Archives for Research

The new second opinion: How digital engagement is changing healthcare

Evolving digital capabilities allow healthcare providers to develop better, more personalized care for patients. While the fascinating technological advances are fun to talk about (care to implant a microchip of your medical history?), the more pressing side of technology is how it changes human behavior: how technology reframes the process of finding and using healthcare as patients find new ways to
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The next four years – what Trump policies may mean for higher education

What do the next four years mean for four-year institutions? What President Trump has said and what will happen are anyone’s guess. College Educated Voted for Trump First, let’s put aside the commonly repeated myth that he was elected by the uneducated. Voters with only a high school education actually made up only 18% of the electorate. The majority of
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Making Friends Across the Aisle in specialty food marketing

It may not make you popular if you’re a congressperson, but if you’re in specialty food marketing,  take a tip from Nielsen’s report on snacking: crossing the aisle to create promotions across the store is the path to success.  They measure and rate correlations on ‘high connectivity” purchases: for example, fresh chicken breasts, which have strong positive correlation with 133 other
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Focus Groups in the Digital Age

A conversation with Anne Brown, moderator with JSC Consumer Insights, Inc. AC:  Clients often ask us for help choosing the right type of research – and new methods are coming out all the time.  Our recent qualitative work with you and JSC led to significant changes in marketing strategy – and tangible successes.  So why does it sometimes feel old-fashioned
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The Fifth “P”: Selling in the Era of the Maximizing Mindset

You built your brand on the four P’s – product, place, price, and promotion.  Now you need to think about how your company approaches the fifth ‘P’ – Personhood. Anyone who’s read Groundswell, the seminal text on how social media changed business forever, is familiar with the new reality – that the ‘fourth wall’ has come down.  Corporations used to
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Top Planning Tools for 2014

Is it August already?  For the kids it’s back to school, for the rest of us, it’s time to lock and load on our marketing plans for 2014.  If your frontal lobe is a bit rusty, these will help: some of our favorite planning tools and overviews. The Things to Come This will get you started with a 30,000-foot perspective. 
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Where to Coupon for Maximum Response

Given the multiple ways consumers can get coupons – through events, in-store sampling, store affinity card programs, etc…we are always curious about what’s most effective for redemption. We discussed it with Associate Professor Leonard Lee of the Columbia Business School, who, as it happens, did his dissertation on “Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions.”  The findings are fascinating.
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When Shopper Marketing Backfires…Or Does it?

Brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on in-store promotions, often with results that are hard to measure. The provocative title of a new study out of Columbia University suggests that those efforts may not only be ineffective, but actually have a dampening effect on sales.  In the study, titled When Shopper Marketing Backfires, the team coined their findings the
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Corporate Social Responsibility as a New Way of Marketing

A few blogs ago, we mentioned the HBR study that showed that consumers align with brands that share their values.  Does that translate to revenue?  It’s starting to. A March 2012 Nielson study determined that “46 percent of global consumers are willing to pay extra for products and services from companies that have implemented programs to give back to society.”
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