Voices: the CMB Blog

In February of 2008, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. That year, my coworkers formed a Light the Night team as a way to rally around me and show their support as I began my two year journey to kick cancer’s butt! The Light the Night Walk is the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) annual fundraising event. The walk starts at dusk and everyone carries a lantern that is lit from within. There are three different types of lanterns: a red lantern shows support, a white lantern represents a survivor, and a gold lantern represents the memory of a lost loved one. It pays tribute to those who have fallen to this terrible disease and brings hope to those still battling cancer. This Thursday, CMB will be participating and walking as a team for the seventh year in a row.Since we started the walk, we have raised over $65,000 for LLS. And, in true CMB fashion, we had fun doing it. In the weeks leading up to the walk, we do a variety of events to excite and inform CMBers about LLS and their mission. For example, every year we sell tickets to a lunch courtesy of our resident champion BBQ master, Jared Huizenga. During the lunch, we also hold a silent auction and the items up for sale—homemade lunches, handmade scarves, photo editing sessions, etc.— give my coworkers a chance to showcase their diverse talents.  

As a cancer survivor, it means so much to me that something as negative as a cancer diagnosis could result in such a positive movement by CMB. Their participation with the Light the Night Walk is just one example of how my work family helped me through a very difficult time. There were many others: the daily visits from coworkers to help me countdown to the end of chemo and the easy acceptance of my wig, my scarf, or my bald head—whichever I chose to wear that day. 

LLS funds research with the goal of curing blood cancers. It provides support to patients and their families, and I (as well as countless others) have personally benefited from this research. Due in no small part to the advances made from this very research, I will celebrate five years in remission next May. I was the recipient of a lifesaving stem cell transplant and proton radiation therapy…and these are just two examples of the advanced therapies now available because of LLS. Thanks to them, I will be holding my white lantern high this Thursday.

From the LLS website:  When LLS was founded in 1949, a blood cancer diagnosis was almost always fatal. Thanks in part to innovative research funded by LLS, survival rates have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled for blood cancer patients. Today, cancer research in one area helps across all types of cancers. One example of this is the approval of the revolutionary drug Gleevac. The 10-year survival rate for certain blood cancer patients improved from 1 in 10 to nearly 9 in 10. 

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 or join us on Thursday at 5PM in the Boston Common.

Catherine Shannon is the Director of Finance at CMB. She’s a two time cancer survivor who is happy to say that she’ll celebrate five years in remission next May, and she looks forward to Light the Night tomorrow. 

Anyone who’s ever managed a service-oriented team knows that success or failure is often contingent on the successes or failures of your employees. Their professional successes—and sometimes even their personal successes—have a positive and lasting impact on your organization. Then, of course, there’s the flip side of that coin that can result in collateral damage across an organization.At CMB, we take talent management seriously because it’s serious stuff. We literally live and breathe in a team-oriented environment to deliver against our client commitments. To do this day-in-and-day-out takes both the hard skills required of market researchers coupled with softer skills required for teams to thrive.  From the interview process to active team management to individual development plans, we are building and supporting teams and individuals that align with our core CMBehaviors:

• Accountability

• Attention to Detail

• Autonomy

• CMB Citizenship

• Collaboration

• Communication

• Flexibility

• Initiative

• Problem Resolution

• Strategic Thinking

The CMBehaviors aren’t just a bulleted list of the latest organizational buzz-words; these concepts have both meaning and impact, in addition to being closely related and producing significant interaction effects. For instance, Strategic Thinkingis a hallmark of CMB and one of the reasons we have a history of successfully helping clients solve their unique business problems. It’s not good enough to have only the senior-most team members engaged in Strategic Thinking—it’s expected of the entire project team. This, of course, can only be realized through effective Collaboration. Project teams are often greater than the sum of their parts, but to fully realize the full potential of the team requires clear and concise Communication.

It’s not easy to hire and manage to these standards, but we believe it’s part what our clients recognize as unique (and dare I say better?) about working with CMB. Our commitment to our colleagues (we like to call ourselves CMBers) is a direct reflection of our commitment to exceptional client service.

Heather is VP of Client Services and is awestruck with the potential and commitment of the current Client Services team members at CMB. She’s proud to be a member of the awesome team who get to call themselves CMBers.

Would you like to work with some of our top clients like eBay, Facebook, Hilton, Bank of America, Starbucks, Avis-Budget, Neiman Marcus, and Electronic Arts?

Join our team! We are a Honomichl Top 50 company offering the flexible collaborative environment of a small company with the big world expertise that comes from working with leading brands across a wide array of industries.

Check out our open positions here.

On April 1, 1984, Chadwick Martin Bailey was founded in Boston by Anne Bailey Berman and Dr. John Martin. What began 30 years ago on a day known for pranks, continues to thrive today as a Honomichl Top 50 market research and consulting firm.Staying true to our April Fools’ Day origins, we never take ourselves too seriously, despite our commitment to providing insights for confident, strategic, decision-making to a select group of the world’s leading brands.

