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Archive for the ‘Oliver Truman’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »Different Strokes for Different FolksFriday, January 29th, 2010 
In her first Thursday Night Insight of 2010, Caroline Harrison takes the opportunity to go back to basics. I’m sure – at least I hope – he won’t mind my telling you this, but I had something of a hand in my colleague Oliver Truman’s last Thursday Night Insight. Whilst knowing that Oliver had “volunteered” to write (I guess some might say “been coerced into writing”!) an article for the B2B International blog, I was also aware, with just a couple of days to go, that other commitments meant he hadn’t yet got around to it. So, when I happened upon an article in the marketing press about the possible rebranding of Newcastle United’s beloved football ground, St. James’ Park, and knowing Oliver to be something of a sports aficionado, I forwarded him a link to the said article, wondering if it might inspire him. Inspire him it did, and some two days later, Oliver treated us to his latest Thursday Night Insight, which I read with interest. But, while Oliver did use the article I had sent him as the basis for his ‘Insight’, what struck me the most was the specific content of his piece. His blog talked in a broad sense about many of the lucrative tie-ins between a company’s brand and the world of sport – be it shirt sponsorship, providing half-time refreshments or prizes, ‘pure’ advertising at the stadia…and, of course, buying the naming rights to the venues themselves. While I could not disagree with any of the points Oliver raised, these were not the issues that had first jumped into my mind when I read about the possible selling of the naming rights to St James’ Park. I immediately focused on, if you like, the more ‘emotional’ side of things – the likely reaction of the fans to any proposed rebranding of their stadium and the potential risks or rewards for any company brave enough/rich enough/stupid enough/inventive enough to take on such an opportunity. In a nutshell, Oliver and I, when given the same basic trigger, had very different thoughts and approaches to the issue. And so, with this in mind, the message of my Thursday Night Insight today is really very simple. Nevertheless, it is absolutely critical. We can never forget that people are all different. Their various upbringings, culture, language, values, education, interests, priorities, desires and much, much more all combine to affect how they think and how they will react to certain situations and stimuli. For example, as we all know only too well, the product or service you provide is never going to meet the exact needs of everybody out there. That is why segmentation of a target audience is so crucial to deciding which markets you can serve successfully and profitably. Equally, if you show a room full of prospective customers your latest product for launch, I guarantee they will all have differing views on it. You may think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread – but so what? That doesn’t necessarily mean any or many other people will agree! Even with the customers you already serve – you can’t assume everything’s always hunkydory with them, nor that they will stay loyal for life. Their needs may change, their expectations will likely shift. That’s one of the things that makes your job and mine so difficult. But that’s also why we turn to market research. While we can never presume to know what all people are thinking all of the time, the great thing is that we are usually able to ask at least some of them how they are feeling. It’s not that difficult to grasp that people can be unpredictable. Fortunately, nor is it that difficult to use market research to make things more certain. Incidentally – for anyone who is even remotely interested – as of November 2009 until the end of the current season, Newcastle’s stadium is temporarily known as Sportsdirect.com @ St James’ Park Stadium. Personally, I think that’s a bit odd – but that doesn’t mean everyone will agree with me, of course…! Not Howay’ To Do ItFriday, October 30th, 2009
Oliver Truman this week takes a brief look into the topic of sports sponsorship. As is de rigueur in the UK, hardly a weekend goes by when at least some of my time isn’t occupied by watching football (or “soccer”, if you’re that way inclined). After all, it’s Britain’s main pastime and is firmly ensconced as part of the national consciousness. Colleagues, friends and rivals up and down the land talk of the beautiful game as often as they do the weather. And as if to prove the pervasiveness of football, several e-mails have just landed in my inbox informing me of updates of the various online fantasy football games I take part in. (For the record, I should point out that I was the resounding winner of the B2B “Supercup” last season – A fantasy football mini-league that several of us here participate in – Despite Nick’s protestations that he should have won by virtue of scoring the most goals…). Marketers have long understood the lucrative tie-ins that can be realised by associating their company’s brand with sport. Over the years certain household names have grown to become synonymous with the folklore of football in Britain. Bovril and Holland’s Pies may be evocative of a simpler time – when footballs were made of cast iron and players managed to “run off” broken limbs – but they were early examples of the big business that sports sponsorship has undoubtedly become. Shirt sponsorship has been part of the game since the late 70s, when Liverpool became the first team to have a company’s name emblazoned onto their jerseys. Recent deals, worth £20m a season between Liverpool and Standard Chartered Bank and Manchester United and AON demonstrate that the football sponsorship bubble shows no sign of abating. (As a related aside, judging by the image below, I reckon you can guess why the 1986-1988 Wimbledon shirt holds particular fondness for me, even though I don’t support them!). 
