Voices: the CMB Blog

We run this blog a little differently than other corporate blogs. Instead of relying on a few resident bloggers, each of our employees writes at least one post a year. This means you get a variety of perspectives, experiences, and opinions on all aspects of market research, analytics, and strategy consulting from insights professionals doing some pretty cool work.

Before we blast into 2016, we wanted to reflect on our blog this past year by taking a second look at some of our favorite posts:

1. This year, we launched a market research advice column—Dear Dr. Jay. Each month, our VP of Advanced Analytics, Jay Weiner, answers reader-submitted questions on everything from Predictive Analytics to Connected Cows. In the post that started it all, Dr. Jay discusses one of the hottest topics in consumer insights: mining big data.
2. Research design and techniques are two of our favorite blog topics. A member of our Advanced Analytics team, Liz White, wrote a great piece this year about conjoint analysis. In her post, she shares the 3 most common pitfalls of using this technique and ways to get around them. Read it here.
3. In June we launched EMPACT^SM— our emotional impact analysis tool. In our introductory blog post to this new tool, CMB’s Erica Carranza discuss the best way to understand how your brand our product makes consumers feel and the role those feelings play in shaping consumers’ choices. Bonus: Superman makes a cameo. Check it out.
4. Isn’t it great when you can take a topic like loyalty and apply it to your favorite television show? Heidi Hitchen did just that in her blog post this year. She broke down the 7 types of loyalty archetypes by applying each archetype to a character from popular book series A Song of Ice and Fire and hit HBO TV series Game of Thrones. Who’s a “True Loyal”? A “Captive Loyal”? Read to find out!
5. Our Researcher in Residence series is one of our favorite blog features. A few times a year, we sit down with a client to talk about their work and the ideas about customer insights. Earlier this year, our own Judy Melanson sat down with Avis Budget Group’s Eric Smuda to talk about the customer experience, working with suppliers, and consumer insights. Check it out.
6. We released a Consumer Pulse report earlier this year on mobile wallet use in the U.S. To deepen our insights, we analyzed unlinked passive mobile behavioral data alongside survey-based data. In this post, our VP of Technology and Telecom, Chris Neal, and Jay Weiner, teamed up to share some of the typical challenges you may face when working with passive mobile behavioral data, and some best practices for dealing with those challenges. Read it here.

What do you want us to cover in 2016? Tell us in the comments, and we look forward to talking with you next year!

Kirsten Clark is CMB’s Marketing Coordinator. She’ll be ringing in the New Year by winning her family’s annual game of Pictionary.

Is it time for the “traditional” market researcher to join the ranks of the milkman and switchboard operator? The pressure to provide more actionable insights, more quickly, has never been so high. Add new competitors into the mix, and you have an industry feeling the pinch. At the same time, primary data collection has become substantially more difficult:

• Response rates are decreasing as people become more and more inundated with email requests
• Many among the younger crowd don’t check their email frequently, favoring social media and texting
• Spam filters have become more effective, so potential respondents may not receive email invitations
• The cell-phone-only population is becoming the norm—calls are easily avoided using voicemail, caller ID, call-blocking, and privacy managers
• Traditional questionnaire methodologies don’t translate well to the mobile platform—it’s time to ditch large batteries of questions

It’s just harder to contact people and collect their opinions. The good news? There’s no shortage of researchable data. Quite the contrary, there’s more than ever. It’s just that market researchers are no longer the exclusive collectors—there’s a wealth of data collected internally by companies as well as an increase in new secondary passive data generated by mobile use and social media. We’ll also soon be awash in the Internet of Things, which means that everything with an on/off switch will increasingly be connected to one another (e.g., a wearable device can unlock your door and turn on the lights as you enter). The possibilities are endless, and all this activity will generate enormous amounts of behavioral data.

Yet, as tantalizing as these new forms of data are, they’re not without their own challenges. One such challenge? Barriers to access. Businesses may share data they collect with researchers, and social media is generally public domain, but what about data generated by mobile use and the Internet of Things? How can researchers get their hands on this aggregated information? And once acquired, how do you align dissimilar data for analysis? You can read about some of our cutting-edge research on mobile passive behavioral data here.

