Best Practice for Small Business. Marketing ideas for small business.

Ethnographic research has become something of a buzz in the market research world. It has been around for ever, used by anthropologists who observe their tribes and work out what is going on.

The video camera has made this tool much easier for us to use in market research and today’s article from the Financial Times shows how it was used by Unilever to test dental products.

The mind boggles at having a camera watch you doing your ablutions, but it shows what is possible. Although this is a consumer example, the principle can be adapted for b2b research. A video camera could watch people use a product in the office or factory. It could watch people buying products in merchants and distributors. It could observe buyers in negotiation. None of these ethnographic situations would be easy to set up, but all are potentially possible. Welcome to an interesting new tool for our kit bag.

‘Big Brother’ family pioneer research

By Carlos Grande, Marketing Correspondent
May 29 2007

A Sussex family have lived with round-the-clock cameras in their home as market researchers put techniques popularised by Big Brother, the reality television series, to commercial use.

Alex Blue, 30, and Anthony Hemsley, 34, of Angmering, and their two children had web cameras in their living room and kitchen for three months.

Footage was stored in a small computer server in the house, and retrieved daily over the internet by a team from Brainjuicer, an online research group listed on the Aim stock market. Researchers could watch events from the house live and telephone to make specific requests.

The couple, who were paid about £500 a month for the project, were permitted to switch off the cameras if they wanted or at the request of someone else entering the home.

But the domestic focus - researchers asked to see how the couple brushed their teeth or prepared a meal - was worlds away from the tabloid-esque Big Brother series that returns to Channel 4 this week.

The technique is part of the school of ethnographic research, which uses close observation of small groups to discover how people behave and interact.

Compared to surveys or focus groups, ethnographical research is expensive to conduct and difficult to expand practically. Sceptics also claim that the researcher’s presence changes people’s behaviour.

Ms Blue, a former finance analyst turned full-time mother to Florence, three, and Arthur, 10 months, said that after about a month, the couple tended to forget the cameras. “It didn’t really intrude on our day or change our behaviour, though maybe it made us a bit more pro-active about tidying up.”

Brainjuicer, which is partly owned by Unilever Ventures, the venture capital arm of the consumer goods group, said the technique could be used to test new products. A Unilever dental product was given to the family during the project.

from b2bsee * B2B Blog

Undertaking customer research on loyalty, satisfaction and service can make a big difference to your business. You’ll need to focus your efforts on finding out as much as you can about existing and potential customers. If you can work out how they make their buying decisions, you can adapt your sales methods and techniques to fit your customers’ needs.

For business customers, you’ll want to know how big their businesses are, what sectors they’re in, and who makes the decision to buy your product or service.

If you’re targeting individual consumers, it may be useful to know such things as their gender, age, occupation, income, lifestyle, attitudes or social class.

For your existing customers, try to find out:
• what they think about your products or services
• why they need your product or service - this may be different from what you believe
• why they buy from you and not your competitors
• what they think of your prices
• what they expect from you, eg reliable delivery
• how they rate your customer service
• how they think you could develop or refine your products or services

For your potential customers, try to find out:
• who your potential customers are and what groups they fall into
• how many potential customers there are
• how much of your kind of product or service they already buy from your competitors
• the criteria on which they make buying decisions
• what it would take to get them to buy from you
• what developments they expect in your product or service
• when and where they prefer to buy

Visit www.b2binternational.com/work.html for information on our customer loyalty and customer satisfaction research programme or contact one of the team at www.b2binternational.com/contact.html.

from b2bsee * B2B Blog

From today, we shall be publishing the podcast version of our highly successful ebook “A Practical Guide To Market Research” on our podcast site www.themarketresearchpodcast.com. Each Monday a new chapter will be published, avaiable to download for free. This week sees the publishing of the first chapter written by B2B International founder, Paul Hague.

Throughout the publishing of the ebook on The Market Research Podcast, the B2B Blog will be publishing different content on Mondays.

Today’s chapter covers:

• The role of market research in helping business decisions through the systematic and objective collection of data.

• The Data Protection Act that protects enforces data collection and analysis procedures to ensure that people’s wishes for confidentiality and anonymity are upheld.

For those of you who do not already have it (where have you been!?), you can download the ebook version of “A Practical Guide To Market Research” in PDF format by clicking here.

