Distinctive Capabilities

At CraginCube, we have focused upon two facets of consumer research:

• how do we ask questions so that the consumer is responding in a way that is as natural as possible? That is, close to the way they would speak with a friend about the topic.
• how do we analyze the resulting data so that it speaks directly to our Marketing and Creative teams and their issues? Often, this requires us to re-organize the data in a way that inter-relates the answers to separate questions, and to be thoughttful about how to interpret the result.

Interestingly, although social science researchers have been designing questionnaires for marketers since the 1950s, there is still plenty of room for improvement on each of these dimensions. For instance, it is common for a brand to face three or four relevant competitors. But after asking the"importance" of attributes, researchers generally feel they must stop their questionnaire design at ratings of their brand and just two competitors. That's not enough, but how to we avoid exhausting our respondent with too many scales asked over and over?

Another example: Marketers know there are two kinds of "good value for the money." "The money," the price, could be cheap. Most marketing teams don't want to go there. So the "value" they are really interested in has to do with "a quality so good it is worth paying for." Yet most questionnaires ask for ratings on "good value for the money" which has been shown to mostly measure..."cheap.". Even advanced researchers who also ask another attribute about "worth more" rarely analyze how the two kinds of value inter-relate.

Third example: Why doesn't the marketing team know what their major marketing mission should be after conducting an Attitude and Usage study? The data is there to determine whether your brand seek to convert, solidify or retrieve its customers.

One more: How can you win if you manage a losing Brand? Sports and political commentators know how: Perform Better-Than-Expected. We can know this too.

For detailed explanations of the solutions to these issues, please click the links to the articles on the left.