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Archive for the ‘Paul Hague’ Category« Previous EntriesWhat effect does emotion have on choosing a b2b supplier of goods and services?Wednesday, March 21st, 2012  In this week’s Business Surgery, Paul Hague looks at how we make decisions – and particularly how much of an influence a strong brand plays in the process. At the heart of good marketing is persuasion. We shouldn’t be shy about the fact that we have a product or service that we want people to buy. However, marketing focuses on the customer and their needs whereas selling focuses on the seller and what they want to get rid of. In other words, marketing forces us to understand the world through the customers’ eyes. One of the most difficult things when trying to see the world through our customers’ eyes is “how rational are our customers when they make their decisions?” Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink argues that we subconsciously make our minds up very quickly indeed – in fact in a blink. We might then spend a long time rationalising this decision and believing that it has been arrived at by conscious rather than subconscious thought. The relevance of this to us in business-to-business marketing is that we are inclined to believe that business-to-business customers leave their emotions at home when they come to work and that all their decisions are rational. We know that this is not the case. Research consistently confirms that those companies that are best known to us (in other words they have a strong brand) are most likely to get the business. This is because familiarity is important in the blink test – we feel more comfortable with a supplier that we know even if we have never done business with them before. The answer is therefore to build a brand, not only in terms of awareness but also to engage with the customer and build trust. For those of you who haven’t yet read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, we strongly recommend it. Or watch his 30-minute discussion on the subject on YouTube Questions arising from Gladwell’s work are:
For more information on building a strong brand, click here. The Net Promoter Score is RubbishThursday, September 22nd, 2011 Paul Hague this week advocates a simple, new metric to measure value. In less than 10 years, the NPS or Net Promoter Score has become familiar jargon in business boardrooms. It is a single metric, a golf handicap score, that leaders can easily understand and which they can use to ruthlessly drive their businesses. The Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty and who can deny that these two factors are crucial to the success of any business. It is easy to understand and the fact that it requires a simple calculation gives it a sort of scientific kudos. Let us remind ourselves what the Net Promoter Score is. We ask customers one simple question – “How likely is it that you would recommend COMPANY X to a friend or colleague?” The response is recorded on a scale from 0 to 10 and the percentage of companies giving a score of 6 or less is subtracted from the percentage of companies giving a score of 9 or 10. Those in the middle ground giving scores of 7 or 8are ignored. However, the NPS is not without its deficiencies.
We think that the NPS is a good metric but we also recognise that it is dangerous to drive a company on this number alone. The NPS does not measure the value that people attribute to a brand and this must be one of the most important metrics of all. Towards this end we have developed a measure which is fast gaining ground. It is called the Net Value Score or NVS and it measures the value that people attach to a brand or a supplier. Pat Kenny, Vice President Of Corporate Marketing at PPG Industries, said the following about the NVS:
To arrive at the Net Value Score, one simple question needs to be asked:
Using answers to the question, the following steps result in the computation of the NVS:
Calculating The Net Value Score For more information on the Net Value Score, visit http://www.netvaluescore.com/ Marketing 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 If I think this, what do you think?Thursday, April 7th, 2011  In this week’s Thursday Night Insight Paul Hague reflects on his thoughts on completing the UK census form.  I have been a market researcher all my life. 40 years in fact. I love the job. It fulfils my intellectual curiosity, it indulges my love of travel, and it satisfies my desire for constant change – and yet I find it really difficult to take part in surveys. In the main I am protected from this by the Market Research Society guidelines that recommend most survey designers screen out the likes of me, knowing that my professional knowledge will bias my answers in some small degree. However, last week I got my come-uppance. I returned home to find 32 pages of questions had thudded onto our welcome mat, with an introductory letter that informed me I would be incarcerated if I didn’t comply. Yippee – it is decennial census time. I looked at this daunting instrument of torture and I couldn’t begin to think how your average 85 year old, single gypsy, now separated from a same-sex relationship, would cope. Fortified by three large glasses of sauvignon blanc, I decided to fill it in online. It was so easy I sailed through, congratulating