BIG Conference Feature: Friday 13th Part 2

The BIG Conference Committee is not known for its lack of confidence, and it didn't shy away from the challenge of organizing a stimulating morning after the night before on Friday 13th of May. Teresa Lynch, Features Editor was in her seat when many were not.

The first session was, for your correspondent, the real meat of the conference (modesty forbids that we include MrWeb's workshop of the previous day) - real life research problems and how to address them. The session was entitled 'How Research is Changing Business' and featured Dr Susan Prendergast of Insitas, Caroline Van Den Bos of Royal Sun Alliance, Tony Smith of Synovate and (the always reliable) Jonathan Fletcher of Illuminas.

Fletch kicked off with the use of cultural mapping in B2B decision-making. This offered fascinating insights on cultural variations in business behaviour. He explained about how both corporate structures and decision-making processes varied by the importance of family, the level of trust and cultural dynamism in the society and whether the culture is 'high' or 'low context'. Using these four parameters he was able to pigeonhole virtually every industrialized society as to how their organizations behave. Except, of course, the French, who in his estimation are unclassifiable.

Susan Prendergast then gave us a case study of work she had carried out for Wells Fargo bank, which needed to increase customer satisfaction but wouldn't allocate resources to the project ahead of more commercial concerns. The key for the researchers was to make a 'very hard financial case' by calculating the ROI on increasing Customer Lifetime Value. To do this they used a form of Net Promoter Score (NPS). Once the NPS was no longer seen as a 'soft' metric they won their case for funding.

At Wells Fargo internal buy-in was crucial to the project. This was also the case at Royal Sun Alliance (RSA) which engaged Synovate on a customer engagement exercise. New management required new metrics and dashboards but there was a huge amount of work to be done. Both Caroline Van Den Bos and Tony Smith managed to convey the very real pain points for both client and agency. Since it was virtually impossible to estimate a fair price the two companies contracted a 'shared risk model ' which required both organizations to be totally frank about their costs. They also emphasised the importance of involving procurement in the process.

There was a huge amount of information to take away from this session, but one useful summary point was: 'When doing quant keep an eye on the qual and when doing qual keep an eye on the quant'.

Two interludes of light relief followed. The first, 'The Millennials Do B2B', a sinecure for Ray Poynter of The Future Place who had managed to get himself the gig of chairing a panel session of young researchers about how B2B research could benefit from engaging with social media. The participants were so engaged themselves that the lively session ran on wheels. The second was another of the 'borrowed from TV' formats. 'The Highs and Lows of Research and insight' had been planned as a 'Grumpy Old Researchers' session to include Neil McPhee of Nuance Research, Derek Farr of Critical Research and Phyllis Macfarlane of GfK NOP. However one of the grumpy number (McPhee) had been taken ill and the session felt a bit lopsided for want of him. The others did cover gamely for him with Macfarlane playing the straight man to Farr's gagster.

Phyllis also chaired the last session of the day, a keynote from Mark Thomson, Media Director at Royal Mail. Mark gave a bravura performance for a man that most of the audience thought was in a dying trade. Apparently Royal Mail has never been healthier. Thomson pointed out that spending money on direct mail has a better 'cut through' and that 'as volumes have gone down, response rates have gone up'. He said mail was all about the 'sensory appeal' of getting something in the post. He had some good examples: a personalized chocolate letter, a mail shot from Rolls Royce written on the fine sandpaper they use for the last polish of the car and his own business cards which smelled of strawberries and had pink fluffy material on one side. He also mentioned payment by results as a good way of incentivizing a direct marketing company.

The final session broke up with several of the delegates who had stayed for it attempting to get their hands on Thomson's business cards. No curse of Friday the 13th for him and a big hit for the BIG Conference.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.