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
• Obtaining qualitative insights for business decision-making
• Obtaining quantitative insights
• Turning the results of research into action

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
• Market analysis, mapping and segmentation
• Competitive intelligence
• Creating customer value
• Pricing for value capture and profit

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:

Interest in developing markets such as China, India, Brazil and Russia has increased rapidly over the past 10 years. This has resulted in market research and intelligence agencies exploring a wider variety of geographies than ever before. This presents challenges throughout the market research process, for field workers, managers and analysts alike.

As is to be expected, different insights arise from one geographical location to the next. A closer look at the critical marketing success factors in the developing and developed worlds provide a good illustration of this…

click here if you would like to read more of Matt’s thoughts, or to see a short video.

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.

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).
Thinking about this later in the day, I was increasingly startled by two facts. First, how is it possible that such important and valuable information could be interspersed with such rubbish? Second, why is the owner of Wikileaks not a multi-millionaire?
Wikileaks faces a problem that is common to our information age – an ability to obtain valuable information, but a reliance on other organizations to extract any commercial or strategic value from it. Everywhere we look (particularly online), information is readily and freely available, and with little effort any of us can find out more about our rivals, customers and suppliers. What is less easy, however, is turning information into intelligence and then into actions.

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