BIG Conference Surpasses itself

The compliments have been flying through the ether, speakers kept to time and the sun was out to the delight of the golf and tennis players. Particular thanks go to the committee and the sponsors who helped to make it one of the 'best ever' conferences.

Our two keynote speakers, Lucian Camp (left), from cchm:ping, and Cliff Bashforth (right), from Color Me Beautiful, did not disappoint and we welcomed 19 first-time delegates this year in Chepstow. It was very gratifying to see five overseas delegates and two overseas speakers too. Read more about the conference sessions and social scene below.

Two first-time delegates won awards for their papers at conference: Adam Blunt (left) from NOP World Business won his award for the best paper overall, and Anna McAvoy (right) from the BPRI Group won an award for the best presentation at Conference. These awards will be presented at the BIG Summer Party in London on 13 July.

A fantastic total of £598 was collected for the MRBA at the Conference Dinner raffle on Thursday and our thanks go to all the delegates who were kind enough to provide prizes.

Conference Reports - 2005

The theme of the 2005 conference: 'The New B2B: A Widening Horizon' arose out of a strong feeling at last year's conference that there was a new confidence in the B2B research community: a feeling that B2B research really is special and different, in marked contrast to the perception of previous years that the differentiation between Business and Consumer research was becoming of less importance.

Our keynote speaker, advertising guru Lucian Camp, chairman of cchm.ping, opened the conference with an excellent talk entitled 'Building the B2B brand - a new agenda for research'. Lucian showed us how advertising had progressed over the last 20 years from Consumer Goods through Consumer Services and now to B2B Services (the 1988 Cadbury's Flake Ad looked particularly dated by today's standards!). His proposition was that agencies and researchers have a lot to learn about advertising B2B Services - and therein lies the growth and opportunity:

• B2B brands are about 'multi-ness' whereas B2C brands are about 'one-ness'.
• marcomms is much less important than for B2C brands
• 9/10 of the battle is won internally not externally, 50% of research spend should be on internal communications
• the success of the brand stands or falls on the support of top level management
• there is not enough knowledge about the competition

If we can address these issues, we in the research industry should see much profitable work come to us.

Overall, Lucian summed up the current state of B2B branding extremely well and gave us a clear view of where things are and how we need to move forward. He ended with a delightful American ad produced by EDS: 'herding cats', it was based on the fact that what they do is like herding cats and showed wonderful scenes of cowboys (or should that be 'catboys') literally herding cats.

Lucian was followed by Andy Lack, director of Jigsaw Research who presented the paper 'Advertising Funded Programmes: Can they Communicate to Small Businesses?' which he had co-authored with James Flack, also of Jigsaw Research.

Andy focussed on the specific area of Advertiser Funded Programmes (AFP) and shared his learning (both good and not so good) from a particular case study of a series of programmes funded by Investors in People. AFP comprised only £20m of the total £1.5b UK advertising spend in 2003 and was expected to have exploded onto the scene by now. It hasn't, basically because of the very strong regulatory authority in the UK. The IiP programme was not a spectacular success in terms of building awareness of IiP, though it was well received. Significant lessons have been learnt (mainly about scheduling), and IiP are making a new series for early 2006. Andy's paper demonstrated admirably the difficulty of reaching the SME audience through advertising.

Cathy Bickham, Insight Manager for BT's Major Business Division, presented her paper 'Customer Market Insight in the Digital Economy' in which she shared her experiences of BT's largest ever, global B2B programme, which was launched in September 2004. The paper itself is well worth a read, and demonstrates that BT has taken on board the extreme 'multi-faceted-ness' of managing such a significant B2B campaign. Cathy went through the work BT has done to ensure that the campaign works for employees, top management, customers, the investment community, and demonstrated admirably that Lucien's fears are being addressed, at least in the UK's largest companies.
A lively question session ensued in which the effect of call-centres on B2B was generally lambasted - though it is admitted that some are good.

In summary, an excellent session to launch the conference. A session that really got to grips with the New B2B and the advertising challenges by faced by B2B brands.

The second session of the morning centred around whether the distinction between B2B and B2C were diminishing, and indeed if learnings from B2C were widening or narrowing opportunities for B2B researchers.

