It would be wrong to treat marketing as an isolated field or discipline. It is connected with disciplines of management and economics, the social sciences, mathematics and statistics, and more. In the past twenty years we have seen its growing interaction with digital technology and neuroscience. Marketing has evolved through learning from other disciplines, borrowing… Read More
A Glimpse on New Advances in Segmentation
Segmentation is a fundamental topic in marketing strategy. Appreciation of its importance has continuously grown since the 1950s. Segmentation is crucial to targeting messages, fitting preferences of different consumer groups, or creating other types of differentiated programmes. In consumer marketing, segmentation may be based on demographics, perceptions and attitudes (mental constructs more generally), and behavioural… Read More
A Spotlight on the Gap Between Purchase Intention and Actual Behaviour
Rick, who is unhappy with the increased frequency of repairs that his current car requires, intends to buy a new car to replace it within the next six months. Sandy, on the other hand, has her mind set on buying a bicycle in the coming month to help her move around more freely within the… Read More
From Research Findings to Business Decisions: Reporting or Telling a Story?
It is a challenge that follows marketing and consumer research for many years: How to get not only the interest of business decision-makers in the findings from research but also their readiness to implement their lessons from the research? More than being intrigued and interested in the details of analytic findings, business decision-makers (e.g., owners,… Read More
Conjoint and MaxDiff: Choice-Based Methods for Measuring Consumer Preferences
Choice-Based Conjoint and MaxDiff (i.e., Maximum Difference, also known as Best-Worst scaling) are advanced methods for measuring and estimating consumer preferences by means of choice experiments and discrete choice models. Conjoint Analysis is a veteran methodology, initiated in the early 1970s, for measuring multi-attribute consumer preferences, based on ranking order or rating evaluations of product… Read More
Marketing-Driven Financial Valuation of Brands
Assessments of the monetary value of brands has long interested and motivated the management of firms, and their investors. From a business perspective, the financial value is a preferred measure of brand equity or return-on-investment in brands. But a brand is a marketing-driven and consumer-based entity, and hence one cannot detach the financial value of… Read More
Differences and Conflicts Between Metrics of Response to Customer Service Calls
First Call Resolution (FCR) is a key performance indicator for service call (contact) centres. The indicator pertains to success in achieving a resolution to a problem or an issue raised by a customer in his or her first call made to a contact centre. The metric of FCR success rate (%) usually concerns phone calls,… Read More
A Road Map to Customer Insights
In the crossroads of marketing research and customer research, a field of customer insights is flourishing. Instead of talking merely about research findings and conclusions, practitioners (managers and professionals) are developing and discussing customer insights. The term ‘insight’ does sound deeper and more clever, with potentially more ingenuine and farther-reaching meanings and implications. Especially when… Read More
Mapping Semantic and Visual Brand Associates
Brand associates are often conceived in verbal terms, as concrete descriptions and more abstract concepts; they may be captured by single words or longer phrases that express thoughts and emotions. But brands may be linked with visual images (pictures, drawings, photos) that capture the same brand ideas, sometimes even more efficiently than verbal expressions. The… Read More
In the Mood: Consumer Confidence
‘Consumer Confidence’ is a contentious construct, subject to multiple views and versions on how it should be measured. The predictive power of a Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), at the macro and micro levels, is also given to argument. Yet measures of consumer confidence are applied in economic discourse as a useful indication of ongoing consumers’… Read More
Consumer / Shopper / Customer Behaviour 