Jerry Thomas has extensive experience in all forms of market research. He is a prolific writer who has many published articles. Below is a collection of his writings.
While many quantitative methods are utilized in package design research, sometimes we overlook the importance of the softer side of research—the qualitative techniques. Here is some advice on utilizing qualitative research when redesigning packaging.
In the hands of skillful marketing executives and expert researchers, advertising gives us the power to change the world. Advertising can change feelings, change attitudes, and change behaviors. So, how can a client, advertising agency, and research agency work together to create effective advertising?
Many inhabitants of the marketing world have heard of the term “paired comparison” product testing, and some may have heard of the term “triangle testing,” or “triangle taste testing,” and some are familiar with the term “Product Clinics.” All three of these methods involve direct comparison of one product to other products.
A brand is some type of symbol, name, or sign that identifies and distinguishes one product or service from competitive products or services (and we can think of “identifies” and “distinguishes” as the practical functions of a brand). There are also intangible elements, such as status signals, values, emotions and feelings, visual imagery, and personality traits that can be linked to a brand name.
All other factors being equal, Brand Equity is the very best predictor of a corporation’s probability of long-term success. In well-managed corporations, senior management stays focused on building and maintaining Brand Equity for all of their brands among the most important target audiences (customers and prospective customers). Once a sound brand strategy is in place, it’s important to track the cumulative effects through repeated surveys of target consumers, employees, and other target audiences.
Is it a good idea to make a head-to-head comparative claim against a competitor? Before you rush off to create that great head-to-head commercial, a recommended best practice is to test a number of different advertising claims or messages, to see which resonate with your target audience.
The Fathers of Marketing Research invented a number of extremely powerful and valuable tools, methods, questions, and concepts that we all use and benefit from every single day. But no one is perfect, and our industry Fathers committed sins that blight our industry to this day.
For almost 100 years, some large corporations have used marketing research to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors. This is not fair, and does not lead to a fair marketplace. These “marketing research savvy” companies benefit from an “intelligence” or “informational” advantage over their competitors.
Consumer attitudes and perceptions will be changed forever. Industries, companies, and brands will be forced back to the drawing board to re-learn and re-understand their markets and their customers. Companies will have to reinvent, re-position, and rejuvenate their products, services, marketing, and advertising.
Distribution is often an unrecognized and underappreciated element of strategy, yet it is almost always an important factor in a winning strategy. When “distribution” is linked to “strategy,” the question is: How can distribution serve as a component or variable to support a company’s overall business and marketing strategy?
Magically, every 10 to 15 years a new generational cohort (like Millennials, Generation Z, etc.) emerges from the shadows to transform and revolutionize American culture and the economy. We might miss these behavioral changes if it were not for the book authors, pundits, consultants, and communications executives who heighten our awareness of and shape our minds to the significance of each new generational cohort.
Online surveys rely primarily on samples pulled from online panels or on web intercepts (“river” sample). Online panels vary greatly in quality. Most large research agencies employ fraud-detection systems to identify these errant “respondents,” but many small research firms and Do-It-Yourself research departments do not have rigorous systems in place to identify fraud.
A comparison of the proposal-bidding model versus standard-cost model when hiring a marketing research firm. Both bidding models provide stark contrasts in efficiency and time. The proposal-bidding model is far more common in practice, at least in the U.S.. However, the standard-cost model does provide many advantages by reducing project execution times, decreasing costs, minimizing risks, and improving the quality of the research.
Recently at a marketing research conference, I attended an interesting presentation on the correlates or drivers of a highly effective research/insights function. The presentation did get me thinking about all research/insights departments I have worked with. So, here is one opinion about what determines the success of a marketing research/insights function in a large corporation.
Brand managers live in a difficult world of constant pressure, tactical chaos, and unrelenting demands from senior executives. Amid all the frenzy it’s easy for brand managers to overlook or undervalue the critical information they need to strategically (and tactically) manage their brands. To effectively manage a brand, every brand manager should be able to answer seven sets of core questions.
The world is awash in data from surveys of all types. All of these surveys and the data they generate (often using relatively large samples, n > 1,000) tend to create a false sense of accuracy, based on the calculated standard error. The standard error is a widely accepted measure of sampling error, and it is typically the basis for the footnote “the accuracy of this survey.
A perfectly designed sampling plan can end up with too many of one demographic and not enough of another. In these cases, data weighting might make sense, if you want totals that accurately reflect the whole population. The term "data weighting" in most survey-related instances refers to respondent weighting (which in turn weights the data or weights the answers). Here are some best practices to keep in mind.
Planet Earth’s many forms of life has survived and thrived over three billion years. During this time, living organisms have survived the most incredible extremes, from worldwide warmth to bitterly cold ice ages, from heavy rainfall to extreme drought. Somehow, through all of these monumental changes, life has flourished. Might life (or nature, or the natural world) have some lessons to teach us about strategy?
Sampling, of course, has never been clean and pure. The arrival of online data collection and online panels ushered in the “Wild Wild West” of sampling practices. Often these new companies were good at building online panels, but they didn’t have a clue about how to pull representative samples. Here are the systems and practices that Decision Analyst employs in its pursuit of “clean and pure” online samples.
Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns, and Unknown Knowns. These four sets of simple word-pairs convey powerful conceptual ideas with relevance to developing marketing plans and marketing strategies—as well as military strategies. Marketing decisions based on Knowns—truth, facts, and evidence—are far more likely to succeed than those based on hopes, wishes, and mythology.
Product usage (or product consumption) studies should be thought of as foundational research to be conducted on a periodic basis. With the reduced marketing budgets of the last decade, many traditional product usage studies have fallen by the wayside. Yet, it is very difficult to market a brand without detailed knowledge of how the product is used or consumed.
