Market researchers are optimistic about the future

The Next Gen Market Research blog recently conducted a poll of the market researchers in their LinkedIn group and found a lot of optimism about the coming months for market research. Read the results of his poll here.

TMRE 2009 Keynote: Steven Sturm

Toyota: Continuous Improvement Through Research

Steven Sturm
Group V.P., Americas Strategic Research & Planning & Corporate Communications
Toyota Motor North America, Inc.

Steven Sturm is Group Vice President of Americas Strategic Research and Planning and Corporate Communications for Toyota Motor North America, Inc. (TMA), the holding company for Toyota’s North American sales, engineering and manufacturing operating units. Mr. Sturm is responsible for corporate strategy and planning, strategic research across the Americas, and image research. He is also responsible for corporate advertising and marketing communications, as well as media and investor relations.

Prior to joining TMA, Mr. Sturm was Vice President, North America Planning for Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A., Inc., where he developed strategies for North America and the Western Hemisphere in support of sales, supply objectives, and trade issues.

Sturm served as President and General Manager of Toyota Logistics Services (TLS), Inc., a subsidiary of TMS, where he was in charge of Toyota and Lexus vehicle delivery to dealers, new vehicle processing and accessory installation, Toyota Transport operations, manufacturing parts logistics operations, and the export of North American-produced vehicles to overseas destinations.

Since joining Toyota in 1981, Mr. Sturm has held management positions in parts development, U.S. accessory development, product development, and market/price planning for the Toyota Division. He also was the national distribution, logistics, and sales planning manager; corporate sales planning manager; and corporate marketing manager for the Lexus Division. In addition, Mr. Sturm held the positions of Vice President, New Era Business Project, and Vice President, Marketing, for the Toyota Division.

Prior to his career at Toyota, Mr. Sturm was a Marketing Manager for Hunt-Wesson Foods and a Product Manager for Standard Brands.

Mr. Sturm received an MBA from NYU Stern and a BS in economics from the City University of New York.

Thanks to NYU for their biography of Mr. Sturm.

Free Webinar by MarketTools: Quality Research on a Budget

There are a lot of online survey tools available these days that allow you to do one-off research projects for next to nothing. While these inexpensive tools are relatively fast and easy to use, they don’t always yield quality results on which you can base important decisions. Why compromise? There are ways to do quality research without breaking the bank. Let us tell you how.

Join us to hear how your peers are doing high-quality research on very limited budgets. Our panel of experts will discuss their experiences and provide real-life examples of how they’ve been able to do it. During this one-hour webinar you’ll learn:

• Five simple guidelines for doing quality research
• How a panel can reduce your research cost and improve quality
• What companies are doing to deal with “professional” survey respondents
• When is it a good idea to call in the experts
• And much more…

Facilitator:
Mike Waite

Panelists:
Chris Schroll, Senior Manager Strategic Research & Analysis, Wolters Kluwer
Pat Merrill, Founder/General Partner, Merrill Research
and other research leaders from Fortune 500 firms

Register below, make sure to mention priority code MWS0025BLOG
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/375147800

Market research in a recession

In a recent article at The Harvard Business School, they look at seven steps to reduce the impact of minimized spending when it comes to market research.

They are:
1. Stay focused.
2. Enlist trusted partners.
3. Value experience and judgment.
4. Seize opportunities overseas.
5. Go online with a dash of skepticism.
6. Don't cut across the board.
7. Keep an eye on the new consumer.

Read in-depth about the steps here.

Updated TMRE Speaker Profile: Jim Dator

Jim Dator will be a keynote speaker at this year's The Market Research Event. The Market Research Event will be taking place from October 18-21, 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada. He will be presenting "How do you Research a Tsunami? A New Era For Market Research."

Dator founded Alternative Futures in 1977, and is currently a professor at the University of Hawaii. He is also the Head of Futures Graduate Option. A collection of the papers he has written is available here. A podcast titles "Four Generic Images of the Futures — Continued Growth, Collapse of Economic Stuctures, Disciplined Sustainable Society, Transformation" is available here.


His major areas of specialization include:

--Political futures studies (especially the forecasting and design of new political institutions, and the futures of law, education, and technology)

--Space and society, especially the design of governance systems for space settlements

--The political-economic futures of North America, the Pacific Island region, and East Asia, especially Japan and South Korea

--Media production and the politics of media-- video, radio, and multimedia production and the effects of these media on political and other human relations and consciousness

He is also: Co-Director, Space & Society Department International Space University, Strasbourg, France.

