Perspectives: Revisited 2022-4

Abstract

An exploration of articles found across the Sage Publications collection. This issue focusing on market research, competitive intelligence, and social media research.

Investigating the multitude of publications within the Sage journals collection often leads me to finding small groupings of articles on different topics. I seek to report on topics that intersect with the general concept of business information and business research. In this issue, I delve into recent articles on market research and competitive intelligence, as well as articles focused on social media research. We look at 8 articles from 8 journals that show the breadth and scope of research within these topics.

These two topics continue to be the primary focus of numerous researchers. Information professionals would be wise to pay close attention to this developing research as it will inevitably impact the work that they do and the research they support in a variety of contexts.

As always, a reminder that I am simply perusing the different journals for articles that, from my perspective, have connections to each other. I often pull quotes and phrases from the articles with no intention of claiming any of these items as my own, whether or not I have accurately quoted them. I’m merely summarizing and identifying possible connections. All of the actual work and attention should be paid to these excellent researchers.

First, we have Boronat-Navaroo and fellow authors (Boronot-Navaroo et al., 2021) investigating the concept of organizational ambidexterity; the “simultaneous achievement of the exploration and exploitation of knowledge”. Specifically, the authors investigate whether the use of competitive intelligence routines (CIR) can aid firms, especially taking in to account the firm size. The study argues that “if firms of diverse sizes maintain differences regarding resource availability and flexibility, the systematic knowledge of external trends, opportunities, and threats creates strong awareness about the importance of being ambidextrous.”

The study involved a panel of companies from Spain’s furniture industry analysed over a 12 years time period that involved the companies’ participation in an ongoing observatory of their activities to determine if the natural advantages of firm size can be overcome by the commitment to consistent CIR processes. Their findings showed that CIRs are a factor that moderates the influence of firm size on ambidexterity, although larger firms still create a better context to foster ambidexterity. Competitive intelligence routines can provide small firms with an equivalent context to move towards ambidexterity, thus making these firms generally more competitive in the marketplace.

From an information professional perspective, this research can support the justification for practicing competitive intelligence routines regardless of the firm size. There is an identifiable benefit of being more aware of environmental trends and the key success factors for improved strategic decision-making.

In the International Journal of Market Research (Diaz Ruiz, 2022), the author investigates the concept of market research and insights. The growing area of the insights industry is considered as the commoditization of market research creates pressure on the researchers to differentiate themselves and provide a more valuable service to their clientele. Three different empirical studies were conducted; a participant observation in two market research agencies (one each from Finland and Mexico), qualitative in-depth interviews with expert market research practitioners, and an online open-ended questionnaire.

An overarching concept considered in the article is performativity in which “knowledge subjects simultaneously describe social realities and co-constitute the ontologies they ostensibly describe.” The market researchers, it was observed, expended a significant amount of effort discussing how they interpret the results to make them useful. Other observations included the perception that market researchers are both dispassionate gatherers of consumer data and secondly, guides.

Related to this is the growing concern over consumer data commoditization and the distance many market researchers felt from the primary strategists within their organizations. There is a growing push to move away from market research and towards providing more ‘insights’, moving from market research fieldwork towards offering solution services. The concept of an insights industry is developing which incorporates competitive intelligence, customer insights, big data, machine learning, social media listening, geomarketing and text analytics, as well as other services.

“The opportunity for market research is to reinvent itself as the cornerstone of the insights industry. To do so, market research can become a hybrid practice that integrates both ‘organic and designed’ data.” A much broader set of skills must be engaged to focus on a central issue and to provide actionable guidance for strategists.

Simply providing the quality data and information is not enough. Actionable insights must become part of the deliverable. Whether information professionals and librarians are providing the information or teaching it to future MBAs and market researchers, this research sheds light on the necessity for the continuing development of effectively interpreting information and data to identify these expected actionable insights.

Kalra and fellow authors in the Journal of Service Research (Kalra et al., 2022) look at the role frontline employees have in gathering competitive intelligence and its connection to intraorganizational social capital and in the influences on relational outcomes with customers. Specifically, they consider bridging and bonding social capital along with the concept of job autonomy as a moderator within this context.

The research involved interviews with front line employees and customers that have directly interacted with each other. Using a multi-industry sample of 207 front-line employees matched with a customer in a B2B context, the authors found that bridging social capital influences the employees’ competitive intelligence actions, which in turn impacts customers’ perceptions of information communication. This results in enhancing customer loyalty and customer engagement. They go on to present a framework for intra and inter organizational mechanisms.

The study encourages managers in promoting competitive intelligence among their front-line employees, so that they can better perform during customer encounters. Further evidence that competitive intelligence should not be assigned only to a small group within a company but to be most effective is everyone’s responsibility. These CI activities are enhanced by improving internal social capital which in turn improves the engagement with customers.