Only this week came the news that Newcastle United Football Club were looking to sell off the naming rights to St. James’ Park, the team’s stadium. That Newcastle should be looking for new commercial opportunities should come as no surprise – The team has recently been relegated from English football’s top-flight, their current shirt deal with government-owned Northern Rock is due to come to an end, and embattled owner Mike Ashley has failed in his attempts to offload the club. Selling naming rights to sports stadiums is hardly a recent development, however. As early as 1953, the Annheuser-Busch company proposed re-naming Sportman’s Park, the home of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team to the “Budweiser Stadium”. The largest stadium naming rights deals in the US are now extremely big business. In 2006 CitiGroup announced that they would be buying naming rights for the New York Mets’ new ground, in a deal worth $400m over 20 years. A world away from pies and hot beef extract. Like many marketing ideas, what started as a US-initiative has since arrived on this side of the Atlantic. Bolton’s Reebok Stadium, Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and Huddersfield’s Galpharm (formerly McAlpine) Stadium are just a few famous examples from the world of English football. So why, then, do many Newcastle fans regard the proposed selling of stadium rights as being far from “canny”? The distinction to be drawn, it seems, is that in almost all of the successful cases of stadium sponsorship, the naming has generally been of new grounds, where no established appellation exists. This is clearly not the case with St. James’ Park – home to the team since 1892. The effects of corporate sponsorship of stadiums can be made more palatable to fans, however, if the company has a strong local connection. York City’s Kit Kat Crescent (after the chocolate bar first produced by Rowntree’s in York) or Leicester City’s Walkers Stadium are two good examples of this. In the case of Newcastle United, one might think that there can think of no better “local” sponsor of the stadium than Newcastle Brown Ale – A drink that was first produced in a brewery adjacent to the ground in the 1920s. Except for the fact that production is soon to move to North Yorkshire. On balance, therefore, it should come as no surprise that one bookmaker is offering odds of 4/7 on St. James’ Park being called just that at the start of next season. I suppose, therefore, the lesson to be learned is this: In the world of corporate sponsorship, branding and marketing it’s almost always the finer details that matter. The damage of unintended consequences that can result from an injudicious marketing campaign can wreak havoc on a firm’s standing. Under such circumstances, research is very much your friend! Here’s to the temporary solution…Friday, August 7th, 2009
For his two cents’ worth in this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Oliver Truman dwells on the importance of being resourceful – a quality that’s of particular importance to any budding market researcher. I sit here writing this week’s submission to TNI in the conservatory of my home surrounded by drying clothes. And by “surrounded”, I mean utterly deluged by all manner of damp, but freshly laundered, apparel. As is typical of the British summer, climatic conditions here in Manchester unfortunately won’t permit the use of the washing line in the garden to aerate an entire holiday’s worth of clothes al fresco. So the ad-hoc solution has had to make do. At the time, the idea to use the conservatory seemed like a good one, but soon hit a critical snag: Aside from a dinner table and four chairs (and having only recently moved in), there was nothing yet on which to hang my shirts, shorts and smalls. Distressed, and in a sense of mild domestic panic, an idea mercifully hit me: “Why not…”, I thought, “…tear up and tie together some of the shopping bags lying in the cupboard to create a crudely-fashioned homemade clothes line”. Once stretched from one end of the room to the other, with ends bound to the window handles on diagonally opposite sides, a functional, environmentally-friendly answer to my quandary had been found – Even if the end result looked like some kind of bizarre, underwear-based decorative bunting. It was, however, a moment of brilliant and unique genius – quite possibly on a par with the invention of the computer or understanding the nature of the atom (two things Manchester was somewhat better at). OK, so perhaps I’m in danger of exaggerating the significance of this, but the point remains that solving life’s small, but vexing problems with simple solutions can often raise a disproportionate sense of smug satisfaction in us all. And this feeling of achievement has been shared by countless others at the “There, I Fixed It” blog, which celebrates and showcases some of the world’s best (and worst) botch jobs. Some of the more ingenious examples featured on the site include a garden sprinkler made from a multiply-perforated plastic drinks bottle, the bath-over-an-open fire hot tub and the fourteen-pronged garden rake sausage skewer. Many of my personal favourites involve the creative use of duct-tape. All of which (somehow) brings me back to the lot of the market researcher… Although our main role is to furnish organisations with business information and strategy that adds value to our clients’ activities, the path to reaching that goal is always littered with many small, and often practical, problems that need to