We also face challenges in striking the proper balance between sharing information and protecting personal privacy. However, people routinely trade personal information online when seeking product discounts and for the benefit of personalizing applications. So, how and what’s shared, in part, depends on what consumers gain. It’s reasonable to give up some privacy for meaningful rewards, right? There are now health insurance discounts based on shopping habits and information collected by health monitoring wearables. Auto insurance companies are already doing something similar in offering discounts based on devices that monitor driving behavior.

We are entering an era of real-time analysis capabilities. The kicker is that with real-time analysis comes the potential for real-time actionable insights to better serve our clients’ needs.

So, what’s today’s market researcher to do? Evolve. To avoid marginalization, market researchers need to continue to understand client issues and cultivate insights in regard to consumer behavior. To do so effectively in this new world, they need to embrace new and emerging analytical tools and effectively mine data from multiple disparate sources, bringing together the best of data science and knowledge curation to consult and partner with clients.

So, we can say goodbye to “traditional” market research? Yes, indeed. The market research landscape is constantly evolving, and the insights industry needs to evolve with it.

Matt Skobe is a Data Manager at CMB with keen interests in marketing research and mobile technology. When Matt reaches his screen time quota for the day he heads to Lynn Woods for gnarcore mountain biking.    

We’ve come a long way, baby. . .

In the past three decades, the exponential growth in technology’s capabilities have given us the power to integrate multiple sources, predict behaviors, and deliver insights at a speed we only dreamt of when I was starting out. CMB Chairman and co-founder, Dr. John Martin, was an early cheerleader of the value of using multiple methods and multiple sources, so the promise of bringing disparate data sources into a unified view of customers and the marketplace is this researcher’s dream come true. 

While integrating data to help make smarter decisions has always been a best practice, it is the advances in technology that have allowed for an even greater and easier integration. Below are some recent examples we’ve implemented at CMB:

• In segmentation studies, we include needs/attitude-based survey data, internal CRM behaviors, and third-party appended data into the modeling to create more useful segments. Our clients have found that our perceptual data is a necessary complement to their internal data because it helps explain the “why’s” to the “what’s” that the internal behavioral/demographic data tell them.
• For our brand tracking clients, we often combine web analytics (e.g., Google search data, social media sentiment analysis, client’s web traffic statistics) and internal data (e.g., inquiries, loyalty applications) with our tracking results to help tell a much more nuanced story of the brand’s progress. Additionally, we use dashboards to tie that data together in one place, providing a real-time view of the brand.
• Our customer experience clients now provide us with internal data from call center reports (detailing the types of complaints received) and internal performance metrics to complement our satisfaction tracking. 

. . .but we’ve got a ways to go.

While many organizations are leveraging technology to integrate data for specific decision areas, I see a number of stumbling blocks. Many companies are still failing to develop an enterprise-wide, unified view of the marketplace—and the barriers often have little to do with the data or tech themselves: 

• Organizational siloes make it very challenging for different functional areas to come together and create a common platform for this type of unified view. 
• Moreover, the politics of who owns what—and more importantly, who pays for what—oftentimes means efforts like this never get off the ground.  

So, while it seems like technology is helping make all sorts of different data “play together,” we as humans haven’t mastered the same challenge! 

How do organizations overcome these challenges to take advantage of this possibility? Like most challenges, the solution starts with senior leadership. If the C-suite makes it a priority for the organization to become customer-centric and stresses that data is a big part of getting there, that goes far to pave the way for the different personalities and siloes to come together. Starting small is another way to tackle this problem. Look for opportunities in which teams can collaborate, even if it’s something as simple as looking at subsequent purchase behaviors from customers six months after they complete a satisfaction questionnaire in order to develop/refine the predictive power of your customer experience tracking. Starting small can create a more positive beginning to the partnership, building the trust and communication necessary to attack the bigger challenges down the road.

Mark is a Vice President at CMB, and while he recognizes that technology has absolutely transformed all aspects of his professional and personal life, he sees meaning in the fact that he prefers his music playlists generated by humans, not algorithms. Long live the DJ!

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