Voices: the CMB Blog

The company that walks together gives back together! And on October 13^th, thirty CMB employees walk as part of The Annual Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night Walk in the Boston Common.  The walk is one of a dozen held across the country by The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) to raise money for the thousands of people affected by blood cancers each year.  LLS funds life-saving research and provides much needed services to patients and their families.

While CMB employees give their time to countless causes, Light the Night has special meaning for us. Our Director of Finance Catherine Shannon is celebrating her second year of remission, and will walk with us this year—our 4^th participating.

Since we began walking in 2008, CMB has raised over $20,000 for LLS.  This year we have both our largest team of walkers and our biggest goal yet of $12,000! Team leader Lynne Castronuovo sums up why giving back to the community in this way means so much:
“It’s been extremely gratifying to watch what started out as a very meaningful but modest effort four years ago grow into something so substantial.  This year, we are fielding a team of 30+ walkers and over 50 employees participated in our largest fundraiser.  Everyone in the office is thrilled to rally around this cause because we realize that Catherine’s cancer-free status is due in part, to ground-breaking treatments that were initially funded by LLS.”

We’d also like to give a special thanks to our partners at Decipher who have joined in to donate $10 for every “like” on their Facebook page.

We’re a small company trying to make a big difference, if you’d like to join us in the fight against cancer please donate here.

Thank you,

The CMB Light the Night Team

Picture yourself pushing your cart down the grocery store aisle, you’ve planned your meals and are making choices that suit your family’s tastes and budget. The decisions you make are rational and logical. But as anyone who’s ever felt a sense of nostalgia over a chocolate chip cookie, or empowered by their choice of the natural peanut butter, can tell you, they are also emotional.

As market researchers we’re interested in knowing what decisions consumers make, how they make them, and why. Traditionally, we’ve used quantitative (survey) approaches to discover the “what” and the “how,” and turned to qualitative methods (IDI’s, focus groups) to understand the “why,” including the emotions underlying these decisions.  But merely asking people to name their emotions is not enough, language biases, the tedium of having subjects choose from lists of 50 or more emotions, and the dangers of self-report for something so nebulous, are all difficulties faced by researchers. To address these biases, scientists and quantitative researchers have come to recognize the extent to which decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind. The question is: how can we apply rigorous measurement to what seem like the most irrational, unpredictable human characteristics?

Medical science has offered new possibilities using relatively established technologies to gain insight and understanding into the relationships between human emotion and brain activity. EEG’s, eye tracking, and even MRI’s have helped us understand the nuances and complexity of the brain’s response in very concrete and visual ways. An fMRI like the one pictured below, and other technologies, are valuable in their ability to measure brain responses that the subject might not even know they’re having. But there are limitations, beyond being prohibitive from a cost perspective, the results lack the nuance and detail necessary for effective application for market researchers.

Researchers from AdSAM, a research company focused on Emotional Response Modeling, have developed a methodology using non-verbal techniques to identify and measure emotional response to understand consumer attitudes, preferences, and behavior. This approach uses pictorial scales to capture emotional reactions and predict behavior while minimizing the language biases common in verbal approaches and contextualizing the results of more costly brain imaging approaches.

Want to know more? Please join us on September 21^st as CMB’s Jeff McKenna and AdSAM’s Cathy Gwynn discuss the development and application of this new approach to emotional response measurement.

Posted by Megan McManaman. Megan is part of CMB’s marketing team, and she isn't proud to say buying ketchup makes her happy.

Ten years ago this Labor Day weekend, I moved to Boston from Upstate New York. I had dreams, a ’94 Chevy Cavalier that looked like a sneaker, and MapQuest directions carefully taped to my dashboard. For those familiar with Boston, its pre-colonial lay out and slightly aggressive drivers, it’s still a wonder I made it to my apartment. As I recently let the soothing voice of Roger (my GPS) guide me to a meeting outside the city, I reflected on how far we’ve come since the days of the road atlas and printed directions.

