Digital has fundamentally changed the way we understand and serve customers. The developments are accelerating fuelling great consumer centricity and customer experience. It's time to participate or perish.
The research industry is undergoing a rapid transformation with an abundance of new data streams as well as new technology to integrate these data sources with traditional panel and survey data. This should leave us well placed for the future but truth is that our capabilities and techniques need to develop even more rapidly to keep up and stay relevant. What do researchers need to do to adapt to this new environment?
We are living in rapidly changing times and banks are not immune from the need to change. As new banking approaches emerge, market researchers are called upon to assess likely consumer reactions to these changes. This paper argues that, because of innate human resistance to change, research should focus not just on assessing the extent to which changes will be accepted, but rather on how to aid consumers to come to terms with changes that are inevitable. It then proposes a conceptual framework within which to conduct and analyze research findings into adaptation to change, providing examples of the practical value of this conceptual framework. Finally, it points to some methods that can be used to align consumer paradigms and banking paradigms when these do not coincide; and concludes that, paradoxically, often the best guides to adaptation to the future can be discovered by studying the past.
In focusing on the need for a new mental model, we cite two issues of central concern to transnational business firms. These two issues are 1) recognizing the influence of national culture on the normal life of customers and the ways culture affects marketing plans and product development for that market and 2) recognizing the impact of global influences such as worldwide television culture on the environment of customers in foreign markets and how global TV culture influences values, lifestyles and the very perceptions of the firm's customers, and the firm's reputation in foreign markets. These customer-oriented issues have been neglected in the business literature or inadequately realized because of the absence of a conceptual model for dealing with the rapid, almost unconscious, influence of information on the perceptions of the customers
This paper describes the exploratory part of a larger study on management of innovation, focussing especially on the interface between marketing and R&D (Research and Development). Marketing and R&D produce two critical flows of knowledge that have to be integrated in the interface. In this study we focus on one specific industry, namely the innovative pharmaceutical industry because of its high marketing and R&D intensity. Our conceptual model is based on the literature and on exploratory case studies of four pharmaceutical companies where variables are identified that seem important. With respect to the marketing - R&D interface, the qualitative data from in-depth interviews, company library research and financial analysis of the four companies support three main arguments. First, organizational structures change very often which implies that organizational flexibility (adaptability of the company) may be an important aspect in explaining innovative performance. Secondly, there is a number of ways to organize the interface, and there is no one best way. Third, instead of studying the Marketing - R&D interface, it is better to study the Marketing - Development and Marketing - Research interface separately. In the future, a survey will be used to generalize these and other findings, and to examine the relationship between different aspects of integration between Marketing and R&D and innovation success more in-depth. An experiment with a computer simulation game will be used to study the interface between marketing and R&D at the individual level.
Market modelling techniques are at the leading edge of market research technology, an increasingly important part of the technical armoury of marketing companies around the world. 'They cover a wide range of applications: from pricing research and concept development to brand image engineering and market testing. My aim here is not to to read out a highly technical treatise on the theory and mechanics of market modelling. I can do better than that - with a straightforward view of the fundamental principles underlying some key modelling techniques - and a demonstration of how they have been adapted for use in the Middle East. Supported by rapid developments in computer technology, market micro-modelling breaks away from traditional market research methodologies. Whilst they were largely confined to the descriptive (or at best diagnostic) micro-modelling allows market researchers to predict what will really happen out there, in the real world. The real world... this is the key point. Maybe it's the only point. It has been said before but I will say it again. Market places are not tidy, well-ordered vacuums where research theories can be put smoothly into practice. If they were, our lives would be simpler, but less interesting. Markets are essentially untidy places, subject to subtle undercurrents, cultural influences - and that irritating phenomenon known as the competition.
This paper describes the evolution of a new chemical technology into both consumer and business-to-business product applications, by using graphic probe stimuli to help identify unmet needs. In a recent study, these "concept" probe stimuli, originally developed for U.S. markets, were subjected to several different European "cultural evaluations" to identify unmet needs, to refine the positionings, and to provide further guidance for the development of a larger study which would assess the marketing feasibility in those European cultures. The major difficulty for the researcher was identifying end-user needs in each culture, and then learning how to present the potential benefits of this new, unknown technology, which had numerous potential applications for both consumer and business-to-business products. The technology resulted in so many different potential applications, the sponsor, Eastman Kodak Company (Eastman Chemicals Company), needed further market-driven information to provide guidance for final research and development efforts. Because of the global and categorically-pervasive nature of the technology, which could literally result in new products and product improvements in many different categories, it was decided to initiate a global exploratory and evaluation of the potential. Eastman Kodak Company was not interested in marketing products directly, rather in licensing the technology to other companies who had established marketing capabilities in appropriate categories. Therefore, a rapid global and broad category approach was seen as advisable. A concern of both the researcher and the sponsor was how to properly evaluate the market potential for a new technology that had had no previous exposure, and for which potential end-users (consumers or business-to-business) had no perceptions of applications or benefits - no understanding of the new technology or of its potential for fulfilling their unmet needs. It was decided that first, we must identify unmet needs in the initial wave of research by using in-depth, graphic projective techniques.
Over recent years, our company has been engaged in several readership studies both by personal face to face and by telephone methods amongst businessmen in general and amongst specific target groups of businessmen. In the following, I should like to describe the principles we applied when we tried to adapt the standard readership questions in use in the United Kingdom for the telephone interviews; present some results by comparing as far as is possible readership levels of the same publications and amongst similar universes obtained by either method, and draw some general conclusions. I should like to make clear that the following is in no way a report on a series of studies of any planned experimental character but rather a pooling of our experiences related to the subject.
This marketing tool has already been in use for a year in France, and its international growth is to begin in November 1980 with the setting up of a barometer of child-oriented themes in Great Britain; extension to the leading industrialised countries is under discussion. While allowance will be made for specific national characters, these various barometers will be organised so as to allow international clients to consolidate the results from several countries. Conceived with a view to marketing, the barometer 8-14 is intended both for manufacturers - for the development or adaptation of products and services - and for advertising and promotion agencies; it therefore covers both the short term and the medium term.