Jerry W. Thomas Blogs
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.
Searching For Black Holes
There are no shortcuts, no easy ways to analyze qualitative data. True, AI software can provide useful summaries and reduce some of the tedium, but no software can take the place of an observant, analytical human mind. Respondents’ answers are often confusing, inconsistent, entangled, and complicated. Instant analysis is no analysis at all.
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Motivational Research
Unconscious motives are intertwined with and complicated by conscious motives, economic variables, and fashion trends (broadly defined). Motivational research attempts to sift through all of these influences and factors to unravel the mystery of consumer behavior as it relates to a specific product or service, so that the marketer better understands the target audience and how to influence that audience.
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iHUTs (In-Home Usage Testing)
The ultimate benefit of iHUTs is competitive advantage. Creating and maintaining a better product is the surest way to dominate a product category or an industry. Here are some of the best practices to fully exploit the value of iHUTs.
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New Product Concept Testing (And The “Uniqueness” Paradox)
A well-designed new product concept testing system, overseen by experienced and knowledgeable researchers, can vastly improve a company’s ability to develop successful new products or services. Here are some best practices to guide development of a new product concept testing system.
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The Magic of Idea-Centric Creativity in New Product Development
Every change in technology, fashion, cultural trends, government regulations, and competitive forces creates opportunity for new services and new products. The magic of idea-centric creativity might offer a new way for corporations to identify and explore the knocking of these new opportunities.
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New Product Sales Forecasting: Durable Goods
Given the characteristics of durable goods, how can a manufacturer forecast sales of a durable good with some hope of reasonable success?
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Market Segmentation
When the term "market segmentation" is used, most of us immediately think of psychographics, lifestyles, values, behaviors, and multivariate cluster analysis routines. Market segmentation is a much broader concept, however, and pervades the practice of business throughout the world.
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Pricing Optimization
Prices are highly variable, as input costs vary and as market demand and competitive pressures tug and pull prices up and down in response. There is always the conflict between the short-term and the long-term in pricing strategy. So how does a company establish an optimal pricing strategy for one of its brands?
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Choice Modeling to Screen New Product Concepts
Creating viable new product concepts is an expensive and failure-prone process. Choice modeling offers a powerful set of tools to systematically evaluate a much wider range of new product concepts at a much lower cost per concept.
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Qualitative Package Design Research
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.
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Unlock the Power of Advertising:
8 Steps To Creating Better Advertising
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?
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Direct Comparison Product Testing
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.
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Secondary Meaning: The Measure of Brand Strategy
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.
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Brand Equity Tracking Models
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.
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Advertising Claims Substantiation
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.
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Sins of the Fathers
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.
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Let’s Outlaw Marketing Research
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.
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The New World After COVID-19
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.
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Distribution Strategy
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?
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Generational Gobbledygook
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.
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The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Sampling
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.
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The Great Proposal Wasteland
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.
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The High-Performance Research/Insights Department
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.
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Seven Sets of Questions Every Brand Manager Must Answer
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.
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Universe Error
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.
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To Weight, or Not to Weight
(A Primer on Survey Data Weighting)
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.
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Mother Nature’s Strategy
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?
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Clean and Pure Sampling
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.
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Known Knowns and Other Unknowns
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.
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Money On The Table:
Product Usage Studies
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.
Read MoreAdvertising Effectiveness
The advertising industry, as a whole, has the poorest quality-assurance systems and turns out the most inconsistent product (their ads and commercials) of any industry in the world. Unlike most of the business world, which is governed by numerous feedback loops, the advertising industry receives little objective, reliable feedback on its advertising.
Advertising Research
A summary of recent insights about advertising, based on the latest research findings.
Advertising Tracking
The promise of media advertising is great. It's an opportunity for a brand to tell its story directly to the ultimate consumer. It's an opportunity to build awareness and project a powerful brand image.
Automotive Aftermarket Category Optimization
Category Management has been around in various forms since the 1950s and 1960s. The practice acquired its current name (Category Management) in the 1980s. Many marketing executives know quite a bit about category management, since it’s a core concept in retailing, or distribution through retail stores or online venues. The purpose of this article is to share some research and analytic ideas that might prove useful to stimulate your thinking about ways of improving the process of Category Management. The focus of this article is the automotive aftermarket..
