It All Starts With Deeper Customer Understanding: A Call To Researchers

A key focus for business-to-business researchers and practitioners of the rest of the decade will be bringing new tools, techniques, and approaches for deeper understanding of customer needs—and the opportunities to create new value—to their firms. B-to-B marketers are encouraged to help their firms explore both the "right brain" as well as "left brain" sides of the customer needs picture.

Triggered by an original request from Hewlett-Packard in 1999, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) surveys business marketers and B-to-B academic researchers every two years. ISBM asks them to identify the most critical challenges marketers will encounter, the capabilities needed to overcome them, and which firms surfaced as having achieved benchmark performance in the areas identified.

Previously, the study involved an anecdotal research approach, with scores of responses being reviewed, key ideas being gathered into trends "clusters" and seminal "quotes" describing each trend identified. In the fourth quarter of 2007, ISBM launched the sixth round of the trends study, and added to its depth and breadth through the addition of a quantitative phase. The anecdotal data from the first round was clustered into 21 "trial edition" trends, which then became part of a quantitative survey across ISBM researchers and practitioner members. 

With 399 responses, the survey this year provides more robustness in understanding the trends themselves, and particularly in clarifying which trends are most important for ISBM members and researchers to focus on through the end of the decade. 

Results of the exclusive study cite seven critical issues for marketers through 2010:

1. Understanding deep customer needs in new ways.
2. Identifying new opportunities for organic business growth.
3. Improving value management techniques and tools.
4. Calculating better marketing performance and accountability metrics.
5. Competing and growing in global markets, particularly China.
6. Countering the threat of product and service commoditization by bringing innovative offerings to market            faster and moving to more competitive business models.
7. Convincing C-level executives to embrace the marketing concept and support robust marketing programs.

The top seven trends point to key fundamentals of the marketing discipline. As the experts tell it, overcoming those challenges requires significant innovation in products and services along with new strategic business models.

Meeting the first challenge of better understanding customers, for example, requires deeply probing the individual and organizational behaviors and the emotions influencing business buying decisions. Innovative study designs must reach "beyond traditional market research [to] inherent product and process understanding," a respondent said.

The second trend calls marketers to step up to address bringing to their firms new drivers for organic growth.  One respondent went as far as to say, "If marketers don't see a direct line between themselves and top line growth for their firm, they're in danger of becoming irrelevant." Looking for new markets, adjacencies, driving the new offering realization processes, engineering new alliances—all were mentioned as ways to bring new growth generating tools and techniques to business-to-business firms.

Importantly, the third trend engages marketers to bring new tools and techniques for understanding, creating, managing, delivering, and harvesting value to their firm. An important and recent outcome of ISBM research, the new book Value Merchants by James Anderson, Nirmalya Kumar, and James Narus (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) provides a step-by-step approach for better quantifying, demonstrating, documenting, and harvesting value. The centerpiece of our recent ISBM members meeting (Feb. 26-27) in Tampa, the book—and the meeting—features an important new process look at customer value management, and nine cases on how to implement this new process—past the real obstacles marketers will often find in the field.

The need for better marketing metrics, the fourth marketing trend, includes better predictive measures for innovation projects at each development stage. The need becomes ever more urgent as marketers confront global competitors in foreign and domestic markets—the fifth most critical B-to-B challenge.

New product development and investing in the right development projects and platforms hinges on a sound development plan—the key to meeting challenge number six and avoiding product commoditization in the marketplace, ISBM's expert respondents insist. One called for "disciplined processes [for] portfolio management and developing consensus in a decentralized organization quickly," for example. Said another, "Marketers must become the 'networked champions of innovation.'"

Finally, leading B-to-B marketers know that successful new product development is a powerful tool for "marketing the marketing function" to top management: the seventh challenge of winning the admiration, investments, and "seat at the corporate table" marketers need to serve their organizations best.

For more information about the ISBM B-to-B Marketing Trends 2010 Study, contact Ralph A. Oliva, ISBM executive director, at roliva@psu.edu.