Browsing by Author "Said, Emanuel"

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    How organisations generate and use customer insight
    (Taylor & Francis, 2015-05-07) Said, Emanuel; Macdonald, Emma K.; Wilson, Hugh
    The generation and use of customer insight in marketing decisions is poorly understood, partly due to difficulties in obtaining research access and partly because market-based learning theory views knowledge as a fixed asset. However, customer insight takes many forms, arrives at the organisation from increasingly diverse sources and requires more than mere dissemination if it is to be useful. A multiple case study approach is used to explore managerial practices for insight generation and use. Multiple informants from each of four organisations in diverse sectors were interviewed. Findings reveal the importance of value alignment and value monitoring across the insight demand chain, to complement the information processing emphasis of extant research. Within the firm, the study suggests the importance of customer insight conduct practices including insight format, the role of automation and insight shepherding, to complement the much-researched process perspective. The study provides a basis for assessing the effectiveness of insight processes by both practitioners and scholars.
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    Insight into action: how firms use customer insight
    (Cranfield University, 2014-12) Said, Emanuel; Macdonald, Emma K.
    Customer insight is fundamental for market oriented organizations to understand their markets. However, the use of customer insight in marketing decisions is poorly understood, partly due to the difficulties in obtaining research access within organizations. But in part because under the perspective of market-based learning (MBL) theory, knowledge is a fixed asset so while there has been interest in insight acquisition, there has been less interest in the processes of insight use. This doctoral research focuses on managers’ use of customer insight within the organisation. It applies the case research method within two organisations using multiple sources of data, including interviews with multiple individuals and real-time experience tracking over a period of time. A framework of the process of insight use is developed from a review of literature and then explored and expanded upon through case study analysis. The emergent framework provides a more granular understanding of the multiple stages of the customer insight use cycle within an organization. It identifies that the insight use process is a perpetual feedback loop learning mechanism and involves several stages identified as: acquiring, filtering, transforming, sharing, analysing/interpreting, actioning and storing. The study finds that some phases are more likely to involve an individual manager while others are more likely to involve managers working collectively. For instance, the stages of acquisition and transforming tend to be individual while the stages relating to interpretation and actioning of insight tend to be collective. Managers may also opt to store insight as their next step for potential actioning at a later stage after any of the process stages. In addition to identifying the stages of insight use, this study identifies the pivotal role of organizational memory in the insight use process. Enablers and blockers of insight use are identified including that managers may respond to perceived information overload by (consciously or unconsciously) blocking information.A key contribution of this thesis is that it incorporates the first use in an organizational behaviour context, of the real-time experience tracking (RET) method. This pioneering use of RET demonstrates that this method may address some of the limitations that plague traditional participant observation techniques in organizational settings, such as active or moderate participation. It demonstrates that RET can be used to track the insight use process of individuals in organizations over time, helping to understand their individual and collective insight use processes. This multi-informant, multi-method study of customer insight use thus provides a deeper understanding of the processes of customer insight use than most previous MBL studies, which have typically employed single-informant, cross-sectional survey approaches. Practitioner implications include that new individual competencies in information use may be needed and that organisations may need to foster a new code of etiquette for information sharing and feedback between peers in organizations operating in today’s information rich environment.
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    The value of market research information : how do clients of market research services construct value from their usage of market research information?
    (Cranfield University, 2011-08) Said, Emanuel; Macdonald, Emma K.
    A significant global industry, the provision of market research is a business to business service where market research organizations provide market research information to customers, who in turn, need to make informed decisions about marketing strategy alternatives. This study involves a systematic literature review of the influences impacting on the use of market research information. It expounds the conditions, factors and mechanisms that induce or hinder the process of use among client organization users. In so doing, this investigation provides a descriptive assessment of the body of knowledge from which this study draws. This study proposes a theoretical framework of the reported conditions, factors and mechanisms that enhance or hinder the process at different stages of usage of market research. Influences like (user) organization’s strategy, structure, market philosophy, stance in the market and access to market research suppliers have a direct effect on how user organizations seek and apply market research information. The process of usage features seven phases, contrasting against the four or five phases that are typically reported in literature. Application of market research information in marketing decisions may follow one of three possible types of application: instrumental, conceptual and symbolic. This study also explores the various limitations in our understanding of this phenomenon. Relying on a number of published positivist contributions, our understanding of this process is composed of narrow views of specific causalities, each investigated independently from the rest. These result in an incomplete, inconsistent picture about a phenomenon. For instance, influences impacting on transformation and dissemination steps remain largely unknown, as are the factors impacting on application of market research information like symbolic use. Equally, published positivist researchoften relies on a single informant approach that is assumed to represent the reality of an entire organization. The study concludes with considerations about future work that may form part of my PhD research, intended to address a selection of gaps in the existing body of knowledge about this phenomenon.