Best Practices For Private Online Panels
Over the past decade, some companies have set up private online panels as an economical way to conduct marketing research projects. A private research panel (sometimes called a custom panel or customer panel) is one set up by a company solely for its own use. While many private panels are a success, an equal number are deemed failures. This article outlines some basic guidelines to help you decide if a private panel is right for your company.
Brand Strategy (A Constant In A World Of Change)
What is a brand, and why do brands matter? What is brand equity or a brand franchise? And how do you measure and manage brand equity to maximize profits over the long term?
Brave New World
The strategic implications of the Internet are far reaching—for global commerce, for global marketing, and for global marketing research.
Bullet Holes in Bombers: Operations Research and Management Science Applied to Marketing
Most analysts define operations research and management science to mean the application of the scientific method and advanced analytics to the solution of business problems. OR/MS almost always involves building a mathematical model of some business process or system. There is an objective function; that is, a mathematical definition of the object or thing to be optimized (to maximize profits or sales revenue or minimize costs, typically).
Car Clinics (The Head-to-Head Contest)
While this white paper will focus on clinics to evaluate new cars and new trucks, the same concepts and methods can be applied to a wide range of durable goods (bulldozers, construction cranes, lawn mowers, chain saws, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, and hundreds of other long-lasting products).
Choice Modeling for New Product Sales Forecasting
Choice modeling makes it possible to simulate the shopping and decision-making process, with all of the important variables carefully controlled by rigorous experimental design, so that the new product's sales revenue can be accurately predicted. Equally important, choice modeling helps marketers understand the many variables that underlie that forecast.
Customer Satisfaction Mythologies: The Net Promoter® Score Decomposed
The study of customer satisfaction, or customer experience, or whatever the latest moniker is, does not occur in a vacuum; typically, it takes place in the context of the large corporation. Large organizations have tendencies, or peculiarities, that often complicate the process of measuring, understanding, and using customer satisfaction or customer experience data. Let’s look at some of these corporate complications.
Dark Energy in the Digital Age
The advertising media landscape is aglitter with new possibilities. Websites are universal. Social media is everywhere. Mobile is pervasive. Massive shifts of media dollars away from traditional media (television, radio, print) to the new digital media are evident everywhere. A brief look at advertising tracking research in the age of social media and the internet.
Focus Groups and the American Dream
Even though the focus group has become a widely used research technique in the past two decades, a lot of folks still don't know what goes on behind closed doors.
Hang the Innocent
So what is marketing research? Marketing research is collecting data in an unbiased manner and translating that data into information, which can help solve marketing problems. Marketing research includes experiments, surveys, product tests, advertising tests, promotion tests, motivational research, strategy research, customer satisfaction monitoring, and many other techniques.
In Creative Self-Defense
A humorous article about how advertising agencies can defend their advertising from marketing research attack.
Little Data
The the solution to marketing and business problems—and the identification of strategic opportunities—often lies in the realm of little data, not big data. You don’t have to boil the ocean to determine its salt content. You don’t have to eat the whole steer to know it’s tough. Most times a doctor only needs to take your temperature with a $20 thermometer, not a $10 million scanning machine. The great opportunity is not more data faster, but better data—and better analytics.
The Magic of Idea-Centric Creativity in New Product Development
The magic of idea-centric creativity offers a new way for corporations to re-invigorate their new product development programs using consumers who are exceptionally creative individuals who posess idea-centric creativity
Marketing Mix Modeling
A look at how marketing mix modeling can assist in making specific marketing decisions and tradeoffs, and also create a broad platform of knowledge to guide strategic planning.
Marketing Optimization
Marketing is tricky business and a dangerous career. It’s almost impossible to measure the effects of advertising, packaging, distribution channels, media expenditures, sales organization, etc., on brand share or sales revenue. Without good data and absent any trustworthy feedback loop, marketing managers often turn to the security of marketing myths, pop culture marketing fads, fawning at the feet of consultants, and polishing up their résumés.
Mobile Analytics
The earth is shifting beneath our feet. Smartphones, iPads, and tablet computers combined have surpassed PCs in number of units shipped annually. These highly portable devices, and the new technologies embedded in them, represent tectonic shifts in research possibilities. Despite the shock and rubble of tectonic upheaval, new opportunities are visible through the clouds of confusion.
Mock Juries
A look at the role of mock juries in the legal process, along with guidelines for their conduct.
