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A new study by B2B International for Stanley Tools examines the use of certain hand tools within various trades, how tradespeople choose tools and what features they look for.

The Importance of Brand

Quality and robustness are the key requisites for tradesmen when purchasing hand tools but equally, how the tool feels when held is of equal importance – for instance, the weight for hammers, and comfort for knives and screwdrivers. Brand and perceived performance are also important drivers that impact on the purchasing decision, but this is dependent on the value of the hand tools.

When it comes to replacing old favourites, lower value tools such as saws and tape measures are replaced most frequently (every 3-6 months), whereas higher value tools such as hammers and spirit levels are only replaced every 2-3 years. For these items, brand plays a large part in the purchasing decision.

The Strength of Stanley

The Stanley brand is over 160 years old and still has a DNA that reflects its origins. Measuring and hand tools were some of the earliest products made by Stanley and they are an important feature of the company’s portfolio today. Since its formation, the Stanley brand has been synonymous with quality tools (and the ubiquitous Stanley knife), so it is no surprise to find that they are still the preferred choice for knives, tape measures and screwdrivers.

For many years, Stanley’s competitors have concentrated on specialist tools for the trade; e.g. Estwing for hammers and Stabila for spirit levels. However, with Stanley’s recent brand marketing offensive via their Fatmax range, we have seen Stanley closing the gap on tools such as saws, spirit levels and hammers.

B2B International Director Nick Hague was in charge of the research and was impressed with the brand infiltration of Stanley:

“The Stanley brand itself is a super brand – well-known to most people and positioned as a quality product. It certainly still stands for quality tools in the marketplace. Each trade has its specialist tools, yet the research shows that nearly every tradesperson has a Stanley tool in their bag. In fact, only 7 out of 516 tradesmen interviewed didn’t own any hand tools made by Stanley.”

After one and a half centuries in the marketplace, and with younger tradesmen continuing to choose Stanley tools, the brand seems to be going from strength to strength.

from b2bsee * The Market Research Blog

The B2B Blog has been live for around 18 months now. Although many blogs have been around a lot longer, it is the past 2 years that have seen the biggest increase in the number of blogs, as web 2.0 grows at a phenomenal rate. This article from Research World magazine, written by Poornima Vijayan, looks at different types of blogs that are out their.

Mining For A Living
Poornima Vijayan
Market Research World – May 2007-05-22

The inundation of facts, data, figures, opinions and insights that blogs deliver daily are unsystematic and chaotic, yet immensely valuable in the right context. To monitor and capture information from this chaos, we can use a combination of text mining, data mining, linguistic and statistical analysis, and latent semantic indexing techniques. A computer program hunts out blogs and explores the relevant content such as content and social network information, product likes and dislikes, recent purchases, opinions and attitudes which we can structure for more systematic insights.

Blogs give us a source of real-time information, but this means that market research firms need to develop an internal structure that can react at the same speed.

Here are some examples of the most popular blog models:

Advertising: as a general revenue model it’s clearly the most popular. Adsense has made it possible for even the most low-traffic, un-commercial blog to make money, but professional bloggers have taken contextual advertising to new heights with seriously targeted blogs and well integrated ads.

Affiliate Marketing: almost a subset of advertising but when well implemented this is marketing not advertising! A typical affiliate-marketing-based blog will either be a niche product/product groups or specialised audience blog and can generate sales by sending traffic to selected merchants via in-post text links, banners and special offers.

Consultancy: gurus in fields relevant to market research and consultancy can extend their reach and generate leads for their consultancy offerings by blogging on their areas of expertise. Pr, market research and marketing agencies as well as web-based services providers offer business blog consulting.

PR vehicle: Usually compliments existing models. Spreading the name of your company or products on a blog can create a great way for customers, potential customers, other bloggers and the press to interact with your company, its products or services.

Subscription: Market researchers can publish an ‘expert blog’, luring in subscribers by publishing a teaser with more detailed blog posts/reports or sections of the site available by subscription only.

Traffic: Make sure your titles and headlines convey what you want to say, and make it search-engine-friendly. Ways to drive more traffic are to comment on other successful blogs in similar or related areas, or to use incentives to encourage people to participate.

from b2bsee * B2B Blog

Standing still has never been an option. In fact, standing still, in today’s business environment means going backwards.

Here is an essential toolkit for you to stay ahead…

This chapter is excerpted from Harvard Business Essentials: Marketer’s Toolkit.

This chapter assesses both informal and formal methods of market research and asserts that experienced marketers will use both. Decision makers who listen directly to dissatisfied or lapsed customers and pair those conversations with formal data will develop a more visceral idea of what their customers seek, resulting in more dynamic marketing campaigns.

