Bonnie Janzen is an expert in Strategic Research and Consulting. She has focused on retail, CPG, health & wellness, restaurant and home improvement industries. Below is a collection of blogs she has written.
Are You Ready For Some Football? Are You Ready For Some Ads? According to Ad Age, a 30-second spot for the Super Bowl is going for approximately $7 million. Given all that money, it is critical that the ads have a purpose and a driving strategy, and fits within the overall campaign.
Your new product should be selling like "hot cakes" but isn't? Where do you turn for diagnosing product issues? Shoppers' unconscious needs often drive purchase decisions—but hitting a rough patch is an area of opportunity. It is important to understand the unstated and underlying needs that the customer or shopper may not even be consciously aware of, sometimes described as System 1 Thinking.
It is critical that retailers remain relevant to keep an enduring place in the hearts and minds of consumers. So, how can you position your brand and your retail operation for success in the hypercompetitive and extremely fast-moving environment? When consulting with our retail clients, we focus on strategies in 6 key areas.
Consider, if you will, the age-old question of “If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no human or animal to hear it, did it make a sound?” So, in a similar fashion, if the optimal consumer insight research is budgeted, approved, designed, and conducted to solve a business problem but there were no decisions made, and no action taken, what did it accomplish? Why should it exist?
Employees are the lifeblood of any business. Fostering employee relationships is much like planting and caring for a garden. We want to create, maintain, and nurture each relationship between the company and its managers and its employees. Investing in employees’ growth and training as they take on new tasks and challenges is a crucial element of cultivating a successful company.
Recently I was thinking about the similarities between coffee made with a French press and great consumer insights. To manage a successful business, you will need customer insights in order to inform the decisions that are being made on a daily basis regarding products, advertising, messaging, pricing, packaging, distribution, shelf displays, promotions, etc.
How can your organization manage the craziness in this world, given all the supply chain and logistics challenges? Given all of these outside “unusual demands and supply chain constraints” on business, over-delivering on the customer experience can really pay off.
2020 and its challenges have been extremely difficult to navigate! Despite the long list of negatives from 2020, there are several positive trends from the year, including: Strengthening relationships, Connecting with loved ones, Improving communication between teachers and students, Focusing on self-care and mental health, Continuing work-from-home/work remotely, etc.
Remember the joy of discovery? You are the ‘voice of the customer’ in the organization, you are the starting point for innovation. You will be able to discover the consumer pain points, barriers to trial and usage and purchase journey, which will allow you to help your team and organization move customers beyond those pain points and barriers.
There was so much promise and excitement at the start of the year and the decade, but now COVID-19 and its economic fallout has had tragic consequences for many companies and industries. Now we must pick ourselves up and find our way through this challenge. These 7 steps will help you focus on your product roadmap and reviewing your brand positioning.
As you start the New Year, you are not only saying hello to the beginning of a new year, but to a whole new decade! As you think about your career and your business, how can you have more of a positive impact on your business or career? Much as you approached your personal goals and resolutions for 2020, consider starting a list of your business goals and resolutions.
We are taught to plan, to anticipate, to read reality. We are taught to make adjustments in our plans, and to continually do this as we prepare for the future. So how do we read the current state of reality? How do we plan and then make adjustments along the way? What do you do when the future that you had hoped for didn’t quite materialize as you expected? Or didn’t happen as quickly as you planned for?
“To be or not to be, that is the question” famously asked by Shakespeare’s Hamlet as he pondered the value of choosing life over death. In business, opposing positions (such as Hamlet’s) often lead to asking more marketing-nuanced versions of this question: What does your brand or your company wish to be? Or what does your brand or company not wish to be?
So how should a brand or business evolve in the Experience Economy? It is always important to make business decisions steeped in a deep understanding of how the consumer feels and thinks about your brand or company. That is even more important today when consumers have more choices than ever.
We know innovation is important. Let’s say management has determined that your company needs to evaluate how Millennials currently impact your business and how they will impact your business in years to come. How can you design innovative products and services for Millennials?
Whether we work in a corporate environment or for an agency, we are all looking for ways to discover and provide better insights to our clients. The first step is to work on your relationships with your clients. They should feel comfortable discussing all the aspects around the business issues with you. Your past performance on previous client projects is the foundation of your relationship with them.
Now that U.S. travel restrictions have been eased, Americans are joining the mix of Canadians and Europeans who visit Cuba every year. The most obvious opportunity is the one for companies in the travel and tourism industries to serve customers eager to visit Cuba for the first time.
Ethnography is "people watching" at a very basic level. Today ethnography is conducted with mobile devices (virtual ethnography), so that you can be in the moment of emotion, in the moment of the shopping trip, or in the moment of the product usage, without actually being there in person.