Last night I attended an interesting presentation organised by the Business Intelligence Group, jointly given by Debbie Senior from Harris Interactive UK and Llinos Jonathan from Invensys Controls. The business is a global provider of control gizmos to the heating, appliance, refrigeration and automotive industries. The presentation was based on their last customer survey with business customers around the world and focused on measuring the levels and drivers of customer loyalty. Continue reading
What ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ could mean for marketing practice
In a previous post I’ve outlined why I found Mark Earls new co-authored book interesting but frustrating in relation to what I was looking for. Since then I’ve come across a great blog post by Mark in which he starts to answer the questions that the book left hanging in the air Continue reading
Consequences for small businesses of Martin Baillie’s radical views on the future of market research
In a recent article Martin Baillie suggested that we need to move from ad hoc research to responsive insight. What does this mean? He believes that ‘The problem is that in a connected world, marketing should mean always-on collaboration with audiences, working with consumer reactions and making ourselves more and more relevant to them.
However, he says, few clients are structured to deal with continuous, iterative, responsive communication and few agencies have structured themselves to deliver this either (because the clients aren’t structured that way yet).’
The way forward
He believes that the way forward is to: Continue reading
I’ll have what she’s having by Mark Earls – a good book, but not the one I was hoping for
I bought this book, co-authored by Mark Earls, to see if it provides practical, marketing related answers to the questions that Mark posed in ‘Herd’. By and large it does not; so if this is your interest I’d suggest waiting for the next one. Continue reading
Does transformational thinking make sense for small businesses?
I recently came across some musings on market research from the vice president of marketing strategy and insights for Coca-Cola. His main points were that too much money is spent on “rear view research”; it makes up to 80% of research budgets. Understanding what happened in the past helps understand mistakes, but he believes that we need a change of mindset. “It’s not about following the change as quickly as possible, it’s about helping companies to shape the change. Large companies have a responsibility to shape the change, not just respond to change.”
Research departments must therefore Continue reading