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Archive for the ‘Matt Harrison’ Category« Previous EntriesMarketing Training Courses In ShanghaiFriday, August 19th, 2011  B2B International is pleased to announce the dates of its upcoming training courses in Shanghai: On Thursday, 22 September 2011, we will be running a Market With Intelligence course, and on Friday, 23 September 2011, we will host a course on Value-Based Marketing. As with all our courses, these full-day, hands-on training workshops will enable attendees to not only learn the theory of marketing, but – crucially – to apply the learnings to their own businesses. A brief summary of the course schedules is shown below, but more information can be found here “Shanghai Marketing Training Courses”. To book your place online, please click here.. If you have any questions, please call your nearest B2B International office or email shanghai@b2binternational.com Market with Intelligence – Thursday, September 22, 2011 This course introduces you to the key principles of market research and how research tools can be used to grow your business. Topics covered include: • Introduction to market research Value-Based Marketing – Friday, September 23, 2011 Our value-based marketing workshop explores the key marketing principles and how you can make them work for you, including: • Market intelligence and value-based marketing Taking A Different ApproachTuesday, August 9th, 2011  B2B International’s Matthew Harrison was one of the expert market researchers to attend Marketing magazine’s annual Greater Insight round table last month. On the day, Matt brought to the table his thoughts on ensuring success in both developed and developing markets:
click here if you would like to read more of Matt’s thoughts, or to see a short video. Childbirth and How We Delight CustomersFriday, March 25th, 2011
This week Matthew Harrison thinks back to the nerve-racking day his wife gave birth, and reflects on what this tells us about the different ways in which we measure customer needs We headed down a tree-lined avenue and arrived at the hospital, an imposing building in an aspirational Connecticut suburb. A team of uniformed, white-gloved octogenarians ushered us into valet parking, transferred our belongings into a silver trolley and delicately placed my wife into a wheelchair. Our vehicle was whisked away by a Dickensian character in a towering hat. I handed $5 to his fawning colleague and scurried inside the building, behind my wife-on-wheels. The lobby of this hospital was a thing of beauty. Cherry wood-paneled walls met lush carpets; impressionist paintings vied for wall-space with portraits of benevolent local millionaires. One dry-cleaned footman after another escorted us through elevators and corridors and – finally and breathlessly – into a spacious labour room, our personal home for the next 15 hours. I reclined on a chaise longue, like many a husband before me. The flat-screen TV piped cheerful music into the immaculate room. I tuned my laptop into the wi-fi system and emailed my family the latest news. This room had everything a man could want. My wife seemed a bit angry about something. Must be the hormones – I’d read about that. The next days were the most miraculous of our lives, as our baby was born and our every need attended to by this most sumptuous of hospitals. The pièce de resistance arrived the night before we returned home, as the nurses served us a complimentary meal of filet mignon and champagne, before giving our new baby a trendy T-shirt and arranging for us to meet the ‘hospital photographer’. One sleepless night a few days later, I reflected on how lucky we were to be in America at this crucial moment in our lives. Where else would we have received such 5-star service? The hospital had not only met our expectations, it had exceeded them. The hospital had delighted us. Speaking to a friend back in England my view was confirmed. Jon’s wife had given birth in a West Midlands hospital, behind a flimsy curtain in a room full of caterwauling mothers and hyperactive visitors. No flat-screen TV, no chaise longue for anxious husbands. Nothing more than a clock radio chained to a concrete wall and a husband that was sent home to bed when visiting hours ended. I told Jon that his treatment had been a disgrace. The once-great nation I was proud to call home was falling into disrepair. What kind of animal gives birth without champagne, filet mignon and an unusually lush carpet? Jon was quick to correct me, pointing out that his wife was perfectly satisfied with the medical treatment she received, and that he placed more importance on that than on some pretentious undercooked steak. For good measure, he informed me that the UK health service provides a superior service to its US counterpart when it comes to childbirth, with infant mortality 30% higher and maternal mortality 15% higher in America (CIA World Factbook, UN World Population Prospects Report) . Treatment in the UK was less likely to delight but more likely to satisfy. Our discussion illustrated a frequent dilemma for market researchers and service providers. How do we measure customer needs? If we simply ask customers what their requirements are, they