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.
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 many durable goods.
Direct Comparison Product Testing
Paired comparison, triangle tests, and product clinics are direct comparison product tests.
Market Segmentation: Common Mistakes
Segmentation studies tend to be large and complicated, so it’s easy for errors and mistakes to be made.
Market Segmentation Cornucopia
Market segmentation can be applied in many creative ways, but the purpose is always the same.
Survey Error
There are many other types of survey errors that lie in wait for the innocent and the inexperienced.
Searching For Black Holes
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.
Motivational Research
Unconscious motives are intertwined with conscious motives, economic variables, and fashion trends.
Advertising Tracking
Media advertising is an opportunity to build awareness and project a powerful brand image.
Choice Modeling for New Product Sales Forecasting
Choice modeling helps marketers understand the many variables that underlie that forecast.
iHUTs (In-Home Usage Testing)
Here are some of the best practices to fully exploit the value of iHUTs.
New Product Concept Testing (And The “Uniqueness” Paradox)
Here are some best practices to guide development of a new product concept testing system.
The Magic of Idea-Centric Creativity in New Product Development
Idea-centric creativity offers a new way for corporations to identify new opportunities.
New Product Sales Forecasting: Durable Goods
Given the characteristics of durable goods, how can a manufacturer forecast sales of a durable good?
Market Segmentation
A summary of the types of Market Segmentation and how to get the most out of it.
Pricing Optimization
So how does a company establish an optimal pricing strategy for one of its brands?
Choice Modeling to Screen New Product Concepts
Choice modeling offers is a tool to evaluate a wide range of new product concepts.
Quantitative Analytics
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.
Qualitative Package Design Research
Here is some advice on utilizing qualitative research when redesigning packaging.
Unlock the Power of Advertising:
8 Steps To Creating Better Advertising
How can a client, advertising agency, and research agency work together to create effective advertising?
Qualitative Analytics
Basic ideas on how to achieve the greatest learning and the most profound insights from qualitative research.
Secondary Meaning
The Measure of Brand Strategy
A great brand strategy pays huge long-term dividends. Brand Strategy is built atop three powerful foundational concepts
Brand Equity Tracking Models
All other factors being equal, Brand Equity is the best predictor of a corporation’s probability of long-term success.
Advertising Research
A summary of recent insights about advertising, based on the latest research findings.
Survival of the Fittest
A review of Charles Darwin’s theory “survival of the fittest” and how it applies in today's business world.
Positioning
Positioning should be thought of as an element of strategy, a component of strategy, not as the strategy itself.
Mock Juries
A look at the role of mock juries in the legal process, along with guidelines for their conduct.
Advertising Claims Substantiation
Is it a good idea to make a head-to-head comparative claim against a competitor?
Sins of the Fathers
Operating in a business-to-business-to-consumer environment creates extra complexity to consider.
Name Testing
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.
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.
Advertising Effectiveness
Advertising has the power to persuade, the power to influence the mind, and the power to shape destiny.
The New World After COVID-19
Companies will have to reinvent, re-position, and rejuvenate their products, services, marketing, and advertising.
Focus Groups and the American Dream
Even though the focus group has become a widely used research technique in the past two decades.
Hang the Innocent
Marketing research is collecting data in an unbiased manner and translating that data into information, which can help solve marketing problems.
Automotive Aftermarket Category Optimization
The magic formula to optimize sales and profits for a category or for a brand in the category.
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.
Distribution Strategy
Distribution is often an unrecognized and underappreciated element of strategy, yet it is almost always an important factor in a winning strategy.
Generational Gobbledygook
Magically, every 10 to 15 years a new generational cohort emerges from the shadows to transform and revolutionize American culture and the economy.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Sampling
Online panels vary greatly in quality. Most large research agencies employ fraud-detection systems to identify these errant “respondents,”.
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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.
The High-Performance Research/Insights Department
Here is one opinion about what determines the success of a marketing research/insights function in a large corporation.
Seven Sets of Questions Every Brand Manager Must Answer
To effectively manage a brand, every brand manager should be able to answer seven sets of core questions.
Universe Error
It’s generally a good idea to keep your target universe as broad and inclusive as possible.
To Weight, or Not to Weight
(A Primer on Survey Data Weighting)
The term "data weighting" refers to respondent weighting (which in turn weights the data or weights the answers).
Mother Nature’s Strategy
If businesses and organizations follow some of nature’s principles, they too can improve their chances of long-term success.
Dark Energy in the Digital Age
A brief look at advertising tracking research in the age of social media and the internet.
Product Testing
A summary of product testing techniques and guidelines for testing consumer products.
Clean and Pure Sampling
Here are the systems and practices that Decision Analyst employs in its pursuit of “clean and pure” online samples.
Known Knowns and Other Unknowns
Marketing decisions based on Knowns—facts, and evidence—are far more likely to succeed than those based on hopes and wishes.
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.
Marketing Mix Modeling
A look at how marketing mix modeling can assist in making specific marketing decisions and tradeoffs.
Marketing Optimization
Is marketing solely a game of chance, or might there be a way to bring scientific methods to the table?
Mobile Analytics
Smartphones, iPads, and tablet computers represent tectonic shifts in research possibilities.
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.
Worth a Thousand Words-Online Ethnography
This article describes what online ethnography is and how to analyze it.
Little Data
The the solution to marketing and business problems often lies in the realm of little data, not big data.
Strategy of Leverage
Some ideas to help underdog companies defeat their larger and better-funded competitors.
Best Practices For Private Online Panels
Basic guidelines to help you decide if a private panel is right for your company.
Brand Strategy (A Constant In A World Of Change)
And how do you measure and manage brand equity to maximize profits over the long term?
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.
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 many durable goods.
Oh! We of Little Faith
An article about the psychological principles that underlie successful advertising.
The Basics of Packaging Research
The market is changing, and the time has come to redesign the package of that old established brand.
Bullet Holes in Bombers: Operations Research and Management Science Applied to Marketing
OR/MS almost always involves building a mathematical model of some business process or system.
Brave New World
The strategic implications of the Internet are far reaching—for global marketing research.
New Products for Tough Times
Every change in the marketplace creates opportunities for successful new products.
Research Defanged
The renaming and repositioning of the marketing research function might well be a great strategic marketing blunder. Read the French Version
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.
In Creative Self-Defense
A humorous article about how advertising agencies can defend their advertising from marketing research attack.