The first paper challenged us by suggesting that much of our traditional consultative offering is being lost by a shift in B2B towards approaches more common to B2C. But it was followed by two excellent case studies demonstrating on the one hand how B2B research must now integrate with B2C, but on the other how unique and complex the challenges of B2B can be.

First up was Farrokh Suntook, Executive Vice President of HI Europe, who concentrated on how B2B has learnt from B2C in focussing much more on the customers themselves, and less on overall markets. So there is greater emphasis on brands and segmentation, and less on market size and trends. But his challenge was that, in so doing, we do far less broad consultancy on business issues in B2B than in the past, and now far more "factory style" technical survey work. This was a somewhat controversial argument but Farrokh used a large number of project examples to make his point.

Sarah Stannard, Communications Director of the Chip & Pin PMO and Shiona Davies of Continental Research, then gave an excellent case study on the complexities of introducing Chip and PIN technology, and the broad overall technical and educational programme required to address card issuers, retailers, technology providers and, of course, consumers. It clearly demonstrated the range of issues unique to B2B, but also how vital it was to integrate both B2B and B2C research. They suggested that the launch was in many ways better than expected and we wait with bated breath to see whether or not the introduction of the Chip and Pin technology meets the objective of reducing card fraud.

Dr Martin Ruckensteiner of ACCELATE, based in Vienna, then gave another example of NPD in the mobile phone arena demonstrating even more graphically (with some very detailed charts!) the complexities of dealing with business mobile phone users, their managers, the purchasers, IT staff and integrators in order to launch a new business phone. Martin presented in a lively and involving manner and gave us food for thought in a number of areas - in particular sample design.

Overall the session proved that B2B research is alive and kicking and conducting interesting and challenging research, and importantly that it is clearly learning to incorporate B2C techniques. Indeed in many product fields B2B and B2C are segments of the same market.

There was much discussion on whether or not we had moved away from acting in a consultative manner towards becoming more information providers. The question remains unanswered. However, it was felt by some delegates that we are sector specialists and both do and should provide deep insights. This was a challenging session with well-presented, invigorating papers.

In his paper entitled 'Are Off-Shore Providers changing B2B Research' Mike Taylor from Evalueserve began by asking the question - why are UK companies looking to offshore providers to provide them with marketing services? The key reasons mentioned were:

• shortfalls in the UK workforce
• cost pressures
• a desire for flexibility

The main areas of the world being used at the moment for this type of work are India, China and Eastern Europe.

The umbrella term for this activity is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and it was estimated by Taylor that the market could be worth $17 billion by 2010.

Within the BPO market, the area that is most relevant to market research is known as Knowledge Process Outsourcing. This includes market research interviewing which is charged at £50 a day, all the way up to Intellectual Property work, which is charged at up to £300 - still way below what would be charged in Western economies.

In India, there are ten times as many graduates as in the UK, providing a huge reserve of suitable talent for business-to-business interviewing. Business-to-business interviewing is far easier than consumer interviewing when calling from India, as the frames of reference are far more homogenous for interviewer and interviewee.

Overall, Mike concluded that outsourcing of business to business interviewing needed to be carefully managed and was only appropriate for certain audiences. As long as this was the case, he was convinced that outsourcing would increase in the future.

Richard Thornton from Ciao AG began by stressing the fact that he didn't see online panels as a replacement for more conventional B2B research, but instead as an alternative approach. His paper was entitled 'Online Panels: The New Frontier of B2B Research'.

Online panels have many benefits, but the key benefit for the respondent is almost certainly the convenience of being able to fill in the survey when they wish, and break off at any time.

All respondents are profiled, incentivised and the Ciao panel ensures that respondents are not over-researched.

Richard then went on to describe two alternative approaches, the Ciao Research Barometer and the National Employee Opinion Survey.

A) The Research Barometer

This talks to market research commissioners and asks why they are or are not commissioning online surveys. It also asks which type of surveys are being commissioned. Thornton recommended using this survey where time and cost were an issue, but admitted it would not be ideal if a truly representative sample was required.

