ISBM at the Penn State Smeal College of Business – Academic Institute supporting B2B Research. Switch to the ISBM-Corporate website.
The voice of the customer is a powerful tool for firms that are equipped to both listen to it and put its insights into action.
New developments in consumer tracking online will require innovative approaches from B2B marketers.
Data wrapping is the practice of giving data and analytics to customers as product features and customer experiences, with the goal of increasing a product’s value proposition. The users of these data wrapping functionalities are the company’s customers – not the employees. And as this is a customer oriented feature being a part of the product offering, the product road map is lead by product owners – not IT. It is an interesting strategy to monetize data – in a way that extends the product value proposition.
The CMO Survey is a tool to collect and disseminate the opinions of top marketers on a variety of topics. This Special Edition, published in June, focuses on understanding the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on marketing in companies, including marketing spending, performance, jobs, and expectations for the next year. The added value of the CMO Survey is the longitudinal nature of the research, which allows tracking of opinions, evaluations, and expectations over time. Especially facing a pandemic, the ‘breaks’ in the trends are notable.
Effective marketing decision making often requires both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Many marketing analyses across the 4Ps can be supported by quantitative analyses, for example market size estimation, determining economic value to customers, demand generation and customer acquisition with the help of customer lifetime value analysis, channel economics, product cannibalization, market share analysis, and pricing. In this technical Harvard Business School note, Sunil Gupta summarizes how these core metrics are calculated and applied.
The AIM Institute studied 50 new product development teams from 20 B2B companies that had conducted B2B customer interviews. Five in six teams reported that these customer interviews impacted their product design. This means that if you don’t interview B2B customers to formulate new product objectives, your customer insight is probably lacking. Most new product development teams would develop substantially different products if they truly understood their B2B customer needs. In the report ‘Guessing at B2B Customer Needs’, the AIMS Institute discussed the method of interviewing customers.
In the age of COVID-19, should companies still engage in market research? Should companies – perhaps better put, how can companies do market research? Could the current crisis even benefit companies that want to field the voice of the customer? Gerry Katz – Vice Chairman of Applied Marketing Science – is an expert of the topic of VOC (Voice of the Customer). He weighs in on how the COVID-19 crisis affects market research.
ISBM continues the Marketing in Uncertain Times series with a one on one interview between Lynn Yanyo, ISBM Executive Director and Dan Adams, The AIM Institute. Dan discusses the 10 advantages of Virtual VOC and shares his white paper on Virtual VOC.
The objectives of this chapter are to provide an understanding of the methods of qualitative research as they apply to understanding business problems. The chapter defines what qualitative research is, outlines when and why qualitative methods are most appropriate, briefly describes the different types of qualitative research methods, presents the general research process for qualitative research, reviews advice on what constitutes rigor in qualitative research and then closes with a review of the state of the field for published qualitative research.
This chapter presents elementary and advanced methods relevant for conducting applied case study research within business and other (inter)organizational contexts. The chapter advocates adopting particular perspectives including the necessity of being there—going into real-life contexts where individual thinking, intra-organizational exchanges, and inter-organizational exchanges are occurring. The objectives of applied case study research are to describe and understand what is happening, as well as to build and test predictive models that accurately forecasts decisions and actions relevant to specific contexts. The chapter presents theory and use for six applied case-study-research methods.
© 2024 ISBM – Institute for the Study of Business Markets
484 Business Building
University Park, PA 16802
Phone: 814-863-2782
Fax: 814-863-0413
Email: ISBM@psu.edu
© 2020 ISBM – Institute for the Study of Business Markets