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First mover or fast follower for entering new markets?

Different studies in back-to-back issues of The Harvard Business Review make conflicting claims about the importance of being the first to market. Can they both be true?

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The dynamics of today’s IT decision making

Over the past five years, some technology marketers have lost sight of one of their most important audiences – the IT department. The rise of cloud applications, mobile, IT consumerization and BYOD made many technology vendors believe that the IT department was no longer relevant. They envisioned end-users going directly to the technology providers they wanted to use and leaving IT behind to tend to a largely abandoned infrastructure. Looking back, these beliefs about the market followed the usual technology hype-cycle of over inflated expectations and a trough of disillusionment. Today we are in the slope of enlightenment and IT plays a critical role in bringing these technologies to meaningful levels of productivity.

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Uncover hidden causes of slow adoption rates for more accurate opportunity assessment

Why does the adoption rate of many new enterprise technologies fall short of expectations? The answer is often simple: The market isn’t ready. It may have an interest in the technologies and understand the potential benefits but practical realities prevent the market from buying. Understanding these barriers will lead to a more accurate market opportunity assessment, and improved adoption rates.

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Revolutions in Data Analytics

The Independence Day holiday is a good time to talk about revolutions. We are all inundated with stories about big data and analytics revolutionizing how companies use data to run their businesses. As useful and powerful as these tools are turning out to be, the biggest data analysis revolution of all time arguably took place in 1786 when Scottish Engineer William Playfair invented the bar, line and pie chart That is not a typo: We have been using the same tools to visualize data for over 200 years.

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Building the corporate brand

A new book “The People Powered Brand: A Blueprint for B2B Brand and Culture” makes a compelling case that the oft-neglected B2B corporate brand is actually of greater importance than product brands and that more companies should treat the corporate brand as a valuable asset.

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Finding the right amount of edgy for B2B advertising

A tension exists between most marketers and their advertising agencies. Agencies want to push the envelope as far as they can to create advertising that cuts through the clutter and engages the audience. Marketers—especially B2B marketers—tend to be conservative and worry that edgy advertising will alienate customers and prospects. Who’s right? Research conducted by Jonah Berger of the Wharton School and Zoey Chen of the University of Miami indicates that both may be.

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Consistency of Experience and Customer Satisfaction

The March 2014 edition of McKinsey Quarterly makes the case that providing a consistent experience across all customer interactions is more important to satisfaction and loyalty than the performance in individual interactions. This runs counter to conventional market research wisdom, which says that not all customer experiences are equal in driving customer satisfaction and that the goal of research is to uncover the key drivers. While we are not ready to endorse McKinsey’s point of view just yet, it does deserve consideration.

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Bias lives in the execution, not the approach

Sometimes in the buzz over new research tools the practitioners and media are overzealous in identifying insights that the new tool provides that old tools miss. In reality the problem typically isn’t with the old tools, it is with how they are used. But it’s always easier and more interesting to grab onto the next new thing than it is to address the misuse of existing tools and process.

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What’s really in the glass?

When making any business decision–from rebranding to evaluating a new market opportunity–it is easy to view the glass as half full. The challenge is to understand what is really in the glass. Even with the best intentions it can be difficult to step back and evaluate the situation with an objective eye.

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Social media monitoring in B2B markets

Social media monitoring and engagement tracking has joined surveys, focus groups, ethnography and eye tracking as a standard tool in the market researcher’s tool box. As with other tools and approaches there are literally dozens of firms and services to pick from. A simple Google search of “social media moderating” brings back pages vendors, comparison sites, and reviews. In general the social monitoring vendors compete with each other on three broad dimensions.

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