Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus » (3rd Edition)

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.

Visits to customers by a cross-functional team of marketeers and engineers play an important role in new product development, entry into new markets, and in exploring customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The new edition of this widely used professional resource provides step-by-step instructions for making effective use of this market research technique.

Booknews

McQuarrie (marketing, Santa Clara U.) explains how businesses that market to businesses, and particularly firms that offer product categories that are technically complex, can devise affordable action plans for programmatic visits to customers and, as a result, become aware of and satisfy their customers' needs. He describes ways to coordinate visits with the sales force, effective and ineffective questions to ask customers, and pitfalls in the analysis of data from visits. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.