Management has concluded that brands represent the most important asset of a company. Independent from their branches, this is almost true for all brands. Brands demand high investment in marketing activities in order to secure and build value. The profitability of this investment can be evaluated from two points of view. The extent to which the investment can satisfy the main objectives of brand leadership, which is to reach an attractive positioning for the consumer and distinguish the brand from competitive offers must be evaluated. The marketing investment also must be assessed according to its orientation towards profit, meaning that the Return on Brand Investment should be assessed from a qualitative point of view as well as from a financial oriented quantitative perspective. This paper introduces an innovative approach to brand performance measurement which satisfies both perspectives of brand strength as well as the financial objectives. A model based on the statistical instrument of the causal analysis has been developed to help management allocate future marketing budgets effectively and efficiently upon the different marketing instruments.
The process of corporate innovation is often left to outside consultants and internal/external teams specializing in the invention process. Market researchers are all too often neglected in this process, even though the newly emerging tools of researchers can accelerate innovation. What may be needed is a researcher-friendly system with five properties: rapid and user friendly (days and weeks); consumer-based (to ensure ongoing inputs from the end user); knowledge-based (using data, not guesswork); reality-based (using observation to identify actual behaviors leading to these new products); and modularity (to allow flexible sequencing of specific steps in response to new learning). This paper demonstrates the integration of current tools into a flexible innovation system and deals with the creation of specific types of products (sandwich, car features, respectively), responding to the increasing use of the car as a place where food is eaten and beverages are drunk. This approach is 'boundary crossing' as we go beyond the current boundaries of cars as vehicles for transportation, and look at cars as venues for food consumption.
Responding to a call by a major consumer electronics company to accelerate the pace and quality of product development, J Walter Thompson (Detroit) and Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. (New York) developed a new paradigm. The paradigm incorporates current as well as new research procedures into a cost-effective, rapid, sustainable development system, with ongoing market feedback. This paper presents the components of that approach, illustrates the changes in the market research paradigm that ensue, and presents data from a case history on PDAs (personal digital assistant).
This paper provides a case history for multi-country conjoint measurement. The project began as an exercise to understand the features and communications of a food product across many countries, but turned into an organizing principle to understand consumers, worldwide, and at the same time evolved into a unique database that could be used by the company again and again for product development. The authors provide the pros and cons of the approach and describe how the thinking has evolved.