This is Paul’s first book not to be published traditionally in hard copy and will appeal to you if you have an interest in market research, you have a market research project to complete and need help with how to go about it, you are studying for a business degree and market research is part of your course or if you are taking the Market Research Society/City & Guilds Certificate in Market & Social Research. Whatever the case, we know that the knowledge shared within this book will help you succeed.

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This morning’s blog is interesting because it is a harbinger of things to come. We refer to an article in the Financial Times of Tuesday this week in which it talks of online research taking over other methods of data collection for Unilever. Since Unilever virtually invented market research in a commercial sense, we should take note of this.

In the US, 80% of Unilever’s research is now carried out online and the UK and Japan are likely to follow quickly in suit. There is an obvious reason for this. Online research is quicker and cheaper than the phone or face to face interviews. It is the reason for the stellar growth of companies such as YouGov, set up only 7 years ago and now worth £133 million on AIM.

Last week YouGov reported on four surveys in the national press and they were all broad consumer subjects - family breakdowns (Daily Mail), DIY shopping (Daily Express), web surfing (The Guardian/The Sun) and Gordon Brown’s suitability as prime minister (Sunday Times).

The question we business to business researchers must ask ourselves is “can it happen to us?” The problem here is getting the appropriate samples. YouGov has a panel of 150,000 respondents in the UK and they are all consumers. Of course, many consumers are like you and me – they have jobs – and so they could also answer a question in the capacity of their employment. However, that is not going to help a business to business company that wants to look at aircraft deicing fluids because we can be virtually certain that no one (unless we are very lucky) on the panel will be occupied in a job at an airport buying deicing fluids.

At the present, it seems that business to business market researchers will confine their research to customer surveys, using the customer lists (and potential customer lists) that have been built up within the company. Or they will use the panels to carry out surveys of SMEs where the large consumer panels can supply sufficient numbers of proprietors and managers in small businesses. However, what we do know is that most ideas that change the world begin as small dots on the radar screen and one day they can loom large. This online research dot is one that merits a constant watch and report. Enjoy the read and we would be interested in your opinions on this interesting subject.

Unilever to cash in on benefits of web research
By Carlos Grande,Marketing Correspondent Finanical Times April 17 2007

Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch food and personal products group, plans to increase the use of the internet as a market research tool, following the success of its web re-search in the US.
The percentage of Unilever’s US research conducted online has more than doubled to 80 per cent in five years. This is part of a long-term policy by the company to exploit the speed and low cost of the web to research customers’ behaviour.

While the US is its most advanced market, Unilever envisages similar trends in countries where internet access is widely available, such as the UK and Japan. The shift to internet pro-jects by Unilever, which spends an estimated €400m (£272.2m) a year on research, reflects the web’s accelerating impact on the global market research industry. Internet research advocates believe it produces results more quickly and cheaply than phone or face-to-face interviews and focus groups.

Chet Henderson, vice-president of Unilever Insight, the group’s research division, said the catalyst for putting projects online in any country was the point at which half the population had internet access -a figure the UK achieved in 2003. Mr Henderson said: “As soon as we get to that, we can get the benefits of the speed of internet research.”

Mr Henderson said that according to Unilever’s internal data testing, internet responses also tended to be more honest than those gained by traditional methods. “In some countries, people are far more honest on the internet,” he said.

The move to web research by big consumer groups underlines the business opportunity for internet-only research companies trying to grab business from established research networks.
Market research was worth about $16bn (£8bn) in the world’s five biggest territories in 2005, including $7.7bn in the US and $2.4bn in the UK.

Web researchers typically recruit a big panel of res-pondents via the internet and ask them to complete rapid response online questionnaires.

Webcams and online chatrooms are sometimes used to create virtual focus groups.

In Unilever’s case, it believes the web could be 10-20 per cent cheaper than traditional methods. Senior Unilever brand executives think that greater use of technology has gone hand in hand with a broader change in research approaches. Mr Henderson said: “Where you lose is in not being able to have a conversation. People type in a lot less than they say and online you miss the non-verbal way people signal their reactions.”

Nevertheless, Unilever believes it can exploit the web to conduct increasingly sophisticated research.

