How conjoint analysis, a tried-and-true market research tool, can be used to support organic growth.

There is a better way to determine how many—what portion—of your customers were satisfied. Time and again studies have shown that customer loyalty is fleeting for all but the most satisfied of customers, because any customer who is not “completely satisfied,” is dissatisfied to some degree, and/or with “something.” That “something” is the “crack in the door” through which competitors can sneak and steal your business.

I propose one fundamental question to ask; with just two multiple-choice follow-up questions. The first question will tell you how many of your customers are really satisfied—and thus likely to be loyal.

Let’s face it: All too often, life is a succession of hassles. There’s an endless array of frustrations, inconveniences, complications, disappointments, and potential disasters lurking in most of our daily experiences. Even very good products and services (we’ll call them simply “products” for simplicity’s sake) have their weaknesses and drawbacks. My new smartphone sometimes drops my calls; my favorite hotel chain sometimes loses my reservation; those new lightbulbs last longer but produce less light; my new hybrid car gets better mileage but the engine feels less peppy … Managers, marketers, designers, service suppliers, and salespeople for the companies that provide these products don’t focus on their weaknesses. That’s understandable. They devote their lives to making products that are as good as they can possibly be and then to promoting them as enthusiastically as they can. Who wants to concentrate on the negatives? Yet we’ve found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map—a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath explain why it's not enough to give people something they need.

Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters.

The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful.

Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter.

Data from mixed-mode questions are hard, if not impossible, to interpret accurately.

The first part of this article will give an example of a mixed-mode question and an analysis of how to interpret the results that such as question would produce. As you will see, mixed-mode questions, or scales, should be avoided.

The second part of this article will explore the problem of mixed-mode scales further and use the example from the first part to point out issues related to interpreting the data. We then find a solution to the original, flawed approach.

Understanding customer behavior is key to creating marketing campaigns that generate high response and revenue.

One of the best ways to understand customer behavior is to study customer migration patterns—to learn when and why a customer ends up in a segment different from the one he or she had been in.

The starting point for those studies is your customer-segmentation model. After you decide which approach to use to measure migration, the process is a virtuous circle of analyze, segment, campaign, and analyze again.

The next task, requiring strong analysis skills, is to tie the observed migrations to company activities, such as a marketing stream, and to customer purchase behavior.

The final task is to apply the results of that analysis to your marketing campaigns to generate revenue and boost customer retention.

It can be a powerful weapon in any company's strategic planning arsenal. But it can also backfire. Steve McKee offers five essentials to consider.

What happens immediately after a customer uses your product? Knowing the before and after around how your products are used will help you sell more -- and build better future products.

Five practical approaches to get closer to your buyers.

Ask any statistician and they’ll reel off a list of reasons why two surveys can give completely opposite results.

But whether it’s differences in the sample, the questionnaire or the interpretation, the fact is that many businesses, especially large ones, put significant store by their customer measures.

But are we just kidding ourselves? Can we really measure customer experience objectively? In short, that depends on the questions — the most important being those that you ask before you even put pen to paper.

Here are the three important questions to ask before you start planning that next customer survey.

Most companies use a crude approach to gathering vital customer data. Does this describe you?

Many new products fail – far too many. Failures occur regularly in both the manufacturing and service sectors. By failure we mean that these new products both fail to excite customers and fail to reach the sales and market-share goals set by the companies that develop them.

In the 1980s and 1990s, major advances in new product development (NPD) were achieved through the use of StageGate processes. Such processes define the tasks of each of the functions involved in NPD (e.g. R&D, marketing and operations) at each of the stages, from product concept to market introduction. However, as more companies have adopted formal processes for NPD, the competitive advantage that can be achieved by process excellence alone has eroded. Put another way, just because your organisation is good at implementation does not mean that it will bring the best new products to market. Creativity is also required to identify customers’ problems and to develop breakthrough features to address them.

In this article we will discuss an approach to dealing with market uncertainty. This applies new techniques for market research and uses a model to ensure than new products excite the customer.

Talk may be cheap, but listening to what people are saying about your product can be a valuable method of improving corporate performance. According to recent research, there is a measurable connection between what is being said about a product in online posts and real-time customer behavior. Becoming aware of online comments and learning how to use the information can avert potential downturns in sales and can help companies fine-tune their marketing.

