In this session, David Smith of DVL Smith and BV Pradeep of Unilever will build on the How to demonstrate the value of customer insight project that ESOMAR conducted with top insight industry leaders. They will provide a selection of best practice strategies for ensuring the value of your customer insights are recognized by and make an impact with, key stakeholders. They will provide a blueprint for being high-performance customer professional in the new insight era.
The Talent Contest: ESOMAR Research Effectiveness Award Finalist.
Based on a non-deterministic model â which implies prolonged processes, incorporates multiple unconventional actors and values progressive strategy building through non-linear trajectories â this paper describes transverse approaches and formats of relation and operation for installing locally managed consensual processes. The modelâs central goals are to generate consensual diagnostics, provide continual research-based feedback as a basis for decision-making, define positioning and support strategic planning. This stimulus and guidance of local actors in their strategic decisions requires an interactive and incremental logic deployed through successive approximations.
Based on a non-deterministic model â which implies prolonged processes, incorporates multiple unconventional actors and values progressive strategy building through non-linear trajectories â this paper describes transverse approaches and formats of relation and operation for installing locally managed consensual processes. The modelâs central goals are to generate consensual diagnostics, provide continual research-based feedback as a basis for decision-making, define positioning and support strategic planning. This stimulus and guidance of local actors in their strategic decisions requires an interactive and incremental logic deployed through successive approximations.
If competitive intelligence professionals are to add value to organisational imperatives intelligence must become a central component of users decision-making processes. Competitive intelligence must make a material difference to the agendas of policymakers. Competitive intelligence and often the very managers whose job it is to lead the intelligence initiative are not perceived as credible by the decisionmakers. At times intelligence with which executives disagree is ignored and in many instances the competitive intelligence team will concentrate on delivering what it assumes to be important rather than focus on topics which are of real concern to their customers. The outcome or more accurately lack of outcome is generally regarded as a failure of intelligence. This paper addresses some of the cultural and political hurdles that must be overcome and the steps competitive intelligence practitioners can take in order to ensure that intelligence becomes an indispensable management resource fully integrated into the processes of strategic and operational decision-making.
The paper looks at the importance of a strategic approach to understanding markets, and the constant relevance of youth culture as an indicator of the long term development and impact of trends, not just for themselves now, but for their coming adulthood.
Due to the accelerating pace in which technological developments occur nowadays, technology is becoming an increasingly important strategic aspect. Therefore an increase in impact of technological issues on competitive relations can be observed. It makes the incorporation of technology in corporate strategy and the marketing function essential. In strategic business literature, this has not received enough thorough attention up to now. Most managerial approaches to technology take the concept itself as a starting point. This is incorrect from a marketing and strategical point of view. Marketing and strategy start their analyses from the customer and the environment respectively. It is the purpose of this article to gain greater insight with regard to the link between technology, strategic management and marketing. We commence with an overview linking these elements. The familiar categorization of strategic management into corporate, business and operational level is used for this purpose. Furthermore, an integrated instrument of analysis for management is formulated. The authors propose a management approach to the firm's resource base and competitive position, which uses a market-based classification of technology in addition to the traditional typology of technology. This theoretical framework makes the translation of developments of technology push and market pull into potential distinctive competences, which form the firm's basis of sustainable competitive advantage.
Philanthropy is deeply rooted in the American corporate culture? corporate support for the arts is a relatively new phenomenon. The charitable aspects of corporate contributions are fundamentally a reflection of corporate citizenship and corporate responsibility; hence they have little relationship to the company's business. Unlike most recipients of corporate largess, the arts present many opportunities to combine good deeds with good public relations. The success of partnerships between business and the arts is dependent on the creativity, good will, and imagination of each partner. When one comes to negotiations with little understanding of the other, the results will not be satisfactory to either. When there is a meeting of the minds, the results can far outweigh the investment of time, effort and money. The collaboration of business and the arts provide the potential for extraordinary communications for each partner. Its possibilities are only now being explored.
Managing the advertising function for established brands requires an understanding of the nature of the advertising-sales relationship. Historically, both experimental and non-experimental approaches have been used to investigate this relationship, but the impressive amount of literature in this area seems to have identified only a number of broad generalisations. In part, this is due to the inadequacies of the different methodologies and data sources that have been used, which make difficult a comparison of the reported studies for this purpose of establishing guidelines for strategic advertising management. Continuous panel-based experimental research seems to offer greater potential for providing further insights into the nature of the advertising-sales relationship.
The paper analyses the implications of the strategic organisational dynamics of companies that are research users, as a means of proposing new patterns of action for Market Research Agencies. The methodology used was case studies on the strategy and structure of large multinational industrial corporations and Market Research Agencies operating in Brazil, considering the perspective of Latin America as a whole. The principal conclusion of the study is that one of the major constraints to broaden the role of Market Research Agencies is the inadequacy of their patterns of action in front of the emerging strategic organisational dynamics of large corporations-potential market research users.
One of the key aspects of the transformation of companies in the last ten years is the marked evolution of management and of its conceptions of the company. It is perhaps in the social sphere that the evolution is the most pronounced: The necessity of being competitive is universally acknowledged, as is its corollary, the mobilisation of human resources.