This paper outlines an analytic program developed internally at Microsoft to drive greater insight on the return on investment of the $1+ billion marketing budget, resulting in a fundamental shift in planning and budgeting for marketing across the company: Built a flexible, systematic analytic program integrating survey data with other data to create a goal forecast for performance tracking and diagnosis of marketing impact. Provided insights on critical aspects on marketing spend and execution such as reductions in spend. Demonstrated ROI of the program on several dimensions such as impact improvement (6-10%), speed (75-80%) and cost savings (30-40%) driving change at Microsoft.
Innovation is coming from inside and outside of the traditional market research sector, driven by technology and the need for speed and lower costs. In searching for new ways of getting closer to customers, where are we seeing the most innovation and what are the best ways to innovate?
Everyday in Japan huge numbers of mobile users access the web from their mobile phones. This presents a unique opportunity to researchers and marketers alike to use the mobile internet as a research platform. This paper illustrates with three case studies where the mobile internet is a viable tool used to carry out innovative research. The reach and speed of the mobile internet allows researchers to devise new research techniques. This paper highlights the approaches used as well as gives pointers to the possible future application of this technology to market research.