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Tag Archives: innovation
David Forbes Wins ARF Great Mind Award
Dr. David Forbes received an ARF Innovation award certificate Wednesday night, 3/28, at the 2012 ARF Re:Think Conference in New York. This award recognizes development of the most innovative research ideas.
Every year, the ARF celebrates outstanding research minds in the industry with Great Minds Awards. “It is an honor to win this award,” said David Forbes, CEO of Forbes Consulting. “This recognition reinforces the need to push the envelope in market research – to recognize that emotions are critical motivators and yet rarely researched.”
David Forbes won this prestigious award for developing MindSight®, a proprietary applied neuroscience technique that delivers authentic insights from the emotional brain by tapping the subconscious emotions driving consumer behavior.
Last Minute Holiday Shopping Dilemma – SOLVED!
Contributed By Sandra Pimentel
Where to find the best last minute gifts for everyone on your list? The Bookstore!
And I don’t mean the book section at Target. I mean head to a Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore (hopefully they haven’t all disappeared). Recently I went into my local bookstore to pick up a children’s book and ended up buying 12 gifts! Who knew you could find so many great gifts at the bookstore? I know what you are thinking…the person on my list doesn’t like to read. That’s fine, bookstores have much more than just books. They have wall and desk calendars, toys, games, magazines and unique gifts put out for the holiday season. And surprisingly, those people who call themselves “non-readers” often actually like books too, as long as they are short and sweet and are about something that interests them.
During my recent trip, I found books I never would have thought about, but as soon as I spotted them, I knew, “this would be a perfect gift for someone on my list.” Most people have a hobby or passion- running, knitting, traveling, recycling, even mad libs. They are the easiest to shop for since there are books that cover every activity from almost every angle.
In situations where you don’t know the hobbies or passions, think about what kind of person they are. Do they like learning new, interesting facts? Do they have a great sense of humor? Are they into nature? There are always books that reflect someone’s personality, something you know about them or something you share with them.
Don’t worry about the “non-readers”, either. The bookstore has plenty of options for them, too. There are great coffee table books, amazing picture books and short books that are fun and quick. You can also pick up a funny or inspirational desktop calendar and even games at the bookstore. Go in with an open mind, browse around and pretty soon you’ll find a gift for everyone on your list.
All you have to do is head to a bookstore.
That’s my take on Holiday shopping; now check out how Forbes used MindSight to explore people’s motives driving holiday shopping.
Forbes Consulting officially launches MindSight®
Forbes Consulting is proud to announce the availability of MindSight®, an innovative research technology that identifies and explains the specific subconscious emotions motivating consumers and professionals to buy. MindSight® can be used in small, qualitative studies as well as large-scale, quantitative studies with thousands of globally dispersed respondents. It delivers real-time results, cost-effectively, and can be deployed on mobile devices.
Fun with . . . Black & White Shapes
Source: MGH survey conducted by Vision Critical, March 22, 2011
Tuning Up Sales Interactions
The Old Way
It’s an old truism in sales: customers evaluate rationally, but they buy products and services emotionally. Traditional market research, however, typically only analyzes the rational aspects of sales interactions. Win-loss interviews, a standard market research approach, rely upon respondents’ recall of the sales interaction and a discussion of what they thought and felt. Although useful, this approach unavoidably leads respondents to deliver rationalized versions of the story of their decision to purchase/not purchase a product or service. Of course, the story they tell emerges through the filters of their rational recall of the event and desire to present themselves in a particular way. The emotional element in the sale – the piece that drives purchase – is less deeply explored and often obscured in the process.
Which Way Should I go? Making Tough Choices in Segmentation
By Bill Spera, Senior Project Manager
Most would agree that the benefits of market segmentation are many. By identifying opportunity targets within the marketplace, understanding the rules of success with these targets, and building strategies to execute against these targets, companies can hone resources to maximize success.
SO MANY CHOICES… SO LITTLE TIME… 
Although the benefits are great, the path to actionable segments varies based on the end goal. There are a great variety of segmentation types – all involving different inputs and ultimately providing different results.
THE BASIC SEGMENTATION WORLD
At the pure identifiability end of the continuum falls the variety of more basic segmentation techniques, usually based on census tract demographics. All that’s needed to identify these folks is their addresses or 9-digit zip codes. These techniques are superb at targeting at a demographic level, but often include little to no attitudinal differentiation.
Ask Sig: Hot Dogs are Serious Business
We make a popular line of hot dog brands and have done so for decades. Our company is doing ok, but we have seen better times. All management levels agree that we need to grow, but there is some debate over how – expand distribution, partner for recipe inclusion, extend beyond hot dogs, etc. Our company board is partial to extending to hot dog buns. How
do I determine what is best for the brands?Sincerely,
Down in the Dogs
A. A very tricky situation, indeed. I have faced a similar dilemma when I was at the University of Vienna and asked to work on a rather unfruitful search for proof that was never to be found. Professor Karl Claus asked me to study the life cycle of eels. After four weeks at the zoological research station where I dissected hundreds of eels, and starting seeing many of them swimming in my dreams, I was still not able to prove or disprove the presence of male reproductive organs in eels. Professor Claus was determined – he suggested we look again at only baby eels. I suggested we take a step back.
Fun with . . . Words and Their Feelings
It’s been said that fear leads to anger but which words truly capture the difference between fear and anger?
Words that score highest in anger while lowest in fear are often descriptions objectionable people (snob, pest), while in contrast the words that score highest in fear and lowest in anger are more likely to be things that happen or places (tornado, ski-jump).
Positioning for Motivational Impact: Does My Brand’s Difference Matter?
By Jeremy Pincus, Ph.D. and Amit Ghosh
A Brief History Of Positioning
In earliest advertising, the goal of communicating to the consumer was to convey factual ideas about a product or service to promote its unique features and benefits. The logic of this traditional strategy was well expressed in Rosser Reeves’ (1961) famous unique selling proposition (e.g., “melts in your mouth, not in your hand”).
But this approach only works well when something factual about one’s product is truly new and unique. As more and more products entered into the market to make purely factual distinctiveness less and less obtainable, Ries and Trout (1972) developed the concept of “Positioning”, arguing that marketing should stake a unique position in the minds of consumers. The focus of communication under positioning theory became a psychological one, with an emphasis not just on reality, but on perception of reality.
Over 80 percent of new product launches in the last five years consisted of “new and improved” brand extensions, and the majority of these failed.
Success in today’s marketplace requires positioning skills of Olympian proportion.
Research ON Research: Rating 2 Brands at Once
A Time Saver or A Waste of Data?
Background:
There may be time saved by asking a respondent to move through an attribute battery in an online survey j
ust once and rate two brands – rather than rate a single brand, item-by-item, only to go through the battery again to rate a second brand. However, could this slightly more time consuming method yield richer data?
Research Method:
Using standard security screening and a demographically representative online panel, 1,250 respondents, at least partly responsible for household shopping decisions, answered questions about sports drinks. About equal numbers of respondents rated a pair of brands one at a time (n=580) or both at
once (n=586) on 28 attributes. For each attribute, the average gap between ratings when brands were rated one at a time was tested for a significant difference against when brands were rated both at once.