Gerardo Rozanksi, global brand vice-president of Rexona - the deodorant brand known as Sure in the UK - said: “We are shifting the focus into more strategic work. So we ask people less often, ‘What do you think about this specific product?’ and more about their lives and opinions in generic terms to give us the under-lying insights to come up with solutions.”

from b2bsee * B2B Blog

Whilst there is an increasing awareness in the corporate world of the need to manage global risk and security, the fact that limited budgets are allocated to security consultancy & advice means that interest in counter terrorism is very much event driven

Hazard Management Solutions Ltd (HMS) are specialists in advising commercial and government clients about the threat of terrorism and the risk management of that threat. Their clients include UK and foreign governments as well as corporate companies in the insurance, media, oil and pharmaceutical sectors. With increasing threats from terrorism becoming more prevalent in the last five years and in the foreseeable future, security has certainly risen up the corporate agenda. HMS commissioned B2B International to research the corporate market to find out what the opportunity was for counter terrorism consultancy in the corporate market and how they should enter the market.

Nick Hague, Director at B2B International and co-author of the report, feels that companies are now very aware of the threat of risks of all kinds. “Business is taking risk management seriously and addressing it with risk registers and risk management programmes. We certainly found that the terrorist threat is moving up the list of risk threats to join IT, fraud, and reputation. However, research shows that corporate businesses are not, as yet, spending lots of money or allocating annual budgets for security advice.”

The market research showed that corporate companies see risk as coming from a wide and diverse range of groups or specific people ranging from religious extremists, animal activists, Provisional IRA, Al Qaeda and loners through to the disenfranchised in society i.e. the young, the poor and the unemployed.

Risk management in the corporate market appears to be very event-driven – reactive rather than proactive. Risk does vary considerably over time, from company to company and according to their geography and industry sector. Corporate organisations face threats in a variety of scenarios from threats to their sites (buildings, offices, factories), their people (staff, customers, third parties), their IT infrastructure, goods and people in transit/logistics, and suppliers in the supply chain.

The research showed that respondents felt there are more pressures than ever before to mitigate risks; especially in high profile companies. Security is becoming a priority now and even a Board issue. However, whilst all companies interviewed believe that mitigating risk is vital to the running of their business, they believe they have dealt with the situation by taking on a security advisor.

Andy Cooper, business director at HMS, says they are a number of factors contributing to companies requiring solutions to the problems of security and risk. “Saturation of traditional markets is taking markets to more risky places, globalization has changed the structure and pace of modern life, there is more religious extremism and fanaticism than ever before. Many of the threats such as terrorism, organized crime and information security are asymmetric and networked, making them difficult to manage. There is also greater appreciation of the interdependence between a company’s risk portfolio and the way it does business as certain types of behaviour can enhance or undermine an organisation’s license to operate. New forms of accountability such as corporate governance and corporate social responsibility put added pressure on companies. Experienced and specialist firms such as HMS can manage and minimize the risk.”

An obstacle to the burgeoning of corporate top-level security firms may be the level of suspicion surrounding suppliers in the security arena. Many respondents expressed little faith in the security knowledge or expertise of security firms. The market appears to be very reputation-led with a high proportion of respondents saying that personal recommendation was the only way to choose and that trust was vital for a good working relationship.

The market research report concludes that the corporate security market must take its lead from business drivers rather than specific threats and security departments must expand their work far beyond the traditional security portfolio to include issues such as business continuity, reputation, risk management and corporate responsibility. The research also reinforced the fact that security firms who are delivering commercial security have to major on business, management and communications experience as much as actual security experience.

The market for anti-terrorist services amongst corporates at the moment is small but growing. The majority of businesses seem interested in ad hoc assignments costing a few thousand pounds, to advise them and work out a strategy, yet they would pay much more if in the middle of a crisis, hence being an event-driven market.

Methodology:
B2B International carried out interviews and online focus groups with Global Security Directors for multi-national companies in the power, transport, telecommunication, finance, hotel, tourism and petro-chemical industries.

About HMS - www.hazmansol.com
Hazard Management Solutions Ltd (HMS) is a leading player advising commercial and government clients about the terrorist threat, and the risk management of that threat. Its clients include government agencies, insurance companies, media, oil and the pharmaceutical industries.

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