Fellow and member of the Executive Council of the World Academy of Art & Science,

Secretary General/President of the World Futures Studies Federation, 1983-93.

He was an advisor to the Hawaii State Commission for the Year 2000, and has consulted with state futures commissions for Florida, Oregon, and Illinois. He has been a planning consultant to the state judiciaries of Hawaii, Virginia, Arizona, Massachusetts, Illinois and Kansas, and the Federated States of Micronesia as well as several law firms in Hawaii and on the US mainland.

He has lectured to several thousand general, professional, governmental, business, as well as futurist, audiences in Hawaii and throughout the United States and Canada, and in Costa Rica, Italy, Egypt, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Sweden, Holland, England, North and South Korea, Japan, China, Yugoslavia, Spain, Hungary, Australia, Romania, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Finland, New Zealand and Pakistan.

References: Wikipedia and Muratopia

TMRE March LinkedIn Update

If you haven't had a chance to join our TMRE group at LinkedIn, please do! With over 1,500 members, it's a great place to gain insight from others with Market Research backgrounds. This month we focused on how to build brands using insight. Hop on over to the forums and tell us what you think!

Here are a few articles looking at using insights to build brands:
How-To: Build & Manage Your Brand Identity with Social Media

Storytelling: Using narrative to build your brand


We invite you to jump in and share your insights in the discussion section:
What great brands were born from consumer insights?

How can consumer insights be leveraged to save brands that are declining in today’s recession?

Using Google Insights For Niche/Market Research?

Are you using Google Insights for Market Research? Blogger Ben Johnson has a great post on how exactly Google Insights may be used for Market Research. Johnson writes, "So what is Google Insights? Basically it's a tool which allows you to compare and analyse search volume and patterns for your specified search terms over a given period of time, area of the world or a specific category."

Not only does Google Insights allow real-time data, but the clear charts really make it worthwhile for market researchers.

What other free software is available for market researchers? What tips can you share for analyzing the market for a particular product or service?

Web Seminar: What are Words Worth? New Ways to Optimize Consumer Language

Join us for a Free Web Seminar: What are Words Worth? New Ways to Optimize Consumer Language

Thursday, June 4th from 2:00 PM - 3.00PM EST

Reserve your Web Seminar seat now at:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/705128224
Mention priority code: MWS0018BLOG

Seeing words, hearing pictures, feeling sounds. You get the picture?

The exploration of consumer language is a key ingredient in understanding what makes people tick. But consumer language is as much visual as verbal. The challenge then is how to get your message home as quickly and clearly as possible. In that first moment of truth, how do you truly engage?

Through a series of original case studies featuring online techniques, we will help you understand how consumers think about one or more of the following words: luxury, indulgence, natural, and quality. What do these words mean? How are they perceived by different types of consumers? We have chosen these words because they reflect the marketing challenges of today, resonating across a wide spectrum of client industries.

As you listen in, you will get a better understanding of what these words mean, the visuals and imagery around what these words represent, and new learning for ways to engage respondents online for deeper, more personal reactions.

Attendees of this webinar will learn:
• How to go beneath the surface to uncover consumer emotions and personal connections linked to copy and language
• How to improve and refine consumer language critical in exploratory and copy development
• New techniques to identify imagery and visual feedback in copy and positioning development
• Innovative methods for mining and distilling rich consumer language

Presented by:
Brendan Light, SVP, Research and Development, BuzzBack Market Research

Speaker Profile: Jeff Howe

Jeff Howe will be a keynote speaker at this year's The Market Research Event. Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, where he covers the media and entertainment industry,among other subjects. In June of 2006 he published "The Rise of Crowdsourcing" in Wired. He has continued to cover the phenomenon in his blog, crowdsourcing.com, and in August 2008 Crown Business published Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Before coming to Wired he was a senior editor at Inside.com and a writer at the Village Voice. In his fifteen years as a journalist he has traveled around the world working.

Read Jeff's blog here: http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/


Source: Bright Sight Group

TMRE 2008 Speaker Featured in New York Magazine

Kathleen Vohs, PhD is featured in this week's cover story "Recession Culture" in New York Magazine.

From the article, It turns out there are people who study our brains on money. Kathleen Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, is preeminent among them, and for the sake of better understanding both the past and the future of our city, it’s useful to start by looking at what she’s found. Just thinking about money made her subjects less likely to help strangers struggling with their belongings. Just handling money made her subjects less sensitive to physical pain. My favorite experiment of hers, though, was one in which she divided her subjects into groups, one of which stared at a screensaver of floating dollar bills and another at a screensaver of exotic fish. Subjects were then asked whether they’d like to work on a task alone or with a partner. Eighty percent of those who’d been staring at the dollar bills chose to work alone. Eighty percent of those who’d been staring at the fish wanted to collaborate. (One wonders if the offices of AIG couldn’t have benefited from an aquarium or two.)