Name Testing
That great new product is ready to go. Concept test results are positive. In-home usage tests of the product are positive. The package design looks great. Oops! Wait a minute. What are we going to call this new product? What is its name to be? Here is a little explanation of how to conduct Name Testing.
New Product Sales Forecasting
The development and introduction of a new product is an inherently risky venture. In an effort to reduce the risks associated with new products, the forecasting of year-one sales has become an established practice within the marketing research industry. The goal of this article is to take a bit of the mystery out of the methods used to derive year-one sales forecasts for new consumer packaged goods.
New Products for Tough Times
Every change in the marketplace creates opportunities for successful new products. One way to keep new products flowing to market during tough times is to rely on “hyper-creatives” and idea-centric creativity. This is the creativity of innovative individuals with relevant product category experience. Hyper-creatives can help generate hundreds of new product ideas to keep companies driving forward through tough economic times.
Oh! We of Little Faith
An article about the psychological principles that underlie successful advertising.
Positioning
The term “positioning” is often used nowadays as a broad synonym for marketing strategy. However, the terms “positioning” and “marketing strategy” should not be used interchangeably. Rather, positioning should be thought of as an element of strategy, a component of strategy, not as the strategy itself.
Product Testing
A summary of product testing techniques and guidelines for testing consumer products.
Qualitative Analytics
Much has been written about how to conduct qualitative research (that is, the techniques of moderating and interviewing), but comparatively little has been published about the far more important task of analysis and reporting. The purpose of this primer is to share some basic ideas on how to achieve the greatest learning and the most profound insights from qualitative research.
Quantitative Analytics
The analysis of survey data is a massive topic, and most of this exotic landscape is beyond the purview of this article. The purpose of this paper is to offer some suggestions for the novice researcher, but even those with experience might find one or two of the tips useful.
Research Defanged
Over the past decade or so, many corporations have renamed and repositioned their research functions. What used to be called the marketing research is now often called consumer insights. This renaming and repositioning of the marketing research function might well be a great strategic marketing blunder. Read the French Version of Research Defanged
Restaurant Industry Losing Low-Fat War
A look at the growing importance of low-fat foods and restaurants’ failures to develop low-fat menu items.
Strategy of Leverage
Some ideas to help underdog companies defeat their larger and better-funded competitors.
Survival of the Fittest
A review of Charles Darwin’s theory “survival of the fittest” and how it applies in today's business world.
Survey Error
Sampling error is only the tip of the iceberg. This article discusses many types of survey errors and how to avoid them.
The Basics of Packaging Research
The market is changing, and the time has come to redesign the package of that old established brand.
The Great Marketing Debate: Rational Versus Emotional
Perhaps nowhere in the marketing domain is our thinking more fuzzy and flawed than the on-going debate between the Rational and the Emotional. The phrase “rational versus emotional” (or variations of it) is found in textbooks, articles, and common everyday usage in the marketing and marketing research spheres. And, as with so many other topics, we all tend to copy what others are saying and writing—without stopping to really think about what it all means or implies. All too often in books, magazines, blogs, and conference pronouncements, the assumption is made that “emotions” are non-conscious and all “rational” thinking is conscious. What’s the harm in these presumptions?
The Honesty of Online Survey Respondents: Lessons Learned and Prescriptive Remedies
This paper presents a series of preventative measures that researchers can and should take to reduce vulnerabilities of survey cheaters. The measures are based on consumer behavior, statistics, and psychology theory with empirical support. The measures have also been successfully utilized in practice by Decision Analyst and other professional research firms.
The Ultimate Question® And the Net Promoter® Score
The Net Promoter Sscore is not a magical formula, but a flawed formula that loses much of the information in the original answer scale. If you like the concept of measuring the influence of customer recommendations, you might want to consider the Net Recommendation Score™, but please remember that the Net Recommendation Score™ is only one measure—and you will need other questions to fully measure and understand the customer experience.
TURF Analysis
TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) had its origins in the media planning world, long before it was adapted to marketing research applications. As the name of the technique suggests in its original media application, the goal was twofold: to maximize Reach (the percent of the target audience that sees at least one ad) and to maximize Frequency (the average number of exposures or number of times the ad is seen by a member of the target audience).
Worth a Thousand Words-Online Ethnography
A look into online ethnography. This article describes what online ethnography is and how to analyze it. Online ethnography provides a snapshot of respondents’ real-life experiences in order to truly understand not just what they report they do, but what they are actually doing and how that behavior drives their decisions.