B) National Employee Opinion Survey

This was a far larger survey aimed at allowing employers to compare their own employee surveys with external benchmark data. As such it had to cover all industries and ensure that it was nationally representative.

From both surveys, a number of learnings were obtained:

• quality of the online access panel is crucial
• profiling information on respondents is very important
• important to define the target group for the panel tightly
• only appropriate for surveys up to a certain length - 15/20 minutes absolute maximum
• respondents must be incentivised
• fieldwork timing is not as limited with a b2b audience as may be expected - respondents will fill questionnaires in over the weekend in some cases

The third speaker in this session was Anna McAvoy from the BPRI Group. In her paper on 'To Bow or Not to Bow: managing the challenges of emerging markets' Anna began by defining emerging markets, stating that they were often seen as economic powerhouses in their respective regions. Some examples were provided of countries typically described as emerging:

• NigeriaArgentina
• China
• Venezuela
• Brazil

Anna went on to outline how multinational companies are sometimes concerned at being seen as exploitative when moving into these markets. They also feel that there is often not enough information relating to aspects of emerging markets.

For both these reasons, there is a clear opportunity for research to help multinationals in emerging markets, particularly in relation to Corporate Social Responsibility work. However, often local research practitioners in the emerging markets feel that Western researchers do not understand their market well enough and will always judge situations based on Western values.

Anna recommended becoming as familiar as possible with emerging markets when looking to commission research in those areas. This would include cultivating a small list of preferred suppliers, ensuring the brief has been understood (not assuming this is the case), generate sample through local networks and allow longer in the recruitment phase.

If these basic steps are followed, research in these areas should go relatively smoothly. Anna deservedly received the best presentation award for this paper.

Friday followed Thursday in the usual fashion (only with a dry taste in the mouth and a slight headache). The quality of the papers on Thursday had been very high and the first session on Friday continued in the same way.

The session was made up of three papers focussing on quantitative customer research. The theme of all the papers was that measurement for measurement's sake often leads to research dilemmas and perhaps somewhat dissatisfied clients.

In the first paper Ray Poynter (The Future Place) set out the problems inherent in traditional customer satisfaction measurement. His paper highlighted issues such as multi-colinearity, lack of discrimination, over reliance on five point scales and causality issues between individual attributes and overall satisfaction. Ray went on to suggest some very practical solutions which included changing:

" the underlying objective behind the research away from measurement to a more diagnostic approach to customer satisfaction
" the type of scales we advise our clients to use
" the forms of statistical analysis we apply to the data.

The thrust of Howard Moskowitz's paper (Moskowitz Jacobs Inc.) was that often clients want to do more than just measure customer satisfaction and the more forward thinking may consider alternative methods that can provide data that will stretch their understanding beyond what they currently offer their customers. In such cases, clients may get richer data by conducting a conjoint analysis using an approach like Moskowitz Jacob's IdeaMap. Compared with customer satisfaction research Howard explained that conjoint provides more than just a measure of the status quo, it allows the client to understand needs, possible segments and direct future service provision through scenario testing and service optimisation.

David Jackson of Clicktools finished the session with a paper that emphasised the benefits of good event driven customer satisfaction research tailored to the needs of a specific business. He stressed (as Ray Poynter did in his paper) that large all-singing, all-dancing research programmes often fail to deliver, because they try and cover too much ground and managers sometimes struggle to convert the research findings into action. The Clicktools approach is to build a tailored web-based programme of short surveys that focus on specific customer events. This meaningful approach is also carried through to the way results are presented. The aim is to provide managers with a single page summary or results dashboard that is always up to date and focuses on action rather than measurement.

Overall, these three papers provided a balanced view of the benefits of quantitative customer research for clients, without failing to mention some of the potential drawbacks we all need to take on board. It was still quite early in the morning for many of us, but this session was worth it.

The three speakers at final session of research papers, chaired by Kathy Hurst of the Wire, focused on matters of innovation and technology in b2b research.

