Development of a market research method in business-to-business markets and business-to-government markets

Abstract

The goal of the present work is to develop a method to research business-to-business and business-to-government markets with a special focus on examining the market potential. Current literature was studied to serve as a basis for a method to be developed and presented. This method was tested in practice to validate its reliability. Thus, a cooperation with Knorr-Bremse Rail Services¿an enterprise that specializes in producing parts for the railway sector¿was formed. The method that was developed is a quantitative, data-driven method which has to be implemented in a software framework. In the following case this implementation was done in Excel and Visual Basic. The method assumes that the decision whether to buy or not can be modeled based on measurable characteristics. This is done for a vast amount of decisions. These countless decisions on a market are aggregated in different ways in order to create insights which did not exist before. The outcome of this thesis reveals that the method at hand offers an advantage, but with a limitation. It is a strength of quantitative approaches that they open a broad new spectrum of market knowledge. Big, data-driven market research will definitely play a major role in the future of marketing. However, some problems within the suggested method could be revealed. The decision model is based on factors which are not always observable. Using statistics those factors can be revealed, however this assumes that enough and¿especially¿the right sales data exists in a company. The practical test showed that this data often simply does not exist. Therefore, the parameters of the model have to be guessed by experienced personnel. Nevertheless, the big chances that quantitative methods in market research offer are definitely worth being researched further.