Apple Devices

Between December 19 - 25, Apple devices accounted for 51% of all new device activations around the world. The iPhone 6+, Apple's first venture into the phablet market, was also among the Top 5 devices and contributed to the jump in popularity that phablets saw this year.

Phablet activations were up from 4% in 2013 to 13% in 2014, but this was at the expense of tablet activations, which dropped 35% in 2014 compared to 2013 numbers. Maybe manufacturers are having a hard time convincing consumers about the worth of a tablet versus a bigger phone.

Here's a chart, courtesy of Statista.

New Zealanders Online Shopping Habits

In 2014, New Zealand online shopping patterns changed, reflecting pressure on time felt by consumers, improved logistics, globalisation and smartphone ownership.

• NZ annual online spending is now equivalent to around 9.5% of traditional retail sales (excluding grocery and liquor).

• More and more Kiwis are choosing to shop online at international merchants - around 43% of all online sales.

• The number of international online purchases will be more than domestic online purchases within two years.

• Daily online deals are on the way out, as consumers get tired/bored with them.

• Smartphones are being used more to source and purchase online shopping deals.

To manage and exploit these changes, businesses need to :

• Segment customers - target and treat them well.

• Use payment systems such as Apple Pay.

• Get customers to create content for them - reviews of products for example, which help convert sales.

• Give customers info they can use via their smartphone. eg. QR codes, consumer reviews.

Source: eCommerce.org.nz

Best Practice Competitor Research

People often get caught up in tracking every movement their competitors make  - they benchmark, look how a competitor differentiates themselves by product or service offering, and how they position themselves. All good-to-know stuff.

However, competitor or competitive research involves looking outside the boundaries of those identified competitors who do exactly what you do. You need to understand what substitutes there are for your product or service. These can include new technologies which are more convenient and cheaper or changing consumer preferences such as fashion trends or new social dynamics.

Competitors play a small part in the success of your product or service. In the end, its what your customers want that will have a much more lasting effect on the long-term success of your business.

Top Trends

Every year, futurists at Frost & Sullivan produce a list of what gamechanger trends will affect us in the coming year. For 2015, one of their top picks is the harmonisation of trade. New Zealand has had a head start with its FTA with China, which enabled us to build networks and sell our products first. Australia now has the same access, and we need to acknowledge that the Aussies are smart players who are selling the same types of primary produce. They are also aggressive in the marketplace, and can use and copy our experiences to move quickly in and take our market share. The Australians also need to diversify their economy, rather than having a good chunk of it focused on minerals. Agribusiness offers them a way to do this, so our friends across the ditch will be working hard to maximise the potential.

International Online Shopping Trends

Nielsen have released a new report about global online shopping behaviours. It found that the appetite for online shopping is strongest in the largely developing regions of Latin America and Asia-Pacific. However, consumers from these two regions have very different buying habits. Latin-American customers like to window-shop and have the highest rates for browsing, while consumers in Asia-Pacific have higher online buying rates. This is thought to be due to the high use of mobile commerce in Asia Pacific. E-commerce in Latin America is still being developed, with barriers such as internet access, shipping costs, high taxes and logistical issues hampering online sales.

Wind Power

Statista is a database of ready-to-use infographics on just about anything. Here's one on electricity generation from wind. Did you know that...

"Denmark is well on its way to achieving its goal of 50 percent wind power by 2020. In 2013, the Danes generated an impressive 33.8 percent of their electricity through wind, a share most other countries are eyeing with envy."

This website is great for market research and competitive intelligence, and the info is perfect for that Powerpoint presentation. Search it now for the information you need.

Finding Research on Obscure Topics

Academic research is often the best way to go to find info on obscure or technical subjects. First port of call is Google Scholar, but there's other options to explore too. Try the Digital Commons Network, holding the work of 349 universities and other institutions. There's also Ingenta, Emerald, Wiley, and Science Direct. Happy searching!

Latest copy of 'Insights', our newsletter

Here's a link to our June - August 2014 newsletter. This time we are featuring  two websites that provide top quality research on a variety of topics, plus a fun speaking dictionary to try.

India's Building Boom

With the current housing crisis and building boom in Auckland and Christchurch, it was interesting to come across this article from Nielsen about India's housing situation. A rising middle class means that consumers are taking advantage of easy finance and tax incentives and are choosing to build new homes. The numbers are huge, with a need for 12 million housing units to be constructed in urban India. The market spend of housing projects for low and middle income groups alone will touch $40 billion in seven years. India may be a market that could hold a lot of appeal for New Zealand suppliers of building products.

Using Google for Market Validation

Naturally when you have a new product or service, you want to know if anyone else is in the same or allied market, and how big your potential market might be. This is called market validation, and ideally should be done way before you go to market.

