Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus [Paperback]

Edward F. McQuarrie (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0761908846 | ISBN-13: 978-0761908845 | Publication Date: April 2, 1998 | Edition: 2nd

The Second Edition of Customer Visits offers a complete guide to all aspects of planning and executing a programme of visits to customers by individual managers and cross-functional teams.

Features new to this edition include: expanded coverage of ad hoc results; more examples of good and bad procedures; expanded section on how to analyze visit data; expanded coverage of kinds of questions to be asked of customers; and better integration with other market research tools. Customer Visits offers a wealth of specific advice, and shows how customer visits can assist new product development and the improvement of customer satisfaction.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Edward F. McQuarrie is Professor in the Department of Marketing, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.  He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 1985.   His research interests include customer value, qualitative research, and market research appropriate to technology products, on the one hand, and advertising research, rhetoric and semiotics on the other.  He has also written the book, Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus, and published articles in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Marketing Management, Marketing Research, Journal of the Market Research Society, Journal of Advertising Research, and the Journal of Advertising.  He serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Consumer Research.  

He is currently Associate Dean for Assessment & Improvement at the Leavey School, responsible for the assessment of learning outcomes and the evaluation of teaching.  He was Associate Dean for Graduate Studies 1996-2000, responsible for the MBA and Executive MBA programs.   Professor McQuarrie has moderated focus groups since 1980, for Burke Marketing Research among others.

He has consulted for a variety of technology firms, and has taught seminars on Effective Customer Visits, Managing Focus Group Research, Marketing Research Methods, and similar topics for Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple Computer, Tektronix, Varian Associates, Cadence Design, and other clients.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc; 2nd edition (April 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761908846
• ISBN-13: 978-0761908845
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #483,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical, August 22, 2000

By 

Jose Campos (West Linn, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus (Paperback)

McQuarrie obviously speaks from experience. His book is very practical, easy to navigate. Though, the most important attribute is that it is realistic. The author realizes the realities of the corporate environment and allows the reader to progress towards perfection rather that achieve perfection first time out.

Ideal book for development teams. Many "how to" ideas and a logical progression.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Ideas for Beginners and Advanced Alike, February 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus (Paperback)

I found this book to be quite easy to read and also make many useful, hands on types of suggestions of how to set up, conduct and debrief customer interviews. More than that, it also gives you a recipe for starting from scratch if you need it - that is, identifying what your purpose is, who you're going to interview, who should be doing the interviewing from your side (e.g. the Company's 'team'), how to conduct the interview and what to do once you've completed it. For those of you who are already familiar (or even comfortable) with Customer Visits, this book will still give you interesting and useful pointers - such as how to go about getting agreement from the customer to tape an interview and why this could prove invaluable to you in the future. In short, it's not a 'tour de force' for Customer Visit/Marketing junkies, but will surely give even those folks some good information that you can use. For the rest of us, it's quite a useful 'how to' book to start out with.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mandatory Reading for Product Development Professionals, March 13, 2002

By 

Steven Linsk (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus (Paperback)

Edward McQuarrie is clearly skilled in the practical use of customer visits (on-site interviews) as a qualitative data collection tool, particularly for B2B products. His frequent citations of real-world studies that support investment in primary customer research are both useful and validating for industry practitioners engaged in new product definition. I gave this book 4 stars rather than 5 because it falls short in several areas that are important to prospective readers who may be working professionals looking for "a better way" to characterize customer needs.

Customer requirements are only one (although arguably the most important) data point that influences new product definition. McQuarrie doesn't really position the customer visit method very well in the context of the other variables that drive overall product definition. Secondly, while the book does an excellent job describing how to go about planning and conducting customer visits, it fails to provide more than a cursory treatment of how to use the information collected to develop appropriate, useful, prioritized new product requirements in a resource-constrained environment.

Other than these few items (which may be outside the focus of the text anyway), I would highly recommend this book. It provides valuable insight to understanding VOC (voice of the customer) and should be included in any serious product development professional's personal library.