The session opened with a provocative start: Tony Dent, CEO of the CMR Group's paper "Share, Inform & Invent" whose main message was to challenge UK b2b researchers to create an innovation forum to redress our dwindling influence in leveraging technology and shaping b2b research's future. He claimed that over the last decade, most significant innovations in b2b research had either been developed overseas, in markets such as Australia, the Netherlands (the home of CAPI), the US, Scandinavia and, with echoes of earlier papers, the implication of the rising technological expertise in Asian emerging markets looms large. This trend was not only geographical, but also driven by the assertiveness of technology developers from outside the traditional research space entering the industry, with new methodology solutions and expertise in new ways of reporting findings. This has not escaped the notice of practitioners. In an online survey conducted by the CMR group amongst research professionals, only 25% could identify major innovations in UK b2b research. While researchers are open to sharing best practice, Tony concluded we should be doing much more to stimulate innovation and ensure that as well as sharing and informing, that we avoid complacency and strive to 'invent' and regain ownership, or at least seize a more influential role in technological innovation in research.

The two papers which followed went some way to address these concerns. Adam Blunt from NOP World Business presented case studies on the use of web-based bulletin boards for b2b research. This technique allows "groups" to be conducted over several days, with a moderator setting daily discussion topics to which respondents submit responses and debate issues. This technique works particularly well where respondents are geographically dispersed, lead too complex and time-pressed lives to spend two hours in a group session, but nonetheless are able to contribute to a more flexible longer-running virtual discussion. The additional benefits of this technique are the ability to convene larger groups, availability of real-time transcripts, unobtrusive client participation / observation and cost-savings in venue-hire and travel time/expenses. However, Adam identified some potential pitfalls: there is no guarantee that sensitive stimulus material can be protected, drop-out is an issue and inevitably, the loss of non-verbal communication means that the virtual discussion cannot always be a viable substitute. Nonetheless, this concept offers an innovative and flexible way of approaching b2b respondents on their own terms, across different locations and even countries.

Adam won the best paper overall award with the highest marks for innovation and paper content.

To close the session, Silvana di Gregorio, a consultant (SdG Associates) and sociologist from Cranfield School of Management, gave a timely overview of developments in software for qualitative research. These tools are becoming more user-friendly and are particularly interesting in the b2b space, as they can help extend shelf-life of qualitative research. They can create a more accountable presence in clients' businesses, in that they offer a "new type of client deliverable" - a comprehensive on-line project archive. Silvana gave a thorough overview of four software packages, which she termed "ideas management tools": Transana (a tool which allows the direct alignment of transcripts with video-clips of depths/groups); Xsight (a flexible analysis tool, with the capability of linking interpretation with the original source material); MaxQPA (a text analysis tool) and NVIVO (which allows deeper analysis and modelling capabilities for complex projects). Using case studies with qualitative data from the NOP bulletin-board projects and MORI, Silvana demonstrated that these packages can be invaluable on larger scale projects where multiple reports / data-cuts are produced for different client interest groups. For the practitioner, investment in these packages can represent a time-saving of at least one hour per group/transcript in analysis/interpretation time.

The session was rounded off with a lively Q&A. But Tony Dent had the last laugh though when he discovered that none of the qualitative analysis packages had been invented in the UK!

The conference ended with a wonderful talk from Cliff Bashforth of Color Me Beautiful entitled 'Image in Business - it's Personal'.

Cliff was extremely amusing (and not too rude) about how we can improve the impression we make simply by dressing in appropriate colours and shapes of clothing, depending on the type of colouring and shape we are. Colouring types include: light, deep, warm, cool, clear, muted and soft. Examples of men's shapes are athletic, rectangle and sporty; for women they are the inverted rectangle, the lean column, the rectangle, the apple, the pear, the neat hourglass and full hourglass!

Our appearance accounts for 55% of first impressions and what we say only 7%. We therefore need to wear clothes that:-

• complement us, our colouring and body line
• reflect our personality
• are appropriate
• are current

In other words: your clothes and accessories should look like an extension of you!

Cliff showed us how different colours work on different people, what sort and shape of clothing to wear, and how to disguise our imperfections.

Thanks to his 'volunteers' we were able to see it all, and they were very good sports, despite some of Cliff's less complimentary comments.

We certainly ended the Conference on a fun, up-lifting and thought-provoking note - and went home to clear out our wardrobes!

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