Voices: the CMB Blog

By Caitlin Dailey

A warning to all the college seniors thinking about a career in market research: becoming a market researcher is both a blessing and a curse. Since I began working at CMB, I can’t turn away from a questionnaire or a good read on survey statistics, and having a group of classmates and friends with the same background just adds fuel to the fire. Whenever we come across an interesting study, we just have to share it.

One study came into my inbox just 3 days ago. This particular study was about “what singles want.” I found this particularly interesting given that I’m a single “twenty-something” living in a city with a relatively large number of unmarried women. According to the “what singles want” study of over 5,000 unattached adults 21+, “54% would not date someone with substantial student loan debt.” In a world where a college degree is the norm and post-grad education is increasingly becoming a requirement, I find this statistic hard to swallow. When I first decided to attend Bentley University, I remember standing around in a friend’s kitchen senior year of high school. His mother asked the group of us what colleges we had decided on, and when I said Bentley, she responded (jokingly), “good luck finding a husband with all of those student loans you’re going to have.” This has become a running joke between us.  Now that there is a statistic to back it up, the joke has turned into a reality.

And the good news just keeps on coming: “49% would consider getting into a committed relationship with someone who lived at home with parents.” I guess if I still lived at home my student loans would be less of an issue. Call me crazy, but something about living at home and being in a relationship just doesn’t add up. And let’s not neglect to mention the affect that social media has on the dating scene. “38% [of respondents] would cancel a date because of something they found while doing internet research on their date”. So your relationship could be doomed before you even get the chance to meet someone in person. And yet, finding partners online is becoming more and more common. Is your head spinning? Mine is.

So being a market researcher is both a blessing and a curse. I too easily get roped into reading all of these articles that make me contemplate life, and question whether I am in the norm or if I even want to be in the norm, but I also get to learn about market trends and answer real business questions for great clients. My head might be spinning with numbers and statistics, but it certainly makes life interesting.

Caitlin is a senior associate researcher for the Retail/Travel/Entertainment practice. Outside of work she is a company dancer with DanceWorks Boston, and continues her search for ‘Mr. Right’ despite her substantial student loan debt.

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Late last month, the Boston Celtics were struggling along in the middle of the NBA standings. They weren’t great and they weren’t awful, but they were predictable—predictably middle of the pack. But star point guard Rajon Rondo was having another terrific year, racking up triple-doubles (achieving double digits in scoring, rebounds and assists) at twice the rate of his closest rivals. He was the Celtics top performer and the key to what limited success they were having. So when Rondo went down with a season ending knee injury on January 25th die-hard Celtics fans went from disappointment to outright depression.Then something surprising happened.   

Prior to Rondo’s injury the Celtics had looked tired; they suffered from low energy and lack of enthusiasm for moving beyond their very ordinary performance.  After the injury they looked like a bunch of kids bursting through the door on the last day of school.  What happened? They were playing the same game, but had changed (out of necessity) the way they were playing it.  Skills that had been lying dormant suddenly came to the fore.  They were energized, they were playing much better defense and they were moving the ball much more effectively on the offensive end of the floor.  The Celtics went on a tear, winning 8 out of 9 games over the next 3 weeks, and potentially changing the entire trajectory of their season. 

So what does this have to do with research?  Maybe a lot.  Ongoing tracking programs like customer experience and brand health tracking are especially susceptible to becoming “tired” – continuously delivering the same things over and over, with diminishing returns.  One of the biggest challenges facing Celtics Coach Doc Rivers was figuring out how to pull his team out of the middling rut they’d gotten comfortable in.  In his case, the team was forced to change due to their star player’s injury.  Fortunately, customer insights folks don’t need such a dramatic trigger.   

Here are three things you can do to breathe new life into tired tracking programs, and “up your game”:

Introduce “Deep Dives”  Incorporating “deep dives” into your program is a great way to get more and more useful insights into critical issues, without the time and cost of a separate project.  A few examples of potential deep dive topics:

• Product enhancements
• Customer decision drivers
• Competitive comparisons
• Internal performance comparisons

Integrate your tracking data with data from other sources:  Tracking measurement alone (no matter how well designed) isn’t capable of informing all of the insights your internal clients need.  “Connecting the dots” between the measurement and other business data can help you deliver new, more useful insights.  I’m not talking about a “millions of dollars and thousands of lives” IT initiative here. You’ll be surprised how much useful insight you can get by focusing on a specific business issue with data sets that you can readily get your hands on.

Put insights directly into users’ hands in a way that helps them act:  If your internal customers are using dashboards or portals to view tracking results, do those tools really help them take action, or are they really just data dashboards.  A dashboard needs to tell the end-user 4 things, customized to their roles and responsibilities: they need to know where they stand; what will have the highest impact on key business goals; they also need the need the tools to prioritize and plan actions, and show whether the actions taken are really working.

So, has your customer experience or brand health tracking program grown “tired?”  If so, what will you do to up your “game?”

T.J. is CMB's Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager of our Tech Solutions Team. His twin boys are enjoying a re-energized Celtics above.