typically reply with top-of-the-mind requirements that any serious player must satisfy in order to survive in the market – in other words, hygiene issues or table stakes. A hospital, for example, must deliver babies and perform operations safely in order to remain ‘in business’. The alternative way of measuring customers’ needs is to calculate derived importance by correlating respondents’ satisfaction scores on a range of issues against their overall satisfaction with the supplier. This provides us with the drivers of satisfaction. Requirements which correlate strongly with satisfaction are differentiating factors, the non-essential requirements that – so long as basic needs are satisfied – allow companies to pick up market share by distinguishing themselves from the competition. In order to establish customer loyalty, companies must perform effectively against both stated and derived importance. The company that performs poorly against needs with strong stated importance will not be in business for long, because its offering is simply unacceptable. The company that performs poorly against needs with strong derived importance may survive for a while, but in a competitive market will become commoditized and see its margins erode over time. Information, Intelligence and WikileaksFriday, December 3rd, 2010
With the Wikileaks website hitting headlines around the world, Matthew Harrison this week ponders the true value of turning information into intelligence Plumbing the murkiest depths of my mind in search of a topic that would put the ‘Insight’ into my Thursday Night, I decided to leaf through a couple of UK and US newspapers for inspiration. The modern news press offers a heady mix of current affairs, insightful analysis and entertainment, making it an invaluable last-chance saloon for the writer whose imagination has run dry. My search for insight did not start promisingly, as I misguidedly began my search by clicking on the website of the Daily Mail, regarded as the crack cocaine of UK journalism for its Class A addictiveness and the ongoing despair of its readers. In an uncharacteristic display of optimism, the aforementioned rag misinformed me that the English Football Association would imminently ‘bring the World Cup Beck home’, before going on to declare – more accurately and no less intriguingly – that a Scottish dietician had been evicted from a jungle-based game show having refused to wrestle with a bear. My strategic decision to head for the website of the Wall Street Journal was rather more successful, as the front page led with the ongoing outrage surrounding Wikileaks, without doubt the world’s most famous information provider at the time of writing. This website’s decision to release thousands of wires of classified information had provoked calls for its founder to be arrested and charged on terrorist offences. Intrigued by this, I clicked through to the Wikileaks website to see what all the fuss was about. As a researcher and analyst of the views of businesses and industry experts, I was left agog at the quality of Wikileaks’ sources and the granularity of its information. Foreign diplomats and heads of state led the way on Wikileaks’ Who did we interview? list, making my pride at having once secured an interview with the regional manager of an industrial pump company seem no less than pitiful. And the (alleged) detail that followed this A-List of international diplomacy was something to behold – interview transcripts detailing Russian money laundering, American espionage plots and Asian nuclear secrets. Quickly, however, my admiration turned to impatience. For every morsel of war-provoking intelligence there were another 100 paragraphs of inconsequential drivel, ranging from the blindingly obvious (Breitling-wearing, supermodel-marrying French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a little on the vain side) to the ridiculous (Prince Andrew once used a swear-word during a lunch in Kyrgyzstan). We at B2B International recognise that obtaining good quality information is only the start of a long intelligence process. What distinguishes The Wall Street Journal from Wikileaks, and B2B International from many of its competitors, is the ability to sift through large amounts of information rapidly and thoroughly, before presenting and interpreting that data in a way that makes that information valuable to our clients. In short, our focus is on delivering intelligence that enables our clients to deliver a strong return on investment by making more informed decisions. As the matrix below shows, this does make us more expensive than Wikileaks. But weigh that up against the benefits – improved decision making across the whole of your business. And, with the exception of this article, a guarantee that we will never regale you with anecdotes about Prince Andrew. Estimated ROI Of Market Intelligence Projects
