Market Research

Business Consultancy Management Services (BCMS) Limited offers its clients a wide array of Market Resarch services including:

• Consumer behaviour observation involving the close monitoring of purchasing decisions and attitudes among consumers towards products/services in response to competitor and/or retailer strategies. Such research  enables marketers to augment their understanding about offerings whilst effectively targeting users by relating to their emerging needs and uses;

• Retail auditing, enabling customers to evaluate the developments in retail channels pertaining to channel category sizing, retail throughput and shares by product category and brands. Our approaches involve ad hoc one-off snapshot evaluations or continued tracking, enabling time series comparisons pertaining to category/brand share trends;

• Industry intelligence & corporate due diligence built through the collation of data about corporates from public and private sources, enabling our customers to make effective decisions pertaining to competitors, distributors, suppliers, potential alliance partners or merger/acquisition targets. Such information may relate to market shares, corporate reputation measurement, financial information, fiscal performance, supplier & customer relationships;

• Industry analysis & best practice benchmarking, through the collation of information about products and corporates from public and private sources, enabling our customer to make effective strategy decisions about operations and processes. Our approaches relate to industry volumes and performance, competitive forces and expected industry developments, key player features (financial performance, corporate reputation, markets and brands, best practice characteristics);

• Consumer research relating to:

• Product and Service Concept testing, intent of optimising concepts for new or existing products throughout a product’s (or service) life cycle;
• Test market simulation, enabling the quantification of effects arising from alternative marketing plans/scenarios in terms of resultant market shares;
• Development of market shares following launch; effects of promotion, distribution and advertising; effects of competitor response (following launch of competing products); resultant brand substitution; effects of pricing structures and outcomes in respect to target buyers acquired;
• Usage and attitudes towards products/services, enabling the pinpointing of alternative uses for existing products/services. Such research supports marketers in fully exploiting offerings whilst effectively targeting users in the context of real needs and consequent uses;
• Advertising tracking, enabling the quantification and identification of audiences receiving communication from a marketer through the use of different media (TV, radio, published or other), together with the effectiveness of such communications in terms of awareness building, interest elicitation, attitude development and desire creation;
• Price challenging, assisting in the optimisation of pricing structures pertaining to products and services’ features, evaluating a pricing strategy’s acceptance against competing brands whilst determining a product’s/brand’s price elasticity features. This research enables our customers to evaluate the result of competitor pricing changes, market share shifts following changes in price structures and price thresholds relating to the bundling of different service/product features.
• Brand Loyalty, assisting in the estimation of the equity of a brand and the evaluation of the effects of different marketing strategies in terms of loyalty to brands following the removal or inclusion of products within a brand. This area of research also assists in the estimation of effects on revenues and brand profitabilities following the implementation of potential strategies by competitors,
• Package challenging, enabling the optimisation of packaging (in respect to packaged products) in terms of functions pertaining to protection, medium for communication, identification, added value, disposal or reusage. This research also enables the quantification of impact on marketing performance (in terms of pricing, market share, profitability and revenues earned) following customer or competitor strategy scenarios;

The above market research is performed using one or a mixture of the following techniques:

1. i.              qualitative research involving one-to-one interviews or group discussions (simultaneously translated), through exploratory, probing approaches involving proven psychological approaches that elucidate consumers’ attitudes, beliefs, behaviours and needs;
2. ii.            service quality measures through “mystery shopper” approaches;
3. iii.           consumer behaviour observations involving in-store “watch” of buyer behaviour;
4. iv.           Secondary data collation and analysis (through the use of statistical or spreadsheet applications) pertaining to client own data or data acquired from public domains (such as libraries, databases or Internet);
5. v.             Primary data collation and analysis involving CAPI (1), CATI (2), mail and internet surveys (through the use of custom built software, secure servers and PC infrastructure and associated statistical and spreadsheet applications);

other research approaches involving innovative data collation techniques such as SMS questionnaire and TV programme call-in opinion polls.