In adult social groups, there are few trend-setters and many followers. In some situations, it is essential to isolate the trend-setters' opinions and attitudes in order to predict the trends and behaviours of the masses. The trend-setters phenomenon is all the more true among children because groups play a key role in the development of their personalities, and children are very conformist and tend to model their behaviour and actions on those they recognise and accept as the group leader. In certain cases, it is necessary to speak to children who are capable of anticipating the interest of an operation and, once converted, then serve as the proponents of the âcauseâ among their peers. These children are the creative trend-setter. This paper proposes a method to help researchers understand the psychological underpinnings of these childrenâs personalities in order to more easily identify and recruit them.
Information Technologies can be considered as a single market, constituted by many interdependent market areas. It is a multidisciplinary market, more and more complex to understand from a technological point of view but also from a marketing point of view. This market is dominated by the offer and where you are better off among the leaders. The managing of changes is essential if one wants to build a better marketing strategy. This very dynamic market place offers a challenge for market research companies. Indeed, traditional market research is not really adapted in this context for reflection about marketing strategy. New offers must be made, allowing a better understanding of the market (i.e. of the supply-side) and a better understanding of the consumer (individuals or companies). That is what we call "monitoring of the market" and "monitoring of the consumer".
For quite some time now, marketing researchers found themselves at a distance from the TRUE decision making level of marketing contexts. Now, as the marketing environment becomes increasingly complex, it is evident that the role of the marketing research agency must adapt in order to establish and maintain a strong presence. This paper treats the subject of the changing role of research agencies by providing an example of an extreme situation where marketing research agencies were not only isolated, but were actually excluded from the decision making level of the marketing context: The Fashion Market. By discussing this extreme case, we seek to demonstrate that marketing researchers should not hesitate to change an established structure or method if this will enable them to adapt to a market and aid the decision makers in developing marketing strategy. The focus of the paper is the discussion of the creation and implementation of an Annual Trend Survey in the fashion market, as well as the insight, into the attitudes of women in the area that this survey provided in the years 1993 to 1995.