Although I’m fond of Roger, it’s already clear the iPhone has made him obsolete, I don’t need both.  This Labor Day weekend I’m traveling to the Adirondacks and Roger is staying home. And according to Richard Read at All Car Tech’s Taps for TomTom: The Standalone GPS Unit is Dead, I’m not alone. Read looks at research from our most recent Consumer Pulse and finds the GPS device may be going the way of the road atlas. Findings from our survey of 1,461 people, found 38% of mobile device users are using their GPS less, since getting a smartphone or tablet.  

And those aren’t the only findings to ponder as we head into one of the busiest driving weekends of the year: nearly all (89%) mobile device owners are using their devices for mapping and directions. Mobile devices are “go-to” devices in every sense, with 67% of mobile device owners eschewing printed directions, and 60% stopping less at gas stations, due to GPS and mapping capabilities on their device

For more on how Smartphones and Tablets are changing everyday behaviors, download our latest Consumer Pulse The “Go-to” Device: Smartphones and Tablets Change Consumers’ Entertainment Behavior

How are you finding your way to your Labor Day destination— GPS, map, Smartphone, Tablet, compass?

This post was written by Megan McManaman, who has a perfect driving record.

In this month’s “John’s Corner,” John discusses the limits of benchmarking and its alternatives with CMB's Megan McManaman.

MM: Today we’re discussing a topic that you feel strongly about, the misuse of benchmarking in marketing. Can you tell us what benchmarking is and how it’s used?

JM: Before we get too far along, I want to make it clear that benchmarking is a process aimed at enabling you to become the best through improvements.  It is not a score. Often benchmarking is used poorly in marketing, with too much emphasis on standardized “descriptive” scores. Yes, a comparative score is useful in raising a red flag, but then what should you do for success?  Unfortunately, there are third parties that don’t just offer comparative scores, but encourage you to meet or exceed this score using a diagnosis based on a “standard” set of externally generated criteria.  By focusing on the gaps between you and your competition you are assuming you can become the “best” by essentially copying competitors using criteria. In reality that will actually ensure you will not become distinctive. 

MM: I can see why a “best in class” company might not want to focus on standardized competitor scores, but what about the fifth ranked company, the tenth?

JM: For companies somewhere in the middle I also consider it unlikely they will gain a notable market advantage by closing the gap with higher score competitors.  In fact it could be quite detrimental. A focus on scores using standard measures will obscure what makes your company unique and distinctive.  It is your commitment to innovation that will better your performance and market standing, leading to improved financial performance. Apple does this well. They are a company committed to being distinctive: they would hardly be where they are today by copying others.

MM: It strikes me that this has been a fundamental problem with how benchmarking has been used in marketing from the beginning, is it particularly problematic now?

JM: Yes, it’s true. People are acquiring information differently and at faster rates, and it is not just because of the internet. The myopia that comes with focusing on standard benchmarking scores and gaps is particularly dangerous for companies in a marketplace saturated with a broader set of competitors. In part because people travel more widely, and information is not centralized, there are very few companies that are the “only game in town” and that number will grow fewer. So benchmarking as a process striving for distinctiveness will become even more important.

MM: Could you help me understand what a diagnostic approach aimed at distinctiveness looks like?

JM: Remembering that benchmarking is a process, the essential nature of a best practice is diagnostic: functionally and in what is produced.  In marketing we must aim at a holistic perspective due to the interconnectivity of all the strategic and tactical elements, and also the growing relationship to operations or value delivery.  So, the “diagnostic approach” recognizes the need to know what your competitors are doing, but rather than scoring yourself in comparison, you customize systems and methodologies directly relevant to your unique organization that focus on what will both help you stand out in the marketplace and improve your efficiency.

A process with a customized diagnostic approach allows both small and large companies to account for emerging challenges and opportunities, and be more nimble and distinctive in the face of these changes than companies that focus more on comparative standards.  Innovation and distinctiveness are more important than ever, and a custom diagnostic approach reveals these in a way that a competitive descriptive score based benchmarking cannot.

Download the full conference presentation here: The Perils of Benchmarking 10 things to consider when deciding how you should benchmark against the market.

So what do you think? Does benchmarking stifle innovation? does it encourage marketers to "keep up with the Joneses?"