As with many financial services firms, SunTrust Bank has had to re-consider its strategy over the past several years. My colleagues at Chadwick Martin Bailey (CMB is South Street’s sister company) and I had the privilege of recently working with the company as it shifted into a decidedly customer-centric approach to the way it designed its products and services.

Next Thursday, I am pleased to be co-presenting a webinar with Jeff VanDeVelde from SunTrust and Rich Schreuer from CMB. We’ll be covering SunTrust’s use of customer segmentation to drive its shift to customer centricity.

What’s a strategy consulting firm doing talking about segmentation, you might ask?

Well, strategy is as much about saying “no” as it is about saying “yes” to opportunities for growth. Being able to identify, understand, and then remain true to your target customers is at the core of any good strategy. Clarity around target market segments helps businesses crystallize and rally around the strategies that will drive the most value for their best customers, profitably.

At some point, all our projects hinge on being able to answer the question: will this product feature/marketing message/overall initiative/etc meet my most valuable customers’ needs? Because we believe customer-centric strategy and innovation leads to more profitable growth, all our work contains a strong foundational element of re-grounding the client in the market and their best target segments – for today and the future.

We hope you will join us to learn more on the 28^th, and please drop us a line to let us know what you think! Click here to register.

Posted by J. Mark Carr, Mark is co-founder and managing partner of South Street Strategy Group.

South Street Strategy Group, an independent sister company of Chadwick Martin Bailey, integrates the best of strategy consulting and marketing science to develop better growth and value delivery strategies.

By Heather Magaw

It's Oscar week, time for me to reveal a few of the lesser-known parallels between two glamorous industries—Hollywood and Market Research.

Just as the Academy is abuzz about Lincoln and Argo, market researchers can't get enough of two topics: 1) Big Data and 2) Storytelling. You can’t go to a conference or read a blog without hearing at least 5 new takes on both concepts. For us, figuring out how to tell a compelling story with massive amounts of data is exciting stuff. Maybe we should recruit some big-name, box-office talent, like Steven Spielberg, to join the CMB ranks for our next Blockbuster client project.

What? You’re not convinced Mr. Spielberg is cut out for the life of a market researcher? Movie producers and directors sift through mountains of footage, leaving the vast majority of it on the cutting room floor; an extensive team effort transforms hundreds of hours of film into 90 minutes of entertainment. Really, it’s very similar to what we do every day at CMB: analyze mountains of complex data, synthesize it into a focused story, ultimately crafting a business decision focused research report.

At first blush, you may think that research reports don’t stack up to a movie for entertainment value, but for our research junkie clients and information needy executives, a well-written research report that helps them tackle their most difficult business challenges is often even more compelling than the latest blockbuster flick. The art of storytelling in a research report is just as important as it is to movies. Just as audiences would never willingly sit through hours upon hours of raw footage, business leaders have little appetite for sifting through reams of data tables.    

So, I ask, why shouldn’t we be recruiting Steven Spielberg as our next great Practice Leader or Senior Consultant at Chadwick Martin Bailey? As my colleague Athena mentioned last week, our neighborhood has served as a backdrop for a number of well-known movies, he might feel right at home.

Heather is VP of Client Services and always makes a point to read and finish the book before viewing movie adaptations.

Can't get enough excitement? Register for our upcoming webinar, February 28th at noon: Segmentation as a Strategic Change Agent, with Jeff VanDeVelde of SunTrust Bank.

By Athena Rodriguez

CMB fun fact: our little street in Boston has enjoyed a few moments on the silver screen, perhaps you've seen the great moment in cinematic history known as Bride Wars, or maybe Surrogates starring Bruce Willis as a cop from the future, filmed in our lobby no less. I know, as if market research wasn't glamorous enough! All this to say we’re kind of used to strange goings on outside 179 South Street, so I wasn’t initially interested in the guy, standing in a pick-up truck outside the office, handing out cans of Diet Pepsi, I’m usually a Diet Coke drinker* anyway. However, as a marketer I have a soft spot for a good campaign and I’m not too proud to turn down a free soda.

So what’s blog-worthy about free soda? Two deceptively simple things stand out. First, there were some very cute details—the Pepsi logos were heart-shaped in honor of Valentine’s Day—pretty adorable. The whole website was done up for Valentine’s Day and there was also a contest to tweet about what you love, it was a perfect and simple tie-in with the brand and a chance to win something. Lesson: promotions don’t need to be too complicated to be really appealing.

Along with the can of soda, they handed out coupons for a free 2 liter bottle, as well as a Boston-specific flyer with little allusions to the Red Sox, Patriot’s Day, Newbury Street, the Charles, and the North End, all stuff that's very appealing to locals (and those of us who’ve been here awhile). Lesson: it's tough to lose when you're appealing to hometown pride. Just make sure it's not written by someone who's only seen your town on Google Maps.

And if all else failed, they really couldn’t go wrong with the life-sized Sofia Vergara cut out available for a photo opportunity.

*Note, I make an exception for Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi which beats both Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi by a mile.

Athena is a Project Director at CMB, she's only just forgiven Pepsico for pulling Crystal Pepsi off the shelves.