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Consumer
Insights
We take the ancient statement "Know thy
Customer," as an axiom
of business. We expand on this basic concept to include all
possible constituents of the business: Customers, Consumers,
Analysts, Investors, Employees, Channels, Resellers, Sales Force,
Partners, Suppliers, Opinion Makers, Politicians, and Influencers
of every type.
Our Constituent Insights effort falls into
the broad area of constituent research (frequently called
marketing research) and the specific disciplines of account
planning and analyst planning.
Constituent
Research
This service enables you to refine your
branding, to develop new products and services, to fix fledgling
products, and most of all to identify and exploit emerging opportunities.
We employ a number of methods depending on the
type of constituent and what we are seeking to learn.
If we are researching teens for example,
we might conduct a video journal study. If we are
researching a "shopping mother" we might employee an
anthropological "kitchen" study. Frequently can achieve
our goals through a simple, but carefully crafted interview of our
target. We can execute projects from in-depth interviews of
a handful of narrowly focused analysts to large scale quantitative
surveys or complex simulated test markets.
Our partners have strong research
backgrounds in both education and practice. We have
collectively managed millions of dollars worth of research and
personally conducted hundreds of focus groups, or one-on-one
interviews. We have strong statistical analysis backgrounds
and experience with sophisticated analytical techniques like
clustering, conjoint and regression.
Most importantly we have refined our instincts
to be able to detect the key insights that motivate and drive your
constituents. Knowing those facts puts you in a position of
power that translates into building your business.
Account Planning
Account Planning is a specific discipline
in the creation of advertising that is a mixture of advertising
research and insight development directed at really finding the
sweet spot of your communication target. This service is primarily employed by
ad agencies or brand managers seeking to improve the impact and poignancy
of their communication. It allows you to target your
messaging and branding efforts to get the biggest bang for your
buck.
Many agencies employ an account planning
function internally. If they do, great! If your agency does
not, or does so poorly, our Account Planning services can help
insure your advertising is going to work well in the
marketplace. Don't be suckered into shooting gerbils out of
cannons by some punk kid looking to build his ad portfolio.
Make sure your communication will work for you, will really build
your business. Sometimes this requires a third party to test and
reason out the success of an advertising effort.
Analyst Planning
It is a
twisted world, but true enough that a handful of people can dramatically
influence the value of your company. We believe you must
market to and plan for how to deal with Analysts and treat them
like any other customer.
We are not ex-market
researchers who have tried to parlay their ability to do a focus
group into a strategic consulting company.
However, we have spend millions of dollars
on research in our careers. And as both users of and
practitioners of research we have developed great expertise in
developing and conducting research that really gets to the heart
of the constituent. Frankly, we have been forced to do our own
research because the quality of work is so universally pedestrian
and bland.
This
is the basis of all great strategic work. Know thy
customer. Know the market. Know the
alternatives. We provide a range of market research service
that include:
Vision Crystallization
(interviews with Senior Executives to ascertain the vision and
determine if that vision is strongly or weakly held)
Qualitative (focus groups, one-on-one's,
anthropological, personal journals, etc.)
Quantitative (on-line and off-line
surveys, concept testing, etc.)
Secondary Research (utilization of
syndicated research from the likes of MARC, Merrill Lynch,
Forester, Gartner, IDC, etc.)
Database Analysis (taking a clients
customer database and bumping it up against other richer databases
and performing analysis)
Industry Topologies (creating detailed
maps of the players in an industry)
Corporate Knowledge Extraction (extracting
and crystallizing the holistic knowledge that exists within the
company, knowing who and what to ask)
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