This paper deals with the growing interest in the marketing of services to the corporate sector. It takes as an example the marketing of financial services which in the United Kingdom is receiving increasing attention from a wide range of financial institutions such as clearing banks, secondary banks, merchant banks, finance houses, among others. Official policy is to encourage a more competitive outlook on the part of these organisations which has resulted in these institutions adopting a more aggressive marketing stance. The supply of such services to the corporate sector has expanded in recent years, as different types of institution have moved into a market which has traditionally been the preserve of the main clearing banks. The paper describes how market research has helped to analyse the requirements of the corporate sector with examples from studies conducted on behalf of major banks and finance houses, among corporate buyers of asset finance and other financial services. The object of the studies was to provide information to assist these institutions to sell their services more effectively to the corporate sector.
This report shows the image position of industry in the Austrian population by quantitative research representative for people up from 14 years. Research program covers spontaneous associations to the stimulus "industry", advantages and disadvantages of industry and improving the share of industry in the economy, image profile by rating a semantic profile, comparing validity of items for three different size classes of companies (large companies image can be identified with industry image) and the relevance of pollution factors and their link with industry.
In order to keep up with the growing demand for specialised services and to be able to better follow and predict the developments in the marketplace of business-establishments, a group of some leading Dutch banking- and insurance companies in close cooperation with Nipo have developed a strategic research instrument, the so called "BUSINESS MONITOR. The paper falls into 2 parts: "Setting up the Business Monitor and Using the Business Monitor.
Over the past ten to fifteen years, decision-makers have gradually turned to scenario-based approaches. In these, rather than try to foretell the future as an extension of the present, they seek more realistically to envisage possible states of the world and to frame strategies capable of adapting to these different eventualities. Naturally, these scenarios need to be based on suitable hypotheses of change. The market researcher can contribute to the formulation of plausible scenarios. In other words, although he does not claim to predict the future, he can investigate a number of hypotheses of change, help to narrow the field and to explore the different possibilities.
The paper presents the practical difficulties that an industrial researcher faces when undertaking a survey in the Middle Bast. The techniques and the approach are overall the same as in the West, but the task is that much harder. Desk research is useful and absolutely necessary, but the sources of information are more limited and more analysis and investigation is needed to develop data. Any industrial research project has to rely mainly on fieldwork, and fieldwork in the Middle East means personal, face-to-face interviews. Telephone interviewing, as it is known in the West, is of no practical relevance. Telephone interviewing can be of assistance today particularly in identifying incidence of usage and in smoothing the way towards a person-to-person interview. Because of the lack of adequate secondary data, estimating the market size and the market trends can be done only through the creative usage and interaction of desk research, on-the-field collection of secondary data and extensive personal interviews supported by telephone interviews. The process should not be looked upon as separate activities, but rather as supporting each other and leading through creative analysis to conclusions concerning the market size, its structure, its characteristics and its future prospect.
We all know from our experience that amongst companies selling to non-consumer markets there is a wide divergence in the importance assigned to market research, the resources devoted to it and the way in which it is used, It was in order to quantify these differences that Marplan Germany and Marplan UK together undertook a programme of research. Research was carried out by means of telephone interviews with a sample of the largest companies in two sectors.
The paper defines product-concept and the importance of its identification in new-product development. Whether consumer- or industrial-oriented, new-product success relies to an important extent on what the purchaser perceives in it as satisfactory for his or her needs. This specific meaning the purchaser endows the product is called product-concept.
For their external, customer-targeted research, industrial market researchers have access to a varied range of quantitative and qualitative methods adapted to the particular characteristics of the environment under study. Polling is an accurate means of measuring ownership of appliances or equipment; the semi-directive interview can record motivations and perceptions; while the monograph allows us to understand the decision-making process as a multi-actor system
At the end of 1984 Canon, represented in Switzerland by W. Rentsch AG, decided to launch a completely new type of copier: the Canon Laser Copier 9030. This machine has a wide range of new features based on digital principles. Primary research was carried out to discover what volume of sales could be expected, the amount of interest that would be generated by the wide range of applications and which sales, communications and distribution policies were to be selected. The information was passed on to Canon's European agents, and the Canon copier met with an exceptional amount of success when it was introduced.
This study illustrates the use of focus group research in the development of a new product in a high-technology field. Most U.S. high technology firms conduct very little formal market research, and they rarely conduct qualitative market research as part of the new product design process. The market research described in this paper illustrates the use of focus groups to help design a highly complex, technical product: CAD/CAM software.