within milliseconds. Our computerised systems at work hold hundreds if not thousands of filing cabinets of data which we can access through word searches. And if this is not enough, we can turn to the market research community who will carry out a survey at a tenth of the cost in real terms of 30 years ago. In other words when it comes to market intelligence we have never had it so good.
So why therefore do we sometimes find it difficult to make business decisions?
One reason is that despite the enormous amount of information available to us, some of it is not clear and some of it is in conflict. This means that our judgement and interpretation of the data is still vital. Consider the following paradigm in which a decision maker may have a choice of internally collected data versus externally collected data and that which may be considered objective verses that which is subjective.
Most of us would intuitively believe that external data that is objective is to be trusted more than data that has come from opinions inside the company. However, the old guy with grey hair who has given an internal opinion may have synthesised years of data and his view could be worth far more than the number crunching survey that skimmed the surface. Of course, it could also be worthless as he could be a vacuous mouth with one year’s experience repeated 30 times.
So the difficulty in using market intelligence is fusing data together and working out which bits are to be trusted and which are not. It is for this reason that the workshop approach to delivering findings has become so popular. The research agency is able to put the findings from their survey on the table and invite all participants at the workshop to share their own knowledge and help in its interpretation. In this way disputes as to the meaning and value of data can be resolved and actions can be agreed.
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Paul Hague, Market Research |
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
Market research specialists B2B International have welcomed over 1,000 employees during their 10 years, with Leah Fletcher (pictured above) being the lucky 1000th.
Peter Mullarkey, operations manager at B2B International’s UK office says:
We’re delighted to have reached this milestone. More than 1,000 people have now worked for B2B since its inception in 1998. This includes the consultants in our research team and those working in the telephone interviewing unit. There’s certainly always a lot going on here!
Whilst there are a large proportion of English-speaking interviewers, B2B also employs people of many nationalities with up to 35 languages being spoken amongst the staff at any one time. This, in no small part, is due to the international nature of many of the projects that B2B conducts.
Director and co-founder Nick Hague says:
This multi-national aspect is why so many clients commission us. We talk to people all over the world, and the differing time zones means the phone unit is often busy 24 hours a day!
With the opening of a Beijing office 18 months ago and a New York branch having opened in June, Peter says constant expansion means B2B that is always looking out for additional staff:
The B2B phone unit is thriving. Work is quite flexible, which suits many people, and also very varied – short interviews, longer in-depth conversations, through to focus groups. We‘re a happy and dedicated team…and the provision of a tea trolley also proves highly popular, as well as helping lubricate their voices whilst interviewing!
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Nick Hague, International Market Research, Market Research, B2B News |
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