Click here to read the full chapter.

from b2bsee * B2B Blog

This article follows on from Part 1 which was published on Wednesday 7th Feb.

Naturally, it is every researcher’s aim to obtain the greatest accuracy at the lowest cost. Unfortunately there are no firm and fixed rules for doing so. For one product the market size may be handed on a plate in a Business Monitor or by a trade association; in others the figures will have to be dug out, possibly by a special survey. Assuming it is necessary to assess a market size, here are some steps to consider.

Step one: Search all government and trade association figures. Using the Central Statistical Office’s Guide to official statistics (available from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), the search should begin for government publications which contain the market size data. The most obvious starting point is Business Monitor but, depending on the product, it could be another government publication such as Housing & Construction Statistics, Agricultural Statistics, etc.

If it is not immediately apparent that the data are available in published form, it is worthwhile double checking by telephoning one of the government statistical departments.

A search through the Directory of British Associations (published by CBD) will identify any trade associations which could be a repository for sales or production statistics. Cooperation from a trade association, even if it does collect data, cannot be assured. Very often their terms of reference are to maintain confidentiality on all figures for the benefit of members.

Finding a published source of data from a multi client study is like striking gold for the researcher. It is quick, inexpensive and usually accurate. Nevertheless it is worthwhile carrying out a few simple cross checks since government departments (or the firms which supply the data) have been known to make some unintentional errors in their records. The publication Marketsearch from Arlington Press is a comprehensive listing of published market research reports.

The published data which the researcher finds need not necessarily be in a convenient form. However, with a little manipulation it may be possible to link to the subject of interest. There are, for example, no published figures on the market for high quality labels used on bottles of gin and whisky but the sales of spirits are so well documented they could very easily be derived.

If still unsuccessful in assessing the market size, we move on to step two.

Step two: Build up a picture of the supply side of the market, by adding together the sales of the companies who sell within it.

The researcher is likely to need to consult a variety of sources to obtain suppliers’ sales. A starting point is Companies House where for a small search fee for each company the registrar will send a microfiche of the whole history of the report and accounts. Unfortunately The Companies Act does not require small and medium sized companies to state their tunrover. Even for larger companies which have to submit turnover figures, some adjustment will be necessary. The researcher needs to strip out (often with no greater sophistication than simply making intelligent guesses) those sales which are derived from other products.

Other sources which may provide clues as to a company’s sales turnover may be found on web sites in articles in the trade press or in company’s sales literature. The references may be oblique, referring to the number of employees or productive capacity rather than sales. However they provide a position which can be refined down. With all the guesswork which is applied to this method of market size assessment, it should be clear that accuracy levels may well be hovering around the 20 to 30 per cent mark.

AN OPTION which provides a quick and often more accurate means of assessing market size than juggling turnover figures is to find someone (or preferably more than one) with an overview of the market. Insights from these market gurus help sharpen the estimates and add to the researcher’s wider appreciation of the market. Overview interviews can be sought from suppliers themselves; journalists; important distributors and companies selling raw materials or components to the suppliers.

Step three: Build up a picture of the demand side of the market. Assessing the demand of consumers (or distributors) of a product usually requires an interview programme. Buyers of products seldom publish figures which can be used as a guide to their purchases – this needs to be elicited from an interview. In the case of a narrow market sector with just a few large and medium sized customers, the researcher may well attempt a virtual census. Where there are many buyers of varying sizes the researcher may sample most of the large ones and a proportion of the medium and small ones to arrive at a picture. Whether telephone of personal interviewing is used (or even a postal survey) depends on the complexity of the data to be collected as well as its cost.

A problem often arises in surveys of demand when the sample data has to be grossed up. The basis for grossing up needs to be reliable. For example, a researcher may gross up by taking the average consumption per company (derived from the survey) and multiply by the number of companies in the market. And yet there are very few markets where we know how many companies there are. Directories are notoriously unreliable as they include double counting, omissions and the inclusion of irrelevant companies.

Another method of grossing up is to obtain employment statistics for the people employed in the industry sector of interest. These can now be used to calculate market size using the following formula:

Market size = Total purchases by sample firms X Total people employed in sector

Market assessment can take place within existing markets or new industry sectors or new geographical markets. For many companies, the first place to look for more sales is amongst existing customers. Current customers have already made the ultimate gesture of approval and paid money to buy your products. A bit more persuasion and they may buy more. Also, existing customers know and trust the company sufficiently well to do business. So much so, they may give serious consideration to buying a new product or service from the company. However, every company has a product that can travel. New markets wherever they are - new countries or new segments - carry risk. Market research is a must in making all these decisions.

Fro more articles and white papers visit www.b2binternational.com.

from b2bsee * B2B Blog