myself and secure in the knowledge that the analysts who look at these things would be able to see that the time I had taken to complete the questionnaire was a world record. That was until I came to question 43, which asked me how many visitors would be in my house on the 27th March. Since I was pretty certain there wouldn’t be any, I looked for the button to say this and move on. However, there was no such button to tick. It seemed I had to have a visitor on the 27th or I was stuck. I wondered whether Alfie, my 11-year-old boxer, would qualify but I couldn’t see any space for pets and animals in the form. I clearly needed a human visitor and I decided that to get out of the impasse I would invent one (I know, I know – I was risking a jail sentence, but by now I didn’t care). We often do have a couple of elderly relatives stay with us so why couldn’t I imagine that they were on one of their stop overs? In went Rosie’s name to start with, and this prompted a question about her date of birth. I had no idea and this was beginning to look ridiculous. I shouldn’t be making this up and, anyway, the more things I invented, the deeper the hole I dug myself into. It was at this stage that my conscience was pricked and my head cleared slightly so I decided to work out what was going wrong. As I tracked back through the questionnaire, it became clear that in my slightly inebriated state I had incorrectly filled in question H5, which I thought had said how many people will be in the house on the 27th and it had, in fact, asked how many visitors would there be. Since I had answered 2 people, it was quite clear that this was the reason the computer-aided questionnaire was routing me to the visitor question. So, what are my insights from all this? The experience of completing the questionnaire was better than the anticipation of doing so – which I was dreading. However, I found myself wondering about the futility of some of the questions. Surely the census is a head count of the people living in households and not much more. If we need to dig deeper on my thoughts and feelings such as the state of my health right now, or how well I can speak English (??), this is the stuff of sample surveys. Over-complication is a crime and we are over-complicating everything, including the design of our questionnaires. Isn’t it a reflection of the politically correct world that we have to necessitate a special questionnaire for Welsh speakers and weird combinations of answers to which people can say they are British/English, simply British, simply English, British/Welsh, simply Welsh and so on. And please guess how many will actually tick the box that says they are Gypsy or Irish Traveller. Minorities must be looked after in our daily life but, in the case of a census, we should not be designing our process around 0.01% of any population. I know that we have been keeping tabs on our population since the Doomsday book, but the census as we know it in the UK began in 1801. I don’t think anyone will shed any tears over the fact that this is our last one and from now on we will rely on sample surveys. My saving grace is that my completed form will be kept confidential for 100 years. So, unless I tell you, you won’t know that I am a surviving partner from a same-sex civil partnership, living in a holiday home, of any other Black/African/Caribbean/Black British extraction, holding an Irish passport, actively looking for work over the last four weeks and whose main language is British Sign Language. Who wants a better mousetrap?Thursday, October 28th, 2010
In this Thursday night insight Paul Hague looks at the phenomenon of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and argues that “product” isn’t everything. Have you read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? It’s a great story, there’s no doubt about it, but the story of how the book became a bestseller is even more incredible. Written in his spare time as a hard-working journalist, Stieg Larsson first called it Men Who Hate Women. Having finished his whopping manuscript and without publishing it, he began his second book. When this was finished he wrote his third. And then he had a heart attack and died. Only after his death were the books published.
The publishing of his books is another incredible story. The rights to the books in the UK, where it began its huge success, were bought by Quercus, a small and unknown backstreet publisher. The owner of Quercus became so desperate to shift copies he gave them away to people in parks and he planted dozens on the back seats of taxis and on tube trains. Today Quercus has moved to luxurious offices in Bloomsbury Square, and its revenues trebled to £15m in the first six months of 2010 on the back of the Larsson phenomenon. So what can we learn from this? It seems to me there are at least five lessons:
My insight today is that we should always take care to put as much emphasis on the other parts of the marketing mix as the product itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that, If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. I am not so sure that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo would have had such a large path beaten to its door without a little bit of marketing help. « Previous Entries |
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