|
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category« Previous EntriesB2B International sponsors USA polocrosse teamThursday, May 19th, 2011  B2B International is delighted to be the official shirt sponsor of the USA national polocrosse team, which is competing in the World Cup in July in England. The tournament will be held at the Onley Grounds Equestrian Centre in Rubgy, Warwickshire, UK. The global research and market intelligence company has an active interest in the USA, with an expanding research team in its New York office, and the recent posting of a 58% year-on-year growth in 2010. Other offices include three in Europe and two in Asia. While polocrosse might seem an unusual sport for Americans to play, it resembles the American Indian game of lacrosse. It is a racquet sport played on horseback and is a fast paced game that combines the speed of polo and the strategy of chess with the ball handling skills of lacrosse. B2B International Marketing Manager, Caroline Harrison, explains, “Sport has always been important to B2B International, with a number of keen marathon runners, squash players and cyclists among our research teams. This sponsorship opportunity enables us to demonstrate our interest in sport and to feature B2B International beyond the business-to-business arena.” Find out more about the event here: USA Polocrosse 2011 The Restaurant CriticsThursday, January 27th, 2011  In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Peter Mullarkey tells us how going out for an impromptu meal leads to a smorgasbord of options, washed down with plenty of discussion. On a recent trip to Liverpool to visit an old school friend. My Girlfriend and I stayed in a hotel close to the shopping and leisure development, Liverpool One. After an afternoon walking round the dock, a trip to the Tate Modern and viewing the Liver birds, we walked up to Liverpool One and decided to go for a meal at one of the many chain restaurants on offer, but just as in business, here is where the problem occurs. 3 people stood outside 20 different restaurants all with differing tastes. How do you make the choice? Companies face these decisions when trying to development new products. They will (hopefully) have lots of ideas, but only with the budget to move forward by prioritizing one of them. One of the ways to test if the product has any hope of being a success is by using the Stage-gate model which was developed by Robert G. Cooper in 1986 and although it has been modified by different users it has the same process:  Our “Discovery” was the large amount of choice, all conveniently located within a 200 meter radius. But after a quick discussion we had reduced the list by some influencing factors: • Is it a restaurant rather than a fast food outlet  Once we all had common knowledge of these, we reduced the list to 5 restaurants: • Las Iguanas – A Latin American Restaurant. At which point we start to walk between the eateries, perusing the menus and looking through the large glass windows at the atmosphere inside. This scoping stage also included looking at the menu of each of the restaurants and the most interesting was for Red Hot Buffet “a meet all” solution for the evening, a Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Italian and Japanese buffet, but it seems that the rest of Liverpool also had the same idea as there was a rather large queue. This put a cross against our initial choice. We all pitched in with our thoughts, experiences and built a case for each of the remaining restaurants, trying to quickly weigh up all the pros and cons. At this point my hunger increases and I think they all look good, Rob is still unsure and Louise has made up her mind, but is being diplomatic. But the decision was made when we focused on value and more importantly, at which venue could we use a discount voucher? After a quick search, we found a “buy one get one free” deal at the Italian restaurant Zizzi. With a few taps on a Smartphone, the choice was made for us, and we would get the chance to fight over the 4th free meal! It was a relief to have reached a conclusion. We strolled in and asked for a table for three, then we were hit with a spanner in the works, there would be a 40 minutes wait before we could be served. Another group huddle ensued, but after all the choice and indecision so far, we said it was fine and that we would find a bar for an aperitif. This test emphasised that the correct decision had been made on the face of it, but just as in business, the proof is in the pudding… Not all decisions can be made with a few clicks on an app for a Smartphone and just as with the Smart-Gate Model; some new products will need market research to help them to evaluate the bigger picture. If you would like more information on how B2B International can help you with this, please click here The Dos and Don’ts of B2B MarketingThursday, January 20th, 2011  Always on the lookout for interesting articles about b2b marketing, we recently came across CeeKue.com, which contains some interesting blog posts. And a great piece to start off the year is, of course, one that considers how B2B marketing will develop and change over the course of 2011, and how these changes should impact the way we work. So, without further ado, here are the 10 Dos and Don’ts for 2011 B2B Marketing: 1. Do make yourself visible on Social Media and don’t spend all your money on advertising. 