B2B attitude study
Market Attitudes & Desires
Tracking the needs, attitudes and preferences of current and potential buyers and influencers, so decisions rest on what the market says and not on what the company assumes.
Chapter 01
Assuming you know what your buyers need
The costliest belief in B2B is that the people who sign the orders have told you everything. Account managers hear what customers choose to tell account managers. The needs behind a purchase move over time, and the company's picture of them tends to stay where it was the last time someone asked. Power Decisions begins by treating that picture as an assumption to be tested.
Every engagement opens with the 360 research and concept generation process: identify your management preferences and unique drivers, illuminate and clarify the bucket of growth ideas you already hold, and deliver useful information about products, segments, pricing and brand positioning. Thomas Brown tailors the engagement plan to your situation, you approve it, and your own judgment stays in the loop throughout.
Attitude research is aimed at a decision, not collected for its own sake. The Decision-Research Matrix examines the stages of the decision in front of you, whether it concerns branding, pricing, products or targeting, to find the most useful research at each stage. The 8 Key Questions serve the same discipline from the other side: they help avoid paying for intelligence you don't need.
An empty meeting room after an interview, two chairs pushed back from a round table
Tracking needs, attitudes and preferences of buyers and influencers
In business-to-business markets, the buyer is rarely the only voice. A technical influencer specifies, a dealer recommends, a skeptical prospect holds the budget back, and a frontline user decides whether the product is worth renewing. The wording of this service says buyers and influencers for that reason, and a study can include decision-makers, technical influencers and skeptical prospects in the same program.
The published record shows the shape. For a major farm implement and tools manufacturer, a Dealer & User Attitude & Usage Study ran throughout the Western states among farm supply dealers and farm operators, using a hybrid of phone and mail surveys. It identified opportunities in new products, customer satisfaction, branding and advertising for strengthening customer loyalty, product adoption and market share. For Micron Technology, one-to-one depth interviews on market position in high availability servers were followed by a larger quantitative phone and phone-to-web study.
That sequence is typical. Kinetic Depth Interviews come first, because they discover what is worth asking and in what words. When views, purchase behavior and attitudes need to be captured from a larger and more diverse audience, Power Decisions may recommend a quantitative component. For executives and other hard-to-reach audiences, a moderated online forum over several days fills the gap between the two.
Chapter 03
Repeating it so shifts show up early
One reading of market attitudes is a photograph. Two readings with the same people and the same plan start to show direction: a feature that mattered less this year, a competitor mentioned more often, an influencer group whose opinion has begun to carry weight. Repeating the research is what turns an attitude study into an early warning.
There is no fixed calendar attached to this service. How often to go back, and with which audiences, is part of the engagement plan Thomas tailors to your marketplace and you approve. Power Decisions' concept work already favors smaller samples across multiple waves over one large wave, and the same logic applies here: a repeatable study lets the changes between rounds do the talking.
Each round ends in an executive brief, not a data dump, with themes, quotes and customer narratives translated into implications you can act on. Teletrac, the commercial vehicle GPS company, is a published example of attitude work in several parts: brand image, price sensitivity and repeat purchase preference by one-to-one interview, followed by an online forum on one target competitor. If you want to know where your market's attitudes are heading, call Thomas Brown in Forest Knolls at 415-328-7927.
Power Decisions, Forest Knolls, California. Call 415-328-7927 or write Tom@powerdecisions.com.