Improving or refining current products is not good enough to sustain or improve competitive advantage. Products, markets and categories are changing fast and consumers' (buying) behaviour is very difficult to predict. However, to make real progress we all know that re-defining a market place, or inventing something totally new will be very profitable. Although not all of these new products are successful, they are the best road to future success. This paper describes the route taken within Masterfoods to get in closer 'touch' with consumers and meet their unanswered needs.
The process of corporate innovation is often left to outside consultants and internal/external teams specializing in the invention process. Market researchers are all too often neglected in this process, even though the newly emerging tools of researchers can accelerate innovation. What may be needed is a researcher-friendly system with five properties: rapid and user friendly (days and weeks); consumer-based (to ensure ongoing inputs from the end user); knowledge-based (using data, not guesswork); reality-based (using observation to identify actual behaviors leading to these new products); and modularity (to allow flexible sequencing of specific steps in response to new learning). This paper demonstrates the integration of current tools into a flexible innovation system and deals with the creation of specific types of products (sandwich, car features, respectively), responding to the increasing use of the car as a place where food is eaten and beverages are drunk. This approach is 'boundary crossing' as we go beyond the current boundaries of cars as vehicles for transportation, and look at cars as venues for food consumption.
This paper seeks to answer a major question: how effective is sponsorship? This paper argues the case for sponsorship and search for ways in which effectiveness can be evaluated. The paper particularly looks at the way a brand can be built through a life-long association to major sporting events, and how children can begin to accept the brand, even though it may not be directly relevant to them. The paper then looks at the attitude of major global brand sponsors to The World Cup, and assesses the perceived effectiveness of the association with the event on their brand through pre and post awareness research.
This paper provides a comprehensive framework for a new communication process model where company and consumer perspectives are considered as co-equivalent parts of a relationship communication system. It is based on the notion that in 21st century market realities, business needs a more dynamic model to deal with relationship communication processes that are based on integrated efforts to build value and create benefit for all parties. Underlying is the assumption that value is captured most efficiently in the form of increased connectedness between the various parties. This process is characterised by the effective integration of customer feedback that enables the company to move forward in the relationship process. It utilizes a new, process-based classification of communications; planned communication, contact and connectedness. The managerial significance of the model is demonstrated through three distinctive case studies.
The traditional 'rules' of marketing are undergoing serious re-examination as companies seek new ways to build strong brands in the post mass-media era. There is an urgent need to answer the core questions of which contacts to use, and how to allocate brand's marketing investments beyond mass media and across the wide variety of contact choices. The Market ContactAudit© tool was developed to help answering those questions. A Procter & Gamble application of the MCA© to a concrete business problem illustrates how the tool is operated to improve marketing effectiveness and efficiency.
Possible uses of technical web service standards in customer relationship management (CRM) and market research (MR) are described. A single CRM web portal for a particular type of customer can interoperate with various relevant services in order to increase the service accessibility. MR facilities can be integrated into a CRM web portal to study the customers' behaviours and preferences. Web service standards enhance the interoperability of web-based business services. Formal ontologies as the basis of common semantics of different web services are also necessary but still very immature in CRM and MR industries. Despite various efforts in developing common electronic business standards such as ebXML, both CRM and MR ontologies should be developed to achieve the goals of integrated web-based services.
This paper describes the development and validation of a trendsetter segmentation model which provides the measurement of willingness to innovate and the potential for interpersonal influence on basis of four validation studies possible. The new instrument enables the identification of so-called 'trendsetters'. Trendsetters are people who sense innovations in the fields of technology, culture and politics in an early stage. The paper will show first applications including the new scale in online market research. It should especially enable fast moving consumer good researchers to anticipate consumer activities in dynamic markets instead of merely reacting to results measured in the past.
In this paper the genesis of category management and the research techniques that have been applied against this area are considered. We generally find a disconnect between the application of findings from traditional research to category management solutions. The reason for this lack of cohesion stems from the misapplication of current technologies and, often, an overly simplistic view of the mapping of consumer attitudes and opinions to category management solutions.Virtual reality shopping techniques are discussed as a time and cost efficient method of determining whether a category management solution produces the end goal - more sales for the manufacturer and more sales for the retailer.
This paper describes not only an example of how successfully a major retailer (Sainsbury's is the second largest grocery retailer in the United Kingdom) and a global supplier can work together but also highlights an innovative and unique research project. The project is innovative because this was an example of real collaboration between a supplier and retailer conducting joint research, rather than a supplier and a third party agency. It can be considered unique as it was achieved through continuous joint effort by both the retailer and supplier throughout the life of the project. This project was also unique as it enabled actual purchasing data and attitudinal data to be combined in order to provide the strongest possible foundations for business decision making. Importantly, the project results had practical and real applications, specifically in developing Health and Beauty care strategy.
At present only a handful of studies compare online and traditional qualitative techniques. Strategic Marketing Corporation (SMC) and Itracks International, Inc. (Itracks) conducted an original case study to compare face-to-face focus groups with both asynchronous (bulletin board) and synchronous (chat style) online groups. These groups, comprised of both patients and physicians, discussed the impact of consumer-targeted medical and health information on the physician-patient relationship. The findings from this case study match SMC's anecdotal experiences with face-to-face and online qualitative research and Itracks customer feedback about online studies, as well as the findings from the few other existing comparative studies.
This paper provides a case study illustrating how brand equity research contributes to AT&T's global Brand Asset Management Group's charter of promoting, protecting and profiting from the AT&T brand around the globe. The authors share Insights from work in modeling and measuring brand equity for communications services across multiple geographies, describing how these findings support the Brand Asset Management function within AT&T at a corporate level, but also at a country-specific market level.