2. Do talk about benefits for your customers and don’t talk about your business or your products. 3. Do let your customers decide how to communicate with you and don’t think you are able to educate your customers. 4. Do start building lists and don’t rely on your existing CRM database. 5. Do measure your existence on Social Media and don’t measure website visitors, pageviews and time spend on your website. 6. Do produce as much content as possible and don’t think your work is done once your website is finished. 7. Do make your content sharable and don’t be afraid if people use your content. 8. Do use standard solutions and platforms and don’t stick to your propriate solutions that none of your customers are using. 9. Do listen to your customer and don’t be the only one that is talking. 10. Do forget (most of) what you have done in the past and don’t be afraid to change. And don’t be afraid if these changes do cost you a lot of money. It is mainly your mindset and the way you think about your customers, market, products and your business that needs to change. Increasing Customer Satisfaction Leads To Increased ProfitMonday, January 10th, 2011  No one would question the importance of keeping customers satisfied. In the latest white paper from B2B International, they show how to address the subject of customer satisfaction and loyalty and investigate what customer satisfaction means as well as actioning a four-point plan for making improvements from customer satisfaction data. The white paper concludes with a fascinating insight into how increasing customer satisfaction can actually lead to increased profitability. With this in mind, shouldn’t a constant improvement in customer satisfaction be in the mission statement of every company this coming year? To read more of this white paper ‘visit A Practical Guide To Improving Customer Satisfaction’ . If you would like more information on how B2B International can help you with your customer satisfaction studies then visit The Customer Loyalty section on the website Things our mothers taught us.Thursday, January 6th, 2011
Paul Hague confesses to being a slow learner when it comes to taking sage advice from this mother Our mothers are great sources of wisdom and we can all remember bits of advice they peppered us with inour formative years. I think I was half asleep or deaf throughout most of my childhood but I do remember my mother telling me that in her view each generation is separated from the next by a decade. Like most of the wisdom she shared with me, it went over my head or I ignored it at the time. However, the lessons and things that our mothers teach us do filter back over the years. I was reminded of my mother’s 10 year generation theory as I was reading a recent copy of The International Journal Of Market Research. This erudite but often unreadable publication occasionally has a paper that appeals to me. In this latest edition, a title drew my attention – Do Growing Brands Win Younger Consumers? The thesis of the paper was that young consumers are more likely to be attracted to new brands and different brands than older people. As it got into some heavy mathematics it lost me but the concept of age affecting buying decisions got me thinking. We business to business market researchers don’t often ask respondents their age. We ask about the size of their companies, we certainly record what business they are in, but we tend to ignore their personal demographics. It is as if we are embarrassed to ask, or maybe we think that in the business to business world these things don’t matter. But what if age is a key driver of decisions? It makes sense to me that younger people are less likely to be committed to brands (or a supplier) than older people. It makes sense to me that younger people are likely to be more open and adventurous and possibly less loyal than their older colleagues. Of course, we’re not going to get too many decision-makers responsible for huge sums of money who are aged less than 25 years. However there is a strong possibility that there will be a reasonable number that are aged between 25 and 30 and maybe these people think differently to those aged between 30 and 40 years,who almost certainly will have a different view to those aged 50 or more. Shouldn’t we know the age profile of our customers, if only because those who are long served will soon be leaving the world of work and joining the grey haired backpackers on easyJet and Ryanair. We need to make sure that we have a young age profile in our distribution of customers if our brands are to have any future. Of course, it may be that the thesis is not entirely correct that younger consumers are less loyal and easier to attract. But they are still likely to have different needs. It is easy to anticipate that a younger buyer might lack the confidence of an older one and require more communication or more relationship building. It is certainly likely that the younger buyer will be attracted by different messages and visuals on websites, mobile phones, iPads, in brochures and in advertising campaigns. Thanks Mum, who got me thinking. I will add this question to my questionnaires from now on. « Previous Entries |
|
