Market research news
The blog of the market research agency IntoTheminds lists opinionated articles, examples of alignment with marketing theory, highlights and bad buzz, carefully selected by Pierre-Nicolas Schwab, his team and influential experts.
McCafé … Starbucks’ bane
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Starbucks’ success has attracted the attention of many potential competitors and McDonald’s attempt to “retaliate” with the McCafés is certainly one of the most serious threats for Starbucks. I visited a McCafé in Paris last week and wanted to benchmark…
An original slogan is all what you need …
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
A business' success is sometimes (not always) associated with an impacting slogan ... here's one I saw last winter in New-York: "ridiculously healthy"
Bad practices: mind the little details
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Service quality is one of the major antecedents of customer satisfaction. Sometimes it may be impacted by little details which can ruin all your efforts. Vanden Borre, which I mentioned in an earlier post, has done a major mistake when…
Cerdan Heritage: a very professional SME
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Generally I’m not easily convinced by new businesses and I rarely get enthusiastic about a young SME. Well, I think I must make an exception. I was in Paris this week where I met up with Alban Cordier who co-founded…
Customer satisfaction best practices
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
This complicated sketch represents the first step of my tentative to sum up the different flows of academic research around customer satisfaction. I started reviewing literature in an attempt to define more precisely which best practices had been defined in…
The Vandenborre experience
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Vandenborre is part of the French retailer "Darty" which became famous thanks to its excellent slogan (and promise) "A contract of confidence" (le contrat de confiance). What Darty realized well in advance was that consumers shopping for electronics and home…
Decrypting Abercrombie & Fitch stores
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Abercrombie & Fitch is trendy and each store opening generates a lot of buzz. Look for instance on YouTube the videos that we taken when the brand opened its store in Milan. A&F flagship store on 5th Avenue in NY…
What is not an experience today?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
With each trend comes a drawback; even in marketing. Look at the customer experience for instance. This concept does make a lot of sense and I firmly believe it is a source of success for all companies, whatever the business,…
Customer experience: CEO’s passion is essential
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
I'm just back from a week in New York where I followed a workshop on the management of Customer Experience at the Columbia Business School. From the work sessions with my colleagues we found out that the CEO plays an…
Customer-centricity lost : it’s all about industrial revolution
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Think about it for one moment. Three-hundred years ago, when you needed let’s say a tool, you just had to go to a craftsman who had specialized in manufacturing that very tool. At that time, such a craftsman was mastering…
Century 21 grows on industry inefficiencies
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
I discussed in a previous post how unprofessional real estate agents in Brussels seem to behave. A quick survey showed disastrous response rate from real estate agents, about 90% of them failing to answer a written inquiry. In my conclusion…
It’s never too soon to prepare the sale of your company
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
I was visiting a client in the south of France last month and on my way back, in the plane, I was seating (as it is too rarely the case) next to a very sympathetic passenger who was willing to…
Next speak at Solvay Business School about Value co-creation
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
The course is mandatory for MBA students of the Solvay Business School but is also opened to everyone. You can register vua Eventbrite : http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1084117625/efblike Teaser bvs dec 2010 value co creation from pnschwab View more presentations from pnschwab.
Real-estate agencies in Brussels: the results of a study to evaluate professionalism
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
A few weeks ago I announced on this blog that I started a small-scale study on real estate agencies in Brussels. One week after the launch the results were already catastrophic, the response rate being very low. The method of…
Effectuation and causation
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
I already used several times in this blog the words “effectuation” and “causation”. Those processes are becoming increasingly important in entrepreneurship research and in particular in the attempt to understand how companies in general, and SME’s in particular, innovate. To…
Michel & Augustin: the reality behind the scene
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
For a long time already I had been eager to know more about Michel & Augustin, a brand which enjoyed a lasting buzz on social media networks. I had met Augustin at SIAL 2010 in October and wanted to see…
The energy drink market at SIAL 2010
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
One of the markets I discovered the amazing vitality of, was that of energy drinks. Basically, for me, the energy drink market was limited to Red Bull, Burn and a few alternatives which put millions of Euros in advertisement. What…
Visit to the SIAL: first impressions
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Thanks to Jean-Christophe Samalens, the active founder of the well-known blog drinky.fr, I went this year to the SIAL in Paris. Thank you for this. For those of you who don't know the SIAL, it's the equivalent of the CEBIT…
Do you know Archiduchesse
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Just like Michel & Augustin (whom I’ll meet in a few weeks), Archiduchesse is also a brand that receives much attention currently thanks to its products, 100% Made in France men socks. Archiduchesse is a pretty good example of a…
Interview with Marc Alagem, CEO of Freedelity
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Freedelity is a company established in Brussels and which got pretty much press coverage this summer. Freedelity launched a service based on the electronic ID card used in Belgium; namely, Freedelity proposes to use the ID card as a loyalty…
Why sme’s go bankrupt
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Why SME's go bankrupt is a topic that fosters a lot of myths. I attended last week a workgroup at the University of Liege (Belgium) organized by entrepreneurship researchers from Aachen, Maastricht, Eindhoven, Hasselt (B) and Liege (B). Bankruptcies were…
Crédit Agricole: why I don’t understand their communication on Facebook
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
After I published my post on Crédit Agricole, I got several comments (one of them from the Crédit Agricole itself) which call for a more detailed argumentation. Here are the main points of concerns I was dealing with in my…
Invent an identity: the case of Breguet’s watches
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
At the heart of any success story is a great product ... and a great marketing. Forget about being successful if you have a less-than-average product. I keep reminding this to my clients. You won't make a successful brand if…
Cocreation lesson #5 : customer experience
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
My review of 40 years of literature has shown that the word “experience” is used by many authors to illustrate co-creation processes. Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2000) called for «personalized experiences with the customers». Vargo and Lusch (2004) suggest that «experience…