Finally, Du, et al., in the Journal of Marketing, look broadly at how marketing information can fuel growth within an organization. Marketers can capture an abundance of information to derive more actionable insights from the ever-expanding array of sources (Du et al., 2021). The concern with this abundance of data is the possibility of the streetlight effect coming in to play which can mislead and misdirect market researchers towards inappropriate insights and recommendations. The article goes on to provide an extremely informative collection of summaries on issues and challenges for customer acquisition, customer development, and customer retention in relation to different data types including retail scanners/scanner panel data, CRM data, clickstream data, online testing/field experiment data, user-generated content, big data, and machine learning methods. Brief anecdotes highlight historic examples of the streetlight effect. The issues and challenges of biometric and social network data is also considered as well as leveraging trend data, incorporating competitive intelligence data, and dealing with unstructured data within the contexts of customer development and retention. One key observation was that “(T) oo often academics and practitioners view the acquisition of data and subsequent analysis as the end goal.”

I found this to be an exceptionally informative article covering the varied data types and how they can be utilized for increasing growth within an organization. The comprehensive coverage of the data types helped me gain a much better understanding of the types of data available and how they can be used. When taken into account with the other articles, one can see definite patterns and trends in market research and competitive intelligence that can have significant positive consequences on an organization.

In the second group of articles considered in this issue, I look at the growing research into social media. Social media is proving to be a powerful set of customer-driven unstructured data that can provide unique and valuable insights into behaviors and choices in a marketplace.

In Tourism and Hospitality Research, the authors focus their study on the impact of the local community and society based corporate social responsibility activity of restaurant companies and how it affects customers’ behavioral responses (Sung et al., 2022). The authors analysed tweets from Starbucks, McDonalds, Yum! Brands, and Darden Restaurants. They conducted a content and sentiment analysis of each company’s CSR messaging in their tweets. The findings showed that local community and society CSR activities have a significant impact on strongly connected customer responses on Twitter. They identified that a certain type of message related to engagement CSR communications significantly influenced stakeholders’ responses versus broadcasting or reactive communications on Twitter. Also, online customer sentiments were mostly positive regarding CSR activity within an engagement strategy.

Bharti, in Global Business Review, conducted a study of Instagram as a sales conversion medium to further develop the concept of social commerce (Bharti, 2021). Bharti posits that “social media applications such as Instagram can be seen as an amalgamation of online shopping and social media.”

The author claims that this is the first study to provide quantitative evidence investigating the role of social media page attributes of a business Instagram page and online conversion rates. The research conducted could provide a mechanism through which fashion apparel retailers can enhance customer engagement. Bharti, in the study, developed and tested an Instagram Page Attribute-Conversion Model investigating four key attributes: visual, aesthetic, interactive, and instant popularity gauge and influencer appeal. The group studied consisted of 375 responding college students. Three focus group interviews were conducted in a semi-structured format to identify important attributes they notice on a fashion apparel’s Instagram page that helps them place orders online. The results supported the benefits of regularly interacting with customers. A final conclusion was “(T) hus, having a visually aesthetic and an interactive forum with active participation from a massive number of followers and collaboration with trusted brands or admired social media celebrities should form an important component of social media marketing and sales conversion strategy.”

In addition to these examples of direct interactions and communications with customers, there is evidence that social media influences brand preferences and can shed light on connections between brands. In the Journal of Interactive Marketing, the researchers examine the extent to which brands are embedded in daily topics of conversations to determine how brands are positioned relative to other brands to attempt to understand changes in positioning over time (Swaminathan et al., 2022).

Their approach leverages language models and topic modeling to help identify brand positioning with the purpose of constructing brand positioning maps. The authors introduce a new metric “temporal topic variability”, which they define as the shift in topic occurrences of topics over time as it pertains to a given brand. They argue that the metric can help accurately predict brand preference shifts that occur in the future. The scale of the research involved the use of a random sample of 130000 Twitter messages using text-mining methods. They show with a number of cross-match tables how brands are perceived to be connected to each other. Their measure of topic probability does show some significance in predicting changes in future brand preferences. Also included within the article is an extensive and informative table of studies using text and visual mining of user-generated content to infer brand perceptions and positioning.

Looking even more broadly, Kaur and others in FIB Business Review performed a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the literature on social media engagement (Kaur et al., 2022). Their goal was to investigate the growth of social media publications and identify the most well-known articles, journals, and authors, as well as the intellectual structure of the literature, and the most commonly used keywords and emerging research themes. The analysis involved citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and co-occurrence of authors’ keywords utilizing the database Scopus along with the software VosViewer for the visualization. Specifically, 305 articles from 144 journals were analyzed, clustered into strategic management, communication, general management, and marketing and applied psychology. Articles were clustered into usage of social media, developing a brand community, electronic-word-of-mouth and consumer online brand-related activities, customer engagement, and how to transform customers into fans. The results included a number of visualizations on emerging trends and connections between the articles and authors.

There is definite benefit in reading broadly to identify trends in research or to explore a topic more deeply. Investigating these 8 articles provides a wealth of information and insight into these two topics of market research and competitive intelligence, and in social media research. The studies on market research show how the overall marketplace it creating pressure that will force researchers and competitive intelligence professionals to adapt to expanding expectations and increased competition. While the varied research into social media applications, how they impact the marketplace; how the interactions generate new insights; and how those in the marketplace, along with info pros, must continue to gather, analyze, and identify potential insights for actionable outcomes.