Whenever I can, I include telemarketing as part of a comprehensive lead-generation program. When it comes to setting sales appointments, populating a database with decision-maker names, or filling seats at an event, there's no contact method that's more direct or more effective. The results of telemarketing are usually measurable, too, which is also a rare benefit for any campaign tactic.

But, actually, you can expect more from your telemarketing programs than appointment-setting and seat-filling. In fact, telemarketing can lend tremendous support to helping you achieve other aspects sales and marketing initiatives.

By now, your marketing goals are clearly defined and you're ready to run a multivariate test. Which elements, or factors, should you test?

Bringing a new product to market is one of the most costly and risky activities that any GM faces.

Voice-of-the-customer research and stage gate reviews have improved the odds of achieving success. But do they go far enough?

Three important tasks are frequently overlooked even though they offer the ability to identify weak links early on.

So, how can you overcome the odds? Arm your team with a three-step commercialization insurance policy designed to identify and assess risks.

The folks at Future Now are skeptical of surveys. They can annoy customers. The questions themselves tend to reflect the bias of the person or company asking them. At best, they offer directionally-correct information, which is often taken out of context and used to replace an old assumption with some shiny new (and equally dangerous) one.

The great thing about Web Analytics is that it allows you to see how people are using your site — without surveying them. But there are things your Web Analytics can’t tell you. That’s when a survey can help. When handled correctly, surveys can provide a good starting point for gathering qualitative data about the customer experience.

As web marketers seek new ways to boost conversion rates and improve their visitors' site experience, interest in multivariate testing is on a feverish rise. But those unfamiliar with the techniques are often unclear about where to start, or how to ensure success.

Today, the product choices available to consumers are more numerous than ever, and competition for customers is downright fierce. In this environment it is extremely difficult for products to standout. So, what can a company do to enhance the competitiveness of its products?

One thing is certain: relying on old methods for maximizing a product’s competitiveness is no longer sufficient. The key to offering highly competitive products is delivering exceptional value. But how does a company develop products with exceptional value, and what exactly does “value” mean to the consumer? That’s where “Marketnomics” comes in, says Charles F. Goetz, an adjunct professor of organization and management and a distinguished lecturer in entrepreneurship at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and the developer of “Marketnomics.”

“Marketnomics” enables users to precisely measure and prioritize the value of a varying list of product features and benefit options relative to two critical product development issues—their target market’s perceptions and the effective cost to the company of these features and benefits. Armed with this information, companies are able to determine the optimal combination of features and benefits to maximize product value.

So many products, so many brands, so many prices - consumers today are almost blinded by all the choices at the supermarket. Marketers draw consumers’ eyes to their products through point-of-purchase (P-O-P) marketing. Researchers use eye-tracking studies to measure how successful marketers are at zoning consumers in on their products on the store shelves. Scott Young and Professors Pierre Chandon and Wesley Hutchinson examine the validity of these studies and suggest a way to improve them.

Researchers have found that "those with negative opinions of [a] product were likely to become even more negative if asked to participate in a group discussion." Marketers beware this truth in the age of MySpace, blogging and general hyper communication!

There are many ways you can conduct market research, and each of the various methods has its own benefits and drawbacks. So which is the best method for you? This will depend on many factors, among them the type of information you are seeking and your research budget. Below are tips to help you carry out the most meaningful and cost-effective research project possible for your situation.

Marketing practitioners regard forecasting as an important part of their jobs. This paper discuss methods to forecast demand.

So you need to develop new products or services. And several questions puzzle you.
* Which new product ideas should you develop?
* What features should you include?
* What positioning messages should you use?
* What marketing tactics will be effective?
* How do you raise chances for success and reduce risk?

These questions continually challenge product, marketing, and research managers. And the stakes are big. New product failure rates are high. Lack of information and faulty assumptions are often culprits. The good news is that qualitative marketing research can help you make better new product and marketing decisions. Qualitative marketing research makes managers smarter. This paper's objective is to guide you in applying qualitative marketing research to develop new products and services.