A High Profile Football Club

We worked with a football club to design several supporter loyalty surveys for their matchday attenders, members of a special membership club and their season ticket holders, during a period of changing ownership. The new owners were particularly keen to identify how to build loyalty amongst their fans. As a result of the market research work, undertaken the club was able to substantially increase its matchday ticket prices and therefore its gate receipt revenue, identify new opportunities for product and service development, and more closely target its supporters in direct marketing and loyalty programmes.

In later work, the club was looking to develop a set of brand values and a branding campaign to develop its relationship with fans further. Through a series of focus groups with a variety of season ticket and matchday supporters, the club’s intended brand values were tested with a predetermined set of values identified by the supporters. In addition, through the groups, we were able to identify what supporters most liked about their club. The project allowed the club to press ahead with its branding campaign, secure in the knowledge that the campaign was focused around the right set of values.

A Large Aerospace Company

When an aerospace maintenance company approached us to design a market research programme to track the effectiveness of their magazine advertising, we jumped at the challenge. The programme required us to undertake telephone interviews with a sample of senior procurement and engineering decision makers in firms across a range of European countries. The company was particularly concerned with understanding how it was positioned in the minds of decision-makers and what it needed to change in order to ensure a more favourable perception of its services. We were able to provide the company with an understanding of how frequently certain industry publications were read, what knowledge they had of our company’s full support offering, the level of awareness of the company’s advertising, which companies they regarded as providing the highest level of quality of service, and ratings on specific service offering characteristics such as cost effectiveness, flexibility, customised solutions, customer service, value for money, technical expertise, quality, experience and quick turnaround time. Our study indicated that although the market had a broadly favourable set of associations for this firm, that the company needed to make headway on a number of levels if it wanted to compete successfully with its main challengers.

An Awarding Body

A specialist awarding body required the development of a training and development programme in strategic marketing for its senior executives in order to inform the development of its corporate plan. After a three day staff workshop where the fundamentals of marketing planning were outlined, and a session with the organisation’s trustees, the organisation was able to develop detailed marketing and operational plans and a corporate plan outlining its strategic objectives for the forthcoming five years.

In later work, Baines Associates was commissioned to consult on how the organisation could reorganise its marketing and research and development functions in order to ensure that a larger number of product and service development initiatives were undertaken in any given year. After extensive interviewing of staff within the organisation, comparison of competitor organisational structures, academic studies on new product and service development, and secondary data studies, we provided a set of options for how the company should reorganise the marketing and research and development teams and made a variety of recommendations as to how the organisation could develop its operations in the light of best practice.

An Advertising Agency

When a specialist sales promotion agency wanted to evaluate some ideas it intended to use in a pitch for the Coca-Cola account, it turned to us. Through the conduct of focus groups with young people, we evaluated several of the concepts that the company was intending to put forward, allowing the company to identify which concepts were likely to resonate most and least with a youth target audience. The focus groups allowed the refinement of the concepts, in particular suggesting the increased importance of conducting sales promotions online, and the agency went on to win the Coca-Cola account.