This paper provides a prognosis for the future of internet research based on the attitudes, experiences and opinions of the buyers of research within the FMCG sector. The paper provides an understanding of the dynamics involved in the possible adoption process from conventional to interactive research. Given their work within the marketing research industry â part of the information economy â and involvement in the collection and dissemination of âbitsâ of information rather than physical products, the authors hypothesised that the marketing research industry will be more heavily impacted by this transformation than most. There are two ways of addressing this transformation. The first is from the supply side, measuring the extent to which research agencies are investing and responding to this challenge. However, the supply side was already well covered by papers at this and other conferences. Consequently, the authors felt a more valuable approach would be from the demand side, testing their hypotheses with empirical research to explore what users actually think about the future of research.
The paper relates to the use and value of business-to-consumer online communities in the network economy. It uses empirical research, such as observation and moderated email groups to understand the value of online communities in building and maintaining relationships with online users and customers.
A group of Volksbanks and Raiffeisen banks in Friesland, which cooperate under the name of âFriesland's Bankâ and are situated in the north-west of the Federal Republic of Germany to the north-west of Bremen, have together with the author of this article developed a concept of customer service which covers the above-mentioned banks fields of interests in the target group. The concept is based on statistical analyses of and empirical research into the attending needs of the target group and its environment.
The paper discusses some technical problems of conjoint analysis. A commercial application, concerning consumers' preferences for a specific kind of credit account is described.
The purpose of this paper is to give some guidelines of how one can set suitable levels of service components. It is too much to say that we will present a methodology for this purpose. We provide some indications of what can be done. In the paper we will empirically focus on the employee resource. It is though clear that our way of dealing with the problem has more general applicability. The paper is arranged in the following way. We will continue by discussing some aspects of quality in services. After this we will briefly cover three independent studies, where we point out that a high standard of the personnel does not convey value or utility to consumers in the expected way. This leads to a discussion on how one can assess quality levels, in order to achieve more successful results in operating a service business.
This paper details the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate just how powerful newspaper headlines might be in terms of: 1) communicating signals that allow the reader to identify the title, in the absence of any other, formal, identification cues, and 2) attracting potential readers. The paper reviews the achievements of three national daily newspapers in terms of their ability to speak with a clear, consistent, identifying accent - and discusses how key editorial and journalist personnel might benefit from such findings.
In this paper, we first argue that the word "innovator" may be inappropriate to describe early triers of new grocery products, because such products are often not real innovations. Besides, an innovator is classically defined as the adopter of a new product, and the definition of "adoption" poses problems for such grocery products. Most of the paper is devoted to the description of a series of empirical analyses. These analyses lead to the final conclusion that the observed overlap in early trial across product classes might be misleading. We show that persons who are early triers of new products in multiple product classes do not necessarily do so because of some innovative disposition toward trying new products, that would allow us to characterise them as "generalised innovators". Rather, most (or all) of this overlap in early trial could be due, spuriously, to the overlap in purchase frequency across product classes, and to the relationship, in each class, between early trial and purchase frequency.
Improved knowledge of the characteristics of consumer change agents, opinion leaders and innovators, can provide the fashion marketer with an informed basis for tactical and strategic decision-making. The research project reported in this article focuses upon an empirical determination of the characteristics of innovators and opinion leaders in the fashion diffusion process.
Over the last 18 months, empirical studies have been conducted by Scantest Research Limited using a research technique called Scantest. This technique attempts to predict, from consumer opinions, rank order sales and absolute percentage sales for individual product items within a given range. Most of the research undertaken has related to patterned carpets; it is the purpose of this paper to outline the research technique and to describe how Scantest has been used to predict the performance of individual carpet designs differentiated by pattern and/or colour, and to detail the results achieved so far.
The Marketing Communications Research Unit at Cranfield School of Management is currently conducting a long term empirical study of the Measurement of Advertising Effectiveness. It is sponsored by some 20 major organisations in the U.K., covering consumer goods, service and industrial markets. In the course of this work the role of research in advertising decision making has been examined and some observations on this are presented. The first part of the paper summarises some of the influences of company structure on the nature of the research effort and the resultant impact on advertising activities. In the second part, company activities directed towards establishing the effects of advertising on market performance are reported upon and some general findings presented. The paper is concluded by a brief statement of the authors' research plan which is designed to allow some overall conclusions to be drawn on the nature of research required for various advertising decisions.
An inductive approach is presented in this paper. This approach involves the following stages: The detailed discussion of a study which attempted to identify different market segments to which four separate retail establishments have been catering; the construction of what is termed a segmentation Index; the analysis of universality of the segmentation Index ; and finally the construction of a logical flow model as a guideline for development of a segmentation Index. The largest section of this paper which is the detailed discussion of an empirical study is based on an analysis of the characteristics of typical customers of four retail stores in buying wall-to-wall carpeting. The present article offers a brief discussion of the criteria that can be used for segmentation, the findings of a field study are presented, and finally, an attempt is made to measure the segments on the basis of an index and to focus upon the role of segmentation in the struggle for survival.
In a large Swedish study (some 20.000 interviews on nation-wide probability basis) it has been shown that the entire process is structured by people 'a interest for the subject area. Such an interest is thus the most appropriate basis as well for the classification of the respondents as for the market segmentation, for the media selection, for product-testing, for message evaluation, for integration of the research activities. This paper will present empirical evidence of the statements above.