For the entire article, please click here.

For more information about The Market Research Event, please visit the event's website.

Archived Web Seminar - End User Analysis: The Power of Collaboration

If you missed today's SPSS web seminar End User Analysis: The Power of Collaboration here's your chance to view it at your own leisure. Enjoy!

View the archived web seminar

African immigrant segment untapped in US

According to a recent study performed by US African Chamber of Commerce, there is a large number of African immigrants whose needs have not been fulfilled in US markets. This study did find out that this market generally patronizes supermarkets and they have their own checking and savings accounts, along with the untapped Islamic segment that is frequent among the immigrants. For a further look at the report, read about it here.

TMRE 2009 Speaker Profile: Ram Charan

RAM CHARAN is a bestselling author, of Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty & Co-Author with A.G. Lafley, CEO, The Procter & Gamble Company of The Game Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue & Profit Growth From Innovation

For more than thirty-five years, Dr. Charan has worked behind the scenes with top executives at some of the world's most successful companies, including GE, Verizon, Novartis, Dupont, Thomson Corporation, Honeywell, KLM, Bank of America, and MeadWestvaco. He has shared his insights with many others through teaching and writing.

Dr. Charan's introduction to business came early while working in the family shoe shop in the small Indian town where he was raised. He earned an engineering degree in India and soon after took a job in Australia and then in Hawaii. When his talent for business was discovered, Dr. Charan was encouraged to pursue it. He earned MBA and doctorate degrees from Harvard Business School, where he graduated with high distinction and was a Baker Scholar. After receiving his doctorate degree, he served on the Harvard Business School faculty.

Dr. Charan is well known for providing advice that is down to earth and relevant and that takes into account the real-world complexities of business. Among his recommendations for achieving profitable growth, for example, are to search for "singles and doubles" as well as home runs and to develop what he calls a "growth budget" to instill discipline on growth initiatives. Identified by Fortune as the leading expert in corporate governance, Dr. Charan is helping boards go beyond the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley and the New York Stock Exchange by providing practical ways to improve their group dynamics. Boards, CEOs, and senior-most human resource executives often seek his advice on talent planning and key hires.

Many people have come to know Dr. Charan through in-house executive education programs. His energetic, interactive teaching style has won him several awards. He won the Bell Ringer award at GE's famous Crotonville Institute and best teacher award at Northwestern. He was among BusinessWeek's top ten resources for in-house executive development programs.
Over the past decade, Dr. Charan has captured his business insights in numerous books and articles. In the past five years, Dr. Charan's books have sold more than 2 million copies. These include the bestseller Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and Confronting Reality, both co-authored with Larry Bossidy, What the CEO Wants You to Know, Boards at Work, Every Business Is a Growth Business, Profitable Growth, and Boards That Deliver. A frequent contributor to Fortune, Dr. Charan has written two cover stories, "Why CEOs Fail" and "Why Companies Fail." His other articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Director's Monthly, and Strategy and Business.

Dr. Charan has served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance and was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He is on the board of Austin Industries and Tyco Electronics. Dr. Charan is based in Dallas, TX.

For more information about speakers at The Market Research Event, please click here.

Video advertising in-stores

In the most recent edition of CPG Matters, they look at the research efforts Coca Cola performed to figure out how customers would react to in-store advertising via video screens. They placed these videos in the Pharmacy aisle, at check out stands, and the grocery and pet care aisles.

Sales results were what Fleener called “dramatic”: percentage increases in the high single digits, he said, directly tied to when and where the in-store media network played the spots. “Not only did it drive specific Coke sales, but also the whole soft-drink category, although Coke benefited most,” he said.

Read the full report here.

No recession for certain food markets

In the most recent edition of the Quirk's Newsletter, they look at the food markets that Americans aren't neglecting due to tighter pocketbooks. They are: bread, sweet spreads (like peanut butter), frozen meals, side dishes and coffee.

Bill Patterson, senior analyst at Mintel, the company who conducted the study said,
"As consumers spend less and stay in more, certain food markets are benefiting. These recession-proof, or rather recession-fueled, industries are destined to do well throughout the economic downturn, but it will be interesting to track their sales after the nation recovers," says