Before you even begin to find published information about a product or service, interview customers and suppliers about product or service gaps they see in a market. Use other people’s experiences - good and bad, to help you fine tune your business. It's low cost market validation that can really pay off.

When you're ready to look online for market validation, a Google search is often the first place to start. Before you start typing your search query, you need to be thinking of some keywords that will help you find the information that you need. For market validation, this could include phrases or words such as “market size”, “market value”, “market research”, or trends. Note the speech marks around the phrases. Google now knows to put those two words next to each other as a phrase, so you will get targeted results.

Another trick I use all the time is the filetype:???? search. If I wanted to find out how many widgets were sold in Vietnam, I start by typing widgets sales vietnam and filetype:pptx into Google. This will pull out Powerpoint presentations with those words in them, which often have some great insights on how a widget is selling, or who is buying it. The same works with other types of documents such as pdf, doc, docx, xls etc.

Try Google Translate too. The best information about widgets in Vietnam is likely to be published in Vietnamese.

Google News is great for finding out who is also producing widgets in the market, and can give you useful information on their sales, key people, industry trends, and what the future might hold. Try using Google’s filter tools for the most recent information to get exactly what you need.

Google Patent is collection of patent documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. By typing in keywords about your widget, you should get a list of patents which will give you diagrams of the different types of widgets, plus a description of how they work, and who is responsible for the patent - very useful to get a feel for what is out there! The big disclaimer here is that although Google Patents is a useful tool, it won’t replace the capabilities of a patent expert, and it only has USA patents.

To succeed, your new product or service has to have the potential to make your customer’s life better by solving a problem, plus make you a profit. Reminder - if it’s not going to do both of those things, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

Growth of digital media

eMarketer expects that in 2014, US adults will spend 5 hours 46 minutes per day with digital media and devices, an hour more than spending time with their TV. This trend is driven by the increasing proliferation of mobile devices in the United States. If you need to know what the figures are for New Zealand, Australia or anywhere else, please email us. 

Chinese Tourists Love New Zealand!

Chinese tourists believe that New Zealand is the most satisfying destination to visit according to research undertaken by the Chinese Tourism Academy. When the Chinese travel overseas, their top three concerns were the need to feel safe, having access to information in Chinese, and confidence that they are receiving value for money. These tourists also highly value the overall atmosphere in a country, along with good transportation and urban management.

An Alternative to Google Scholar

 It's not as easy to use as Google Scholar, but Microsoft's Academic Search is a useful tool. It takes a more visual approach to showing where the article has been cited, so other related work can be easily identified on one page. Just remember that both Google Scholar and Academic Search only show a fraction of what is published in learned journals. Searching fee-based databases are the only way to go to make sure that you've covered all of your bases, and uncovered that vital journal paper! We can help you, as we have access to hundreds of academic research databases, so contact us now if you need help.

Consumer Purchasing Trends in China

The world is getting ever smaller owing to improved technology and transportation. But with the opportunities this increased global reach brings us, comes the complexities of understanding an international customer base. In this issue of Insights (Heath Research's newsletter), we highlight two websites that will help you gain this wider perspective: China Skinny and the Economist Intelligence Unit. Also find out about SimilarWeb, another online resource to add to your analytics toolkit.

Consumer Shopping Behaviours

Nielsen report that more Australian consumers shopped online in 2013 than those who did online banking. They also say that nine in 10 (89%) of consumers purchased a product online last year. Some products have higher purchasing rates online than others. Online research on printed books, clothing and digital music have high online purchasing rates, whereas online-to-offline sales are the best for grocery shopping, liquor, restaurant, clothing and pharmacy items. By using a smartphone, consumers can be in a bricks 'n' mortar store but online as well, doing research. More than one in 10 online Australian shoppers use their smartphone to make a purchase and the same proportion purchase via tablet (13%).

Use Research for Success

Graham McGregor's column in the New Zealand Herald describes how facts can be used to build compelling sales propositions. He gave an example of a company who used their industry knowledge to build their brand, and were consequently seen as a market leader. It's not hard to get good facts to support how your product or service can help customers. Just make sure that the information is up-to-date and comes from an authoritative source. Don't make your customers question the statistics from a dodgy source - it's just going to make them doubt you and the solution you are trying to sell.

Embrace your forgetfulness!

An article in the BRW has been extolling the virtues of forgetting what you know, and being open to getting new information that shakes up your perceptions. The author says that "if we refuse to let go of what we know when the knowledge is obsolete, it can interfere with our ability to keep up with the onslaught of change." Being an expert isn't always relevant anymore - you need to know who and where the disrupters to your world are, and they aren't necessarily in your industry right now.