While clients appreciate our rigorous approach to market science blended with our unique business decision focus and rock solid execution, it’s our genuine and collaborative approach to partnership that our clients tell us they value most. In fact, one of the greatest compliments we can receive is when clients tell us we're “fun to work with.”

Today we celebrate 30 years of helping our clients get the answers they need to grow, innovate, and stay ahead of the competition, and our co-founders who set us on the path toward success.

Thank you, Anne and John, fellow CMBers, and our fantastic clients!

Heather is VP of Client Services, she loves both a good April Fools' gag and birthday celebration!

Dear Friends,

It is with an extremely heavy heart that I share that Chadwick Martin Bailey’s co-founder, leader, and my partner, John Martin passed away Thursday morning after a long illness, with his beloved wife by his side. While it’s difficult to put into words what a truly special man John was, I wanted to share briefly what he meant to me.John was a genius—a brilliant market researcher who set the standard for where the company is today. His precision, creativity, and passion will be just part of his legacy. More importantly, he was a tremendous friend.  He was funny, out of the box, loyal, and the ultimate teacher. He seldom wore shoes and used language that would make a sailor blush. 

Personally, John taught me and made me laugh for 35 years. Try as I might, he would not let me take myself too seriously as we faced the ups and downs faced by all businesses. Our essential values were always aligned and this set the open, collaborative tone that our employees and clients value so much.

I know what he meant to me is shared by so many CMBers – both present and alums.  He listened, he taught, he advised, and he truly cared. And those of us who knew him, we felt it. Of course, he was not just my partner for over 30 years; he was also an intimate friend to my family.  He was always there for my husband and was mentor to our two sons who grew up with him, advocating and advising them on life. 

John is survived by his wife Marion, to whom he was profoundly devoted, and his beloved daughter Bronwyn, and son Travis, who are feeling the pain of loss. Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

While there will be no funeral, plans for a celebration of life will be shared in the coming weeks. John touched so many lives, and hearing the wonderful, funny stories has been a great comfort, please share your thoughts and memories here: http://john-martin1.muchloved.com/

Donations can be made in John's name to the International Mesothelioma Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital: https://giving.brighamandwomens.org/IMP

Thank you, John. Your friend, Anne

As a recent graduate, and entrant into the world of professional market research, I have some words of wisdom for college seniors looking for a career in the industry. You may think your professors prepared you for the “real world” of market research, but there are some things you didn’t learn in your Marketing Research class. So what’s the major difference between research at the undergrad level and the work of a market researcher? In the real world, context matters, and there are real consequences to our research. One example of this is how we approach testing for statistical significance.Starting in my freshman year of college, I was taught to abide by a concept that I came to think of as the “Golden Rule of Research.” According to this rule, if you can’t be 95% or 90% confident that a difference is statistically significant, you should consider it essentially meaningless.

Entering the world of Market Research, I quickly found that this rule doesn’t always hold when the research is meant to help users make real business decisions. Although significance testing can be a helpful tool in interpreting results, ignoring a substantial difference simply because it does not cross the thin line into statistical significance can be a real mistake.

Our Chief Methodologist, Richard Schreuer, gives this example of why this “Golden Rule” doesn’t always make sense in the real world:

Imagine a manager gets the results of a concept test in which a new ad outperforms the old by a score of 54% to 47%; sig testing shows our manager can be 84% confident the new ad will do better than the old ad. The problem in the market research industry is that we typically assess significance at the 95% or 90% level, if the difference between scores doesn’t pass this strict threshold, then it is often assumed no difference exists.

However, in this case, we can be very sure that the new ad is not worse than the old (there’s only a 1% chance that the new ad’s score is below the old). So, the manager has an 84% chance of improving her advertising and a 1% chance of hurting it if she changes to the new creative—pretty good odds. The worst scenario is that the new creative will perform the same as the old. So, in this case, there is real upside in going with the new creative and little downside (save the production expense). But if the manager relied on industry-standard significance testing, she would likely have dismissed the creative immediately.

At CMB, it doesn’t take long to get the sense that there is something much bigger going on here than just number crunching. Creating useable, meaningful research and telling a cohesive story require more than just an understanding of the numbers themselves; it takes creativity and a solid grasp on our clients’ businesses and their needs. As much as I love working with the data, the most satisfying part of my job is seeing how our research and recommendations support real decisions that our clients make every day, and that’s not something I ever could have learned in school.

Amy is a recent graduate from Boston College, where she realized that she had a much greater interest in statistics than the average student. She is 95% confident that this is a meaningful difference.

Join CMB' Amy Modini on February 20th, at 12:30 pm ET, to learn how we use discrete choice to better position your brand in a complex changing market. Register here.