The Name GameFriday, August 27th, 2010  This week father-in-waiting Matthew Harrison reflects on the imminent addition to his family, and what this tells us about industrial branding. It is a truth universally acknowledged that buying a house and getting divorced are the 2 most stressful experiences in life. Frankly this is a statement I find it difficult to agree with, and not only because my in-laws are coming to stay next week. Looking for and buying a house is one of life’s pleasures, bringing with it the opportunity to tread mud through strangers’ houses and chuckle at their patterned carpets. As for getting divorced, so long as I resist insulting my wife’s family on my company’s blog I am optimistic that this won’t happen. No, by far the most stressful experience of my life has come these past 8 months – the duration so far of my wife’s pregnancy. The sources of my angst are too numerous to mention. Is the baby healthy? How is my wife feeling? Am I capable of looking after another human being when I can’t even look after my household’s Christmas card list? Will I find my way to the hospital without getting lost? What the hell is a BabyBjorn? And how will I know when I start dilating? Even these worries pale into insignificance, however, next to the decision that will affect the success or failure of our future child’s life: what shall we call our future offspring? Of our two current labels, ‘it’ is frankly derogatory and ‘Bump’ would most likely result in playground bullying. These may be adequate descriptions for a child we are yet to meet and who – despite my rapidly expanding wife – remains abstract to us, but a more personal name will be required once the baby enters the big wide world. Naming a baby, it seems to me, is rather like choosing a brand name for an industrial product. A brand is something that is asked for and referred to by name. It is, however, far more than a mere descriptor. A brand name must reflect the product it refers to both in its personality and in its aspirations. It should be individual enough to be memorable, but not so individual as to invite ridicule. A successful brand name is backed up by closely aligned brand values. These values, in turn, should inspire. Everyone working on behalf of a brand lives up (or down) to the expectations set by that brand (what would be the implications of calling a product or indeed a child ‘garbage’, for example?). It is clear that the choice of my baby’s name is of the utmost importance. In-depth market research maximizes the chances of getting a brand name correct, exploring issues such as the target audience’s likely reaction and whether there any other companies with a similar brand name. Having trawled through a number of baby-naming books and websites, my wife and I conducted desk research, Googling potential names and seeing what the world’s leading search engine churned out. ‘Audley’ was crossed off the list when we were reminded of Audley Harrison, the erstwhile Olympic boxer (a glance of my physique would tell you why). ‘Tina Catherine’ is also out of the question when you learn that TC Harrison is a second-hand car-dealer in Leicestershire. And how could we realistically call our child George? The target audience’s reaction was judged scientifically, through a series of informal interviews with friends and family. This research was aimed at drilling down into the darkest recesses of the audience’s imaginations and prejudices. “Sounds like a 13th century poet” guffawed my Dad as we broached the name ‘Theodore’. “Is that an industrial lubricant?’ harrumphed my drunken friend as we debated the name ‘Alexa’ late one Friday evening. Some people name their children after themselves, which strikes me as either egotistical, unimaginative or both. More importantly, a brand that is not clearly distinguished from the competition – like a son who shares his father’s first name – is by definition consigned to a life of anonymity. My father (Martin) only shares an initial with me, but it didn’t stop him opening my post for 18 years. So, where did this research take us and what does this tell us about industrial branding? Well, my wife and I eventually agreed on male and female names that we both liked, resisting the temptation to analyze them too deeply or seek the views of anyone outside our own front room. I also thought of some of the world’s most successful brand names and it struck me that most of these are based on relatively mundane criteria such as the original geographical location of the company, the founders’ name or the initials of companies that have merged into the corporation over time. Most successful brand names have no intrinsic meaning beyond the superficial, and only gain real meaning through their activities and interactions over the years. Building a business-to-business brand, like bringing up a child, is a task that requires continuous investment. The name itself is rather like the wallpaper in a maternity ward – so long as it isn’t offensive, no-one is likely to notice. The final proof of this came when I Googled ‘Matthew Harrison’ and was left agog at the wide range of activities undertaken by my namesakes. A Las Vegas musician, a Rastafarian spokesperson, a Missouri Lutheran Church president and – horrifyingly – director of the film ‘Kicked in the head’ were amongst those conspiring to keep yours truly out of the top 10 pages of the search. I am hoping that, like the best industrial brands, I eventually grow into my name and make it my own. « Previous Entries |
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