be resolved. Whether it’s ensuring that product samples are properly dispatched to respondents, attempting to get a rebellious projector to work at a presentation, or co-ordinating reams of interview data from all corners of the world, each can be challenging in their own little way. Research, it can seem, is as much an exercise in academic rigour as simply being resourceful and “hands on”. I can’t help but close proceedings this week by featuring another favourite ad-hoc solution that Matt Powell came up with several months ago. The brief he tackled was this: “Create a long stick out of commonly occurring office objects that will allow Oliver to reach the cord for the window blind, which is otherwise out of reach by virtue of the position of his desk”. The sum of his efforts (featured below) is a marvel of ingenuity:  The Cloud With The Silver LiningFriday, April 3rd, 2009
In his latest Thursday Night Insight, Oliver Truman looks in detail at a creeping trend in our personal and business lives that is starting to have a profound impact on the way we interact with technology. Every now and then an innovation comes along that makes you sit up and take notice. Just such an event happened to me (and, I’m sure, thousands of other geekily-minded folks like myself) last week, with the unveiling of OnLive – A new video gaming service in the US, which promises to change the shape of the computer games industry forever. I should perhaps declare at this point that, contrary to appearances, I am not tremendously into computer gaming – I freely admit that the last (and indeed first) games console I owned was a venerable Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s. The reason OnLive caught my eye lies not in the graphics nor the gameplay on offer, rather my interest was captured because it offers one of the most transparent and obvious applications yet of the phenomenon of “cloud computing”. With OnLive, computer games are no longer installed or run on the end user’s machine – this is all left to a powerful web server housed in a central location. Instead, the gamer effectively watches a live, high-definition video stream of what is running on this server using their Internet connection. This means even a low-end computer (or television set, with a small adaptor) can run the most demanding of games. No installation or downloading time is wasted, and customers can dip in and out of a whole array of different titles on a subscription-based model. This essential concept – that application software or user data is no longer stored locally, but remotely somewhere in the “cloud” that is the Internet – is what lies behind cloud computing. And its effect stretches far beyond the world of computer games Moreover, many CRM systems are now web-based, allowing sales teams instant access to client and prospect data, wherever they may be at the time. In a business context, data becomes pervasive and instantly available, in any place and at any time. And away from the sober world of business, cloud computing also allows for services such as Spotify to develop. Spotify is an online music streaming service that allows free, instantaneous access to virtually any song or album from the last 30 years. The storage burden is no longer upon the user’s machine, but is instead taken on by a huge server farm out there in the ether. So how is all this affecting the world of market research?Perhaps the most obvious projection of “the cloud” on the research industry has been in the development of online research techniques. Online surveys, which are increasingly becoming the methodology-de-jour in both consumer and business-to-business markets, are now fairly well established, and it would seem strange to highlight this as a new development. What is different is the melding of the online world with the offline. This is most clearly seen in the latest generation of mixed-methodology data collection software, which allows the simultaneous collection of data online, via the telephone or even face-to-face. This offline element has traditionally been managed by internal systems, run on market research agencies’ own servers that exist quite separately from the world outside. Confirmit Horizons, of which B2B International is the launch customer, is perhaps the most significant of this new breed of data collection software. All the data collection, sample management and data storage is handled by secure, dedicated hardware housed in purpose-built data centres. All this allows for the seamless and instantaneous integration of data collected from anywhere – whether it is online, face-to-face or via the telephone. Results and analysis can then be fed back to our clients live as the data is rolling in. In the realm of qualitative research, just as social networking websites are arguably electronic projections of our personal lives into the online domain, so online focus groups and online communities now complement and enhance the face-to-face tools we once relied on. In short, the cloud is important because it will affect all of our daily lives in so many ways in the future – Not just to play PacMan against your mates (or whatever it is the kids are playing nowadays). Driven To DistractionFriday, December 19th, 2008
In his latest Thursday Night Insight post, B2B Research Executive Oliver Truman reflects on his own experiences with the automotive industry and concludes that it isn’t just financial assistance that’s needed – it’s also a fundamental reappraisal of what customers actually want and need from their cars. An awful lot of ink has been spilt in recent weeks and months over the state of the automotive industry, not only in the US, but globally in these times of worldwide economic decline. And since it’s an issue that is an important bellwether of the wider state of the world’s industrial activity, I see no harm in adding to the chorus this week. The subject of car sales is one that has been brought into much sharper focus for me in recent weeks as I passed my driving test in mid-October. Keen to exercise my newly acquired skills as a qualified driver, I thought I’d have a look at the used car options available to me at a nearby car supermarket. Ever-the-researcher, I thought I’d head to the car forecourt armed with all the knowledge I’d need to make an informed decision about what to buy. As I pored over magazines, pricing books and websites teeming with data and opinion from self-styled experts in the automotive field, I began to think about what my priorities were for this major purchase. With all the thrift and common-sense that might otherwise be expected of a stoic Yorkshireman (I’m from the Western side of the Pennines), it appeared that straightforward factors like running costs, reliability and resale value were going to be my key considerations. Even so, I was also aware of other “intangibles” that couldn’t be measured and that these were, in view of a vast swathe of similar-ish options, just as likely to guide my ultimate decision. What does the car look like? Is it built to last? Will my choice result in endless of laughter and cheap jibes from friends and colleagues? These were just a few of the pressing questions I’d asked myself. Almost without even being aware of it, I was performing my very own trade-off exercise in my head. As it had become apparent that I couldn’t have everything I wanted and that perfection was unattainable (again!) I would have to whittle down my options to those that would best deliver on the criteria I’d set and the priority given to each. This continued until I was left with a handful of cars in my “consideration set”, whereupon I’d planned to set about trying to get the best deal. This seemingly trivial process is one that’s familiar to most of us, but at the same time is devilishly difficult to pin down, measure or replicate. And to make matters worse, when this computation is put in the context of business-to-business decision-making, the nature of the process becomes even muddier, owing to the complex web of considerations that companies routinely face. Thankfully, in the world of B2B research, we’ve a series of tools at our disposal to cope with this such as SIMALTO or conjoint analysis (which you can read more about here). Unfortunately, the civilian (non-researcher) me would have to rely on ingenuity alone. Even so, I now felt able to stride into the salesman’s lair with all the confidence of a man whose brain had been swelled with the accumulated knowledge of the world’s automotive press. This, I was certain, would result in me leaving the dealership with a crackerjack of a deal, leaving all parties involved satisfied. How wrong I was. Aside from initially learning that virtually none of the cars I’d seen advertised online were available for sale in the real world, my will was to be slowly and gracelessly crushed by a salesman with all the tact of a drill sergeant. When it had become apparent that the car I was after (or one at least vaguely matching its description) wasn’t on offer, he resorted to the tactic of browbeating me into buying a larger, older and most expensive car that met virtually none of my needs. This, coupled with several statements that I knew to be complete, verifiable untruths about the car’s specification and performance, resulted in my leaving empty-handed and frustrated. Was this just an unfortunate, isolated incident? In my case, it seemed not; I went to another couple of dealerships on the same day and experienced largely the same, slimy, smug and, I suspect, underlyingly duplicitous treatment as before. The upshot: I didn’t buy a car and still haven’t. And although my latest contribution to Thursday Night Insight feels as if it’s descended into a bitter, thinly-veiled rant against used car salesmen, there’s a wider point about the automotive industry underlying all this. You see, even though the current crisis in the car industry may well be caused in the most part by declining consumer confidence and spending power, there appears to be a real issue here in terms of adequately meeting needs. Chrysler’s and General Motors’ woes in the US are not just a product of people tightening their belts, it is also partly a reflection of their inability, or even aloof unwillingness to offer the market what it truly wants. In fact, GM recently released an advert apologising for their products, acknowledging that they’d "disappointed" and "betrayed" customers. Coming back to the case of my (non-)buying experience, my modest needs for a small, economical and reliable car also went utterly unfulfilled, even though they should have been easily attainable. And since it is this smaller car segment that will grow most in the next few years, this poses a very serious question for those in the car (or any other) industry that appears perpetually predisposed to under-delivering (and it’s not a pleasant one): If you cannot meet even modest customer needs, what